COVID-19: Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated

Rassmusen Reports | January 13, 2022
While many voters have become skeptical toward the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of Democrats embrace restrictive policies, including punitive measures against those who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine.
A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of voters favor President Joe Biden’s plan to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the employees of large companies and government agencies. That includes 33% who Strongly Favor the mandate. Forty-eight percent (48%) are opposed to Biden’s vaccine mandate, including 40% who Strongly Oppose the mandate. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Voters are similarly divided over the federal government’s top COVID-19 expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Forty-five percent (45%) view Fauci favorably, including 28% who have a Very Favorable impression of him. Forty-eight percent (48%) have an unfavorable impression of Fauci, including 34% who have a Very Unfavorable view of him.
The even split among voters is the result of deep partisan divisions. While 78% of Democratic voters support the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate plan, only 22% of Republicans and 41% of voters not affiliated with either major party support the vaccine mandate. And many Democrats would support even harsher measures, including fines for Americans who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine and criminal punishment for vaccine critics.
The survey of 1,016 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on January 5, 2022 by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
The survey found that 75% of likely Democratic voters – but only 21% of Republicans and 38% of unaffiliated voters – have a favorable opinion of Dr. Fauci. Among other findings of the survey:
– Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters would oppose a proposal for federal or state governments to fine Americans who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. However, 55% of Democratic voters would support such a proposal, compared to just 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliated voters.
– Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a proposal is opposed by 61% of all likely voters, including 79% of Republicans and 71% of unaffiliated voters.
– Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.
– Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a policy would be opposed by a strong majority (71%) of all voters, with 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliated voters saying they would Strongly Oppose putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities.”
– While about two-thirds (66%) of likely voters would be against governments using digital devices to track unvaccinated people to ensure that they are quarantined or socially distancing from others, 47% of Democrats favor a government tracking program for those who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.
How far are Democrats willing to go in punishing the unvaccinated? Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Democratic voters would support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s much more than twice the level of support in the rest of the electorate – seven percent (7%) of Republicans and 11% of unaffiliated voters – for such a policy.
The survey also found that more black voters (63%) than whites (45%), Hispanics (55%) or other minorities (32%) support Biden’s vaccine mandate for government workers and employees of large companies.
President Biden’s strongest supporters are most likely to endorse the harshest punishments against those who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine. Among voters who have a Very Favorable impression of Biden, 51% are in favor of government putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities,” and 54% favor imposing fines or prison sentences on vaccine critics. By contrast, among voters who have a Very Unfavorable view of Biden, 95% are against “designated facilities” for the unvaccinated and 93% are against criminal punishment for vaccine critics.
As the Omicron variant of COVID-19 produces a spike in cases nationwide, about three-quarters of Americans are already vaccinated against the coronavirus, and two-thirds of those have gotten booster shots.
Most Americans are concerned about new variants of the COVID-19 virus, but Democrats are more concerned than others, and place more trust in vaccines to protect against the disease.
Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to the public as well as Platinum Members.
What Kind of ‘Experts’ Didn’t Foresee This Lockdown Devastation?
The Daily Sceptic | January 14, 2022
On Wednesday, the Telegraph published this article: “How lockdowns left babies more vulnerable to respiratory disease.” It’s all about an extra risk this winter from “respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), an infection that can in rare cases make it difficult for children to breathe.”
That really hit home. One of my oldest and dearest friends, a grandparent like myself, has had the shocking experience of seeing two of her granddaughters, both born in late 2021, being seriously afflicted. One nearly died from RSV, caught in the maternity ward after birth where it was rife and where she had not been born long enough to build up resistance. It was very touch-and-go for several weeks.
Her little cousin, born a few weeks earlier, was hit by cytomegalovirus (CMV). Her mother seems to have caught it during pregnancy and since she is a nurse the most likely place was in hospital. The little girl has no hearing in one ear and is likely to lose it in the other, and has only one kidney.
Neither of these viruses is new. RSV is very common. Most children will catch it by the age of two with few ill effects. The same applies to CMV. But some children do become seriously ill, so there is nothing to prove these two little girls wouldn’t have been among them anyway. We’ll never know, but it’s starting to look as though they may well have been two more victims of the madness that has engulfed us.
What is new is the increase in cases and the disruption of the normal cycle which would aid the natural build-up of resistance. RSV, for example, largely disappeared in the winter of 2020-21 but then reappeared incongruously to cause a surge in the summer of 2021, which has not yet abated.
Not surprisingly, the dawning realisation is that lockdowns are probably to blame. “Because of all the Covid restrictions, we’ve been spreading viruses less, so we think that everybody’s natural immunity to viruses like RSV has gone down,” said Dr. Andrew Whittamore, a GP and clinical lead at the British Lung Foundation.
This raises the whole fascinating question of how we define and understand the meaning of the word ‘expert’. That doesn’t mean substituting for a professional the opinions of someone whose education has been conducted at the University of Google, magically conferring on them brilliant insight and revelations that have escaped everyone else. But it does mean using some commonsense.
