Michael Hiltzik: Right-wing judges are on a mission to stop the FDA from warning consumers about snake oil
To anyone who has paid even a modicum of serious attention to COVID-19 and its treatment, ivermectin is the zombiest of zombie drugs.
Used to treat parasitic diseases in animals and humans, the drug became a darling of anti-vaccination activists and conspiracy-mongers, who pushed it as a treatment for the pandemic disease and claimed it was being suppressed by Big Pharma, among other sinister forces.
Contrary to its continued promotion by quacks such as Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, the drug has been conclusively shown to be utterly useless against COVID.
One would have hoped that hard scientific evidence and a stern advisory by the Food and Drug Administration against its use would have been enough to kill the ivermectin craze, but it lives on. Last year, three doctors sued the FDA, claiming that its public warning harmed their practices and cost them their jobs at hospitals and medical schools.
A few months later, a federal judge in Galveston , ruling in effect that they didn't, which takes cases from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi and is, by many measures, the hackiest of hack-ridden federal courts.
