Fayetteville board hears hospital physician's experience with patients who took ivermectin

FAYETTEVILLE -- There is a proven treatment to help people with covid-19 symptoms, and it's not ivermectin, the city's Board of Health heard Wednesday.

The board invited Michael Bolding, physician at the covid-19 unit of Washington Regional Medical Center, to speak about his experience with unvaccinated patients at the hospital who had taken ivermectin. The drug is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use by people or animals for some parasitic worms, head lice and skin conditions. The FDA has not approved its use in treating covid-19.

The drug became a topic of discussion locally and nationally after stories reached the media about physician Rob Karas using ivermectin to treat inmates at the Washington County jail. Karas has defended use of the drug to treat covid-19, saying the potential benefits outweigh the known risks.

Bolding said the problem is people are using anecdotal information to support the use of ivermectin, as opposed to the proven effective treatment of monoclonal antibodies, such as Regeneron's treatment. The FDA issued emergency use authorization of such drugs to treat covid-19 in November 2020.

Oftentimes the doctors prescribing ivermectin to patients are not the ones seeing people in the hospital, Bolding said. The majority of people with covid-19 don't end up in the hospital anyway, so saying an unproven drug helped is misleading, he said.

"You could literally give them Skittles, and 85% of people who don't end up at the hospital say those Skittles just saved my life," Bolding said. "That's not how we do data. You have to have placebo run-ins and trials."

Patients who say they had taken ivermectin get just as sick from covid-19 as those who don't, Bolding said. The common thread is being unvaccinated, he said.

Bolding emphasized the best way to fight covid-19 is through vaccination. He said he has seen zero cases of a vaccinated patient under 65 years old with a severe case. He said he had one 18-year-old patient with a reaction to a vaccine causing inflammation of the heart muscle who was hospitalized for 48 hours and went home.

A handful of vaccinated patients who died at the hospital either had weakened immune systems or were more than 80 years old, Bolding said.

Washington Regional is offering monoclonal antibodies near where it offers covid drive-through testing, said Lenny Whiteman, vice president of managed care. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Northwest campus, Community Clinic and Mercy Hospital also offer the treatment, said Marti Sharkey, the city's public health officer.

"In my ideal world, if you get tested and you're positive, you get Regeneron, and if you're negative and you're unvaccinated, you go to the vaccine tent," Sharkey said. "We should just have that streamlined, but we're not there yet, unfortunately."

Anyone who gets covid-19 and is at high risk for complications can take the Regeneron treatment to combat symptoms, Sharkey said. People who receive the Regeneron treatment should wait 90 days to get vaccinated if they haven't already, she said. The timing has to do with the way the body reacts to the treatment and the effectiveness of the vaccine, she said.