To me, as a layman, I find it utterly astonishing that the conventional experts became so suffocated and obsessed by one risk that they managed to ignore all the empirical observations and experience of their lives that might have told them that ripping up the way human society functions, and how we build up resistance to disease, might possibly generate massive problems from mental breakdowns to economic decline and cancer to reduced immunity. Forgive me for saying so, but I’d have thought that was pretty obvious. If expertise prevents an expert from seeing that, or at least standing up and saying so, then of what value is the expertise?
In the bigger picture, the possibility that RSV and CMV are going to cause more serious cases than hitherto is not an overwhelming one – albeit devastating to the parents in every instance – but it is an allegory for countless other contexts and scenarios where we have allowed the opinions of a small number of people to drive an agenda as if it was a tank into an aquarium. Taken together their cumulative impact is going to be, and already is, extremely serious.
The sheer recklessness of what has been done in the name of annihilating Covid (which didn’t happen anyway) is difficult to measure. One thing was clear from the outset: the ‘experts’ really didn’t have a clue and I’d suggest to a large extent they still don’t [or at least still can’t stand up and say so]. The best thing about Boris Johnson’s Partygate is that not only has it terminally undermined the Government’s authority and basis for locking us all down, but also it has flagged up the sheer idiotic stupidity of some of the rules that – even if one believed an initial lockdown had some benefit – were manifestly not going to make a difference.
As the high tide of the Covid Hysteria turns and gradually recedes towards the horizon it is leaving scattered across the exposed beach of our world countless shattered seashells, every one of which represents broken lives and families, wrecked livelihoods, shattered education and prospects, and a whole raft of medical consequences including these two little girls among a cascade of undiagnosed and untreated cancers and other conditions.
Let’s not fool ourselves. Covid was, and is, an extremely serious and potentially fatal illness for some people, just as flu, pneumonia, and bronchitis have always been. But it’s a rum thing to see how the people we choose to define as experts have played such an enormous part in the consequential devastation. By blinding themselves to everything except one disease they have presided over a farce of unprecedented consequences, driven along by their self-belief whether predicated on their self-professed mathematical ability to foretell the future or the conceit that they could ‘keep everyone safe’ with measures that we now know have done as much damage, or more, than the devastation they were supposed to prevent. What then, is an expert? Perhaps someone who feels they have to come up with something, anything, that makes them look like they know what they’re doing.
As for my friend, the grandmother: just after the viral storm that hit her granddaughters, she had the misfortune to choke on a piece of meat at a dinner party in December. This was no trivial incident. It nearly killed her. She was attended by paramedics and had to be dashed to hospital unconscious. She only just made it through.
What was the reason for her admission? Why of course, she was recorded with “suspected Covid”, even though the reason she was on the point of death ought to be have been obvious even to a blind man with hearing difficulties. It was as fatuous as a priest in the Middle Ages blaming her accident on evil spirits or the ‘will of God’, the catch-all diagnoses of that era.
Nothing could illustrate to me better the extent of the collective insanity that has consumed our time and for which we will all be paying for the rest of our lives – though the two little girls I started out with may well be paying for a great deal longer than most of us, as the grass grows long on the graves of the modellers and other luminaries of this present age.
Troubling news from Germany, Washington DC, and Washington state
By Steve Kirsch | January 16, 2022
Germany wants to ban Telegram. Washington DC requires you to be vaccinated to go to the bathroom. Washington state wants to put you in jail for a year if you don’t follow their health orders.
The authorities are ramping up the pressure even more to get us to comply with what they want us to do “so that they can keep us safe.”
How has the CDC guidance been working out? It’s obvious from this graph (which you won’t see on CNN):
So when something isn’t working, what do you do? Sane people listen would start to listen to qualified people with a different point of view. Insane people keep doing the same stuff over and over again and expect a different result.
In case you haven’t figured it out, we’re in the insanity category. It’s how we roll.
Naturally, the authorities will never blame the fact that cases are out of control it on their own dumb advice. They are going to blame the unvaccinated and anyone who isn’t complying with their advice.
So they will double down on their mandates and make it even harder for critical thinkers to live.
The more it becomes evident that the entire pandemic response has been a complete disaster, the harder people will push back. And the harder people resist, the harder governments will push back by locking down free speech and putting people in jail who refuse to comply with their mandates.
So things are going to get worse. A lot worse.
Check out the latest news headlines…
Germany wants to ban Telegram
A report in the German newspaper Die Welt suggests that the government there is considering taking action to shut down messaging app Telegram.
Why?
Because people opposed to COVID restrictions and lockdowns are using it to organize protests and share information! This is unacceptable to the German government. They require blind obedience.
Read the ZeroHedge article for more info or watch this video:
Fortunately for us, Telegram is a distributed organization that moves around and keeps their location secret. It’s a good thing for freedom of speech.
Washington state wants to put you in jail for a year if you don’t comply with their health orders, including requiring you to be vaccinated
Look at what’s happening in Washington state in America right now as an example.
Here’s an excerpt:
Under the RCWs cited “A person who violates or fails to comply with a health order issued under RCW 70.24.024 is guilty of a gross misdemeanor punishable by confinement until the order has been complied with or terminated, up to a maximum period of three hundred sixty-four days.”
So if they want you to take a vaccine, any vaccine, you better comply or they will put you in jail. They can then repeat that again and again. So basically, you better take the vaccine they want to inject in you, or you will spend the rest of your life in jail.
That’s not a violation of the Nuremberg Code is it? (of course it is, but what do they care).
Washington DC now won’t let you go to the bathroom if you aren’t vaccinated
Even more spectacular is what just went into place today January 15 in Washington DC:
Unvaccinated and want to go to the bathroom? Good luck with that! You have to hold it until you get to Virginia.
However, hotels are not included in the mandate, and federal government buildings fall outside the city’s jurisdiction so that’s a relief (for the moment).
You can still go to grocery stores, pharmacies, and airports. But how long will that last? Another month?
San Jose forces all city employees to be vaccinated
