WASHINGTON, D.C. – The FLCCC filed its amicus brief yesterday in support of the lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for the agency’s campaign against prescribing ivermectin that denied countless patients access to a safe and potentially lifesaving treatment for COVID-19.

The lawsuit, Apter et al v. Dep’t. of Health and Human Services et al, was brought by Robert Apter, MD, Mary Talley Bowden, MD and Paul E. Marik, MD and first filed in the U.S. District Court on June 2, 2022 stated that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) acted outside of its authority and illegally interfered with the doctor’s ability to practice medicine with an aggressive effort to discourage the prescribing of ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. The case was later dismissed by the court citing that the FDA had “governmental immunity” giving the agency absolute protection for any wrongdoing or harm in directing the public, including health professionals and patients, to not use ivermectin, a drug that has received full FDA approval for human use. Last week Apter et al filed an appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to reverse the lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit.

“There is no doubt that the FDA intended to discourage doctors from prescribing ivermectin when they began their disinformation campaign in the early days of the COVID-19 Pandemic”, said Pierre Kory, M.D., M.P.A., president and chief medical officer of the FLCCC. “The FDA’s campaign against ivermectin caused many hospitals to restrict the use of the drug while some state medical boards threatened the licenses of doctors who prescribed a drug that had been proven to safely treat over hundreds of thousands of patients in controlled trials around the world.”

A copy of the FLCCC Amicus brief can be found here.

A copy of the FLCCC Amicus brief press release can be found here.