Ivermectin: Can a Drug Be “Right-Wing”? – TK News by Matt Taibbi
On December 31st of last year, an 80 year-old Buffalo-area woman named Judith Smentkiewicz fell ill with Covid-19. She was rushed by ambulance to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Williamsville, New York, where she was put on a ventilator. Her son Michael and his wife flew up from Georgia, and were given grim news. Judith, doctors said, had a 20% chance at survival, and even if she made it, she d be on a ventilator for a month.
As December passed into the New Year, Judith s health declined. Her family members, increasingly desperate, had been doing what people in the Internet age do, Googling in search of potential treatments. They saw stories about the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, learning among other things that a pulmonologist named Pierre Kory had just testified before the Senate that the drug had a miraculous impact on Covid-19 patients. The family pressured doctors at the hospital to give Judith the drug. The hospital initially complied, administering one dose on January 2nd. According to her family s court testimony, a dramatic change in her condition ensued.
In less than 48 hours, my mother was taken off the ventilator, transferred out of the Intensive Care Unit, sitting up on her own and communicating, the patient s daughter Michelle Kulbacki told a court.
After the reported change in Judith s condition, the hospital backtracked and refused to administer more. Frustrated, the family turned on January 7th to a local lawyer named Ralph Lorigo. A commercial litigator and head of what he calls a typical suburban practice, with seven lawyers engaged in everything from matrimonial to estate work, Lorigo assigned one of his attorneys to review materials given to them by the family, which included Kory s Senate testimony. The associate showed Lorigo himself the the material next morning.
I was so convinced by what Dr. Kory was saying, Lorigo says. I saw the passion and the belief.
Lorigo immediately sued the hospital, filing to State Supreme Court to force the facility to treat according to the family s wishes. Judge Henry J. Nowak sided with the Smentkiewiczes, signing an order that Lorigo and one of his attorneys served themselves, and after a series of quasi-absurd dramas that included the hospital refusing to let the Smentkiewicz family physician phone in the prescription the doctor actually had to drive to the hospital, Lorigo says Judith went back on ivermectin.
She was out of that hospital in six days, Lorigo says. After a month of rehab, his octogenarian client went back to her life, which involved working five days a week (she still cleans houses). Her story, complete with photo, was told in the Buffalo News, causing Lorigo s phone to begin ringing off the hook. Doppleganger cases soon began dotting the map all over the country.