Michael Hiltzik: FDA shoots itself in the foot by settling a groundless lawsuit over its ivermectin warnings
"You are not a horse," read a tweet posted by the Food and Drug Administration on Aug. 21, 2021.
A fairly unexceptionable observation, one would think. But there was more to the tweet than a zoological judgment.
The FDA's goal was to advise individuals against taking ivermectin, a medication used to treat parasitic infections in livestock, to treat COVID-19. "Stop it with the #ivermectin," the agency advised on Instagram. "It's not authorized for treating #COVID."
It was those latter two lines that exercised three physicians who had been prescribing ivermectin for patients. They sued the FDA in 2022, asserting that its advisory illegally interfered with the practice of medicine — specifically with their ability to continue prescribing the drug.
A federal judge in Texas threw out their case, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals — the source of a series of chuckleheaded antigovernment rulings in recent years — reinstated it last year, returning it to the original judge for reconsideration.
Now the FDA has settled the case by the horse post and two similar posts from its accounts on."
