Through July and August, Julie Smith watched her husband, Jeffrey, get worse and worse from COVID-19. In early July, the healthy outdoorsman, 51, had tested positive for the coronavirus. Within a week, he was admitted to the intensive care unit at a hospital near their home in the suburbs of Cincinnati.

The hospital treated him with antiviral drugs, convalescent plasma and steroids, but he continued to decline. Weeks later he was on a ventilator in a medically induced coma — “on death’s doorstep,” Julie Smith wrote in a legal complaint filed Aug. 20.

Smith felt the hospital had given up on her husband, but she could not, according to the complaint. After doing research on the internet, she sued the hospital to require it to treat her husband with ivermectin — an inexpensive anti-parasitic drug that’s been used to cure animals and […]