More Nuremberg Code violations. San Jose, CA is requiring all 7,000 employees to be triple-vaccinated or lose their job. Wow. Pfizer and Moderna must love that!
And if you want to attend any large indoor event, you must show proof of either a booster shot or a negative COVID test before you can enter.
The policies were unanimously approved by the City Council.
The Mayor proclaimed that San Jose is leading the US with this measure.
Does he understand that they have to be vaccinated every 60 days as clearly shown by the Denmark study?
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If you think the world is moving in the right direction, you don’t need to do anything. Sit back and relax.
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Defeat the mandates rally January 23, 2022
If you are near Washington DC, join our rally on Sunday, January 23. Or just make a donation. We’re expecting around 200,000 people.
Because hotel rooms are limited, it’s important that everyone in the Washington DC area show up on Sunday at 11:30am at the Washington Monument. There will be lots of great speakers.
Meet Taylor Nichols, MD
By Steve Kirsch | January 13, 2022
He’s the co-founder of an organization, No License For Disinformation (NLFD) that is dedicated to making sure that doctors aren’t allowed to speak freely.
Here’s Taylor Nichols’ Twitter profile:
He’s an emergency medicine physician in Sacramento and co-founder of No License For Disinformation (NLFD), an organization dedicated to revoking the medical license of any doctor that tells the truth about the dangers of the vaccine, masking, and mandates. Basically, if you say anything against the narrative, NLFD will try to get your license taken away.
Note the NLFD logo on his Twitter profile.
I’d like to see NLFD focused on revoking the license of any physician that says the vaccine is safe and effective. Now that would be a great public service.
To that end, I sent Taylor a DM on Twitter inviting him to debate us on the science:
He’s responded, but won’t debate me. I asked if I could interview him in a recorded interview that we can both post. He can ask me questions and I can ask him questions. Totally neutral.
He refused. He only wants it via messages.
Why is that? Because that way, when he doesn’t know something (which is likely most of the time), he can ask other people and look it up. It’s a tacit admission he doesn’t know enough facts to engage with someone who knows what they are talking about. Other reasons people want to use documents include:
- They can change the topic easily and avoid answering questions they don’t like. There is nobody there to challenge them in real time.
- The documents in a discussion can span hundreds of pages. So nobody is going to be able to follow it.
- He can post his answers to a medium he has exclusive control over (in this case his Medium site) rather than a neutral video debate where nobody has control.
He refused a debate. He refused to be interviewed live. If he really wants to stop misinformation, he’s not trying very hard.
16,000 Physicians Agree
By Robert W Malone MD, MS | January 13, 2022
Consensus is clear among MDs and medical PhDs: following 20 months of exhaustive research, millions of patients treated, hundreds of clinical trials performed and scientific data shared worldwide, they conclude that healthy children and COVID recovered should be excluded from vaccine mandates and social restrictions.
Physicians also recommend legislative and administrative action, to prevent disruption of physicians’ treatments, or putting healthy children or the COVID-recovered at further risk.
16,000 physicians and medical scientists recently published the Rome Covid Declaration, to alert citizens to the deadly consequences of disrupting life-saving treatment and suppressing open scientific discussion.
So, when it makes headline news that less than 300 physicians have signed a letter that went to Spotify, that the podcast that I did with Joe Rogan should be removed from Spotify, I can only chuckle… After all, it has only been viewed around 50 million times and to their 300, I raise them 16,000.
At least the Daily Mail actually did a piece that wasn’t totally negative about what I said. Quotes from the Dail Mail article below:
In the podcast episode, Rogan talked about Malone’s ban from Twitter, which happened just one day before the podcast was released.
‘They removed you for not going along with whatever the tech narrative is because tech clearly has a censorship agenda when it comes to Covid in terms of treatment, in terms of whether or not you are promoting what they would call ‘vaccine hesitancy’ – they can ban you for that,’ Rogan said, adding that Malone is ‘one of the most qualified people in the world to talk about vaccines’.
Malone responded by questioning: ‘If it’s not okay for me to be a part of the conversation even though I’m pointing out scientific facts that may be inconvenient, then who is?
‘Whether or not I’m factually correct or not – and I freely admit no one’s perfect. I’m not perfect. It’s one of my core points is people should think for themselves.’
‘And I try really hard to give people the information and help them to think, not to tell them what to think,’ the doctor added, pointing out that ‘no one can debate the dispute that I played a major role in the creation of this tech’.
Malone later alleged on the podcast that many of the pharmaceutical companies administering vaccines – such as Pfizer and Moderna – have ‘financial conflicts of interest’.
In what appeared to be an effort to establish his credibility, Malone reassured: ‘I think I’m the only one that doesn’t. I’m not getting any money out of this.’
Meanwhile, as the creator of the mRNA technology used in Covid vaccines, many questioned why Malone would then speak so strongly against getting jabbed.
Malone claimed the answer was simply ‘because it’s the right thing to do’.
He said: ‘For me, the reason is: Because what’s happening is not right. It’s destroying my profession, it’s destroying the practice of medicine worldwide, it’s destroying public health in medicine.’
He continued: ‘I’m a vaccinologist. I’ve spent 30 years developing vaccine. A stupid amount of education learning how to do it and what the rules are.
‘And for me, I’m personally offended by watching my discipline get destroyed for no good reason at all except, apparently, financial incentives, and – I don’t know – political a**-covering’.
The controversial doctor also offered his expertise on the government’s Covid-19 response.
‘Our government is out of control,’ he said, adding: ‘They are lawless. They completely disregard bioethics. They completely disregard the federal common rule. they have broken all the rules that I know of – that I have been trained on for years and years and years.’
Read the declaration from the International Association of Physicians and Medical Scientists.
Alberta just inadvertently confessed to fiddling the COVID vaccination stats
More than half the newly vaccinated deaths were dumped in the unvaccinated
By Joel Smalley | COVID Facts – Challenge the Narrative | January 13, 2022
Those who have done the slightest bit of research (really not a dirty word), will know that there is no claim of protection after the first dose of the COVID vaccine.
So imagine how you can conflate the vaccine effectiveness stats if you dump all the COVID events (cases, hospitalizations and deaths) that occur subsequent to infection within 14 days of the first dose into the unvaccinated.

