A Palm Beach circuit judge has denied a seriously ill COVID-19 patient’s request for a court order to obtain the drug ivermectin, but her husband’s attorney has vowed to appeal the case.
Fifteenth Circuit Judge James Nutt denied the request from the family of Tamara Drock, a patient at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center who has been on life support. The lawsuit to stop the hospital from blocking Drock from receiving a meaningful dose of ivermectin is based on a state constitutional privacy right.
The drug has not been approved as a coronavirus treatment by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
Nutt’s opinion concluded that the constitution’s privacy provision cited in the lawsuit can only be used in cases involving an incapacitated patient in the context of refusing or accepting a specific medical treatment.
“An individual’s right to privacy is one of self-determination, the right to accept or refuse,” Nutt said in the Oct. 16 opinion. “It is not a right to demand a particular treatment. It is not a right to substitute one’s judgment as to which treatments must be available by others.”
Attorney Jake Huxtable, who plans to appeal Nutt’s ruling soon, said the purpose of the lawsuit was not “to demand” that the hospital give Drock the ivermectin.
“We rather filed the suit against the hospital for purposes of obtaining a court order to compel the hospital to allow this patient to exercise her constitutional right in choosing ‘to accept’ this available medical treatment,” Huxtable told the Florida Record in an email.
Drock already has an ivermectin prescription written by a medical doctor, Dr. Bruce Boros, according to the lawsuit.
The family initially thought they had an agreement for the hospital to allow Drock to get the ivermectin treatment, but Huxtable said the hospital reneged on that agreement and would only give the patient a very small dose of the drug.
“We found out the hospital was, in reality, going to give Tamara Drock merely an unmeaningful fraction of the dosage of ivermectin, which in all likelihood would not have made any difference one way or the other,” he said.
The most notable study affirming the benefits of ivermectin treatment for COVID-19 was done by Broward Health Medical Center, according to Huxtable. That study, which involved more than 200 coronavirus patients, showed that those treated with the drug suffered less mortality than those who received traditional treatments (15% vs. 25.2%), he said.