A pharmacist’s professional role is as an expert on medication, and their scope of practice includes refusing to fill therapeutically inappropriate prescription

A pharmacist’s professional role is as an expert on medication, and their scope of practice includes refusing to fill therapeutically inappropriate prescriptions. Normally this serves to catch dosing errors or drug interactions, but it’s also a safety net for other inappropriate prescriptions. We don’t put pharmacists through 8 years of post-secondary education to blindly fill whatever a physician writes for. In the US, the requirement for pharmacists to police prescriptions even goes as far as criminal liability for dispensing inappropriately prescribed controlled substances (see: “corresponding responsibility”). Choosing to dispense, or not dispense ivermectin isn’t going to rise to that level, but no state Board of Pharmacy is going to take action against a pharmacist who judges that ivermectin is inappropriate for a COVID diagnosis.