Well, now we know for sure from the data published by the Government of Alberta1. Like everywhere else in the world they claim very impressive vaccine effectiveness by following the fraudulent standard set by the drug manufacturers in the pantomime clinical trials, i.e. to ignore the adverse outcomes in the first two weeks post administration.
But then they go one better and actually inflate the unvaccinated numbers too. And this is on top of dumping the events within 14 days of dose 2 in the partially vaccinated as well, of course.
Almost half of all COVID hospitalizations of the newly vaccinated occurred within 14 days which means they were treated as unvaccinated in the stats.
Fortunately, they inadvertently let us in on the magnitude of this duplicity by also publishing the time from dose to infection for each of the events, thereby allowing us to recalculate just how many events in the first 14 days were shifted from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated cohort.

Not only that but almost 80% occurred within 45 days. I’ll have to check with my friend, Jessica Rose, who is the expert on time-causality but it looks pretty positive to me.

In terms of deaths, the duplicity is even more severe with almost 56% of deaths of the newly vaccinated occurring within 14 days and almost 90% within 45 days.

As usual, if you are interested in public health information, you should be very wary of anything that comes from the public health authorities which is then heralded by the propaganda media and their other shills.
Your life might well depend on it.
Post Script
In reaction to reader comments, I am also including the case data.

It evidently follows the same pattern. However, in the first 14 days we range from 40% of cases, 48% of hospitalizations to 56% of deaths.

I guess it could be possible that the excess hospitalizations over cases and deaths over hospitalizations could be subject to prioritization of the sick but I don’t think it really matters. It’s the sick that needed protection anyway, not the healthy! And