Kansas Senate Says Refusing COVID Early Treatment with Drugs Like Ivermectin Constitutes ‘Failure to Treat’

From TrialSite News:

In what turned out to be a late-night marathon, the Kansas Senate barely passed, 21 to 16, a bill known as the Off-Label Drug Bill just before 1:30 am. Called HB 2280, the bill now passed by the House and Senate, not only allows for the prescribing and dispensing of off-label drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 but also requires child care facilities and schools to grant religious exemptions from COVID-19 vaccination requirements without the need for an inquiry into the sincerity of the particular person’s individual belief.

In what is undoubtedly a victory for what has become known as the medical freedom movement in America, Kansas senators passed a bill that allows doctors to prescribe ivermectin and even hydroxychloroquine without fear of reprisal from health board investigations.

Last month, TrialSite covered that Kansas represented the battleground in the ivermectin war across the heartlands of the nation, as the cause for early treatment using repurposed drugs has been picked up primarily in conservative, Republican-led interior states. 

Led by State Senator Mark Steffen, R-Hutchinson, an anesthesiologist who prescribes the drug to his patients, the proposed law becomes a safe harbor for like-minded physicians. Ivermectin is in use all over the state and has gone underground.

As reported by Jason Tidd writing for the Topeka Capital-Journal, even the state’s deeply religious Mennonite community has been known to use the drug. In one example, an 80-year-old pastor and his wife who happens to be a retired nurse dole the drug out to their church-going community.

Senator Hutchinson declared, “Thousands of Kansans and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died because of this propaganda that shut down early treatment.” 

The Ivermectin Chronology

TrialSite chronicles the research of many off-label drugs for various therapies and has been tracking ivermectin, a drug approved by the FDA to treat certain parasites, since the initial lab findings at the University of Monash during the spring of 2020. The drug, when concentrated in lab cell cultures, absolutely zapped SARS-CoV-2. 

The process of developing evidence necessitates animal and human clinical trials. Once the lab findings were public and due to the pandemic conditions, dozens of low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) launched a series of efforts investigating ivermectin—from case series and observational studies to randomized controlled studies.

While some medical authorities are adamant that neither ivermectin nor hydroxychloroquine show any benefit against SARS-CoV-2—although prominent ivermectin studies such as ACTIV-6 and COVID-OUT remain underway—Senator Steffen looks at another body of evidence that most of the medical establishment simply refutes.

Sen. Steffen claims:

“Studies overwhelmingly show that ivermectin has up to an 85% chance of reducing hospitalizations and death when given early for COVID,” he said in caucus. “This is about decreasing suffering and death of the individual patient.”

According to a website tracking this research, 81 studies in humans have been completed since the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The majority of the studies demonstrate statistically significant improvements in categories from mortality and ventilation to ICU admission, hospitalization, and viral clearance. Unfortunately, the managers of this often-cited website are anonymous which lessens the impact of the information. Moreover, many of the underlying studies showing positive results have not necessarily been vetted for the quality and integrity of data. Most of the medical establishments (e.g., the leadership of federal government health and regulatory bodies, heads of medical societies, and academic medical centers) discount the ivermectin studies as of exceptionally low-grade evidentiary quality.

Along the way, TrialSite interviewed many physicians-investigators such as Dr. Tarek Alam at Bangladesh Medical College who led ivermectin-based research and used the drug extensively early on in the pandemic. Studies were completed in Bangladesh, India, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Nigeria, and many other countries showing real promise, yet health authorities and regulators in America and European capitals were concerned about these studies, rushed, with limited resources, done in the worst health crisis in a century. In fact, in at least a dozen countries, ivermectin has been provisionally authorized on an emergency basis as a treatment for COVID-19.

When Slovakia authorized the use of ivermectin on an emergency basis during the pandemic, becoming the first EU nation to do so, TrialSite was probably the only Western media to report on this event. When TrialSite posted that fact on a Facebook page, the news was immediately taken down. Mainstream media failed to cover any of these studies.

Yet mainstream media showed up in a big way when some of the ivermectin studies failed to show positive findings. Some prominent studies such as TOGETHER and Lopez-Medina in Colombia revealed no statistically significant benefits. This became first-page news—suddenly, CNN and MSNBC were interested in ivermectin. Critics lamented that both the TOGETHER and Lopez-Medina studies had questionable factors—from claims of under-dosing to conflict of interest.

Another recent large study in Malaysia failed to meet endpoints but did reveal some possible secondary measures, although not in a statistically significant way.

In America, early on Dr. Jean-Jacques Rajter and his physician-wife Juliana Cepelowicz-Rajter and supporting team at Broward County Health led the ICON study—a rigorous and methodical observational study showing that ivermectin lowered mortality for those patients infected with SARS-CoV-2. Although the findings were published in Chest, the study wasn’t a randomized controlled trial, but it was referred to by the National Institutes of Health in their ultimate move to modify their treatment guideline recommendations from not recommending ivermectin except for clinical trials to a neutral position due to lack of data.

Emerge Kansas

Now Kansas, the geographic center of the lower-48 United States, becomes the literal center of the medical freedom movement. Sen. Steffen went on the record for the Topeka Capital-Journal:

“Thousands of Kansans and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died because of this propaganda that shut down early treatment,” said Sen. Mark Steffen, R-Hutchinson. “I fully believe that this passage of this bill through the Senate will gain national attention and help be a very important part of getting the care to the people who need it.”

The Kansas bill, if passed, becomes stronger than the New Hampshire proposed law, as in this case, the bill mandates that pharmacists must fill a prescription in a bid to remove their professional discretion reports Tidd at the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Cindy Holscher, D-Overland Park an opponent to the bill told the local journalist, “With this provision, a doctor can write a prescription for abortion medication under the guise of COVID, and the pharmacist must fill it.”

Protecting Doctors

Before the pandemic, doctors would routinely prescribe off-label medication with little notice. They still do, except that now if it is seen as a potential treatment for covid, it gets lots of notice and is aggressively suppressed.

Proponents of medical freedom argue that the federal government has no business telling physicians what they can or cannot prescribe to their patients thus, not interfering with an important doctor-patient relationship.

TrialSite’s founder, Daniel O’Connor commented, “Of course, drugs and devices are regulated at the federal level, and the health system becomes ever more intertwined with federal rules. Almost 150 million people in the United States depend on federally funded health access programs, from Medicare and Medicaid as well as other programs in the DoD and VA, and a myriad of rules and covenants accompany such benefits. But nonetheless, with the pandemic came a heretofore not seen top-down intervention directly in what doctors can and cannot do.”

 O’Connor continued, “In America, the top-down control isn’t direct but rather the FDA writes an ominous letter to physician and pharmacy licensing board associations which then pass the message on down to the states that any deviation from the federal party-line means trouble. And in fact, some doctors have lost their licenses for prescribing ivermectin. In one case, we know of a physician in Maine who was forced to undergo psychiatric evaluation because she was doing too much questioning of the current federal regimen while passing out ivermectin prescriptions too liberally.”

The proposed law protects physicians from the board of healing arts investigations associated with COVID-19 prohibiting any “recommendation, prescription, use or opinion” on COVID-19 treatments from the beginning considered unprofessional conduct, reports the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Vaccine Exemptions

Additionally, the bill better ensures exemptions, allowing parents to opt their children out of COVID-19 vaccines at schools and daycare centers less the burden of providing proof of sincerity of belief. Typically, with religious exemptions, certain proof must be furnished but, in this case, none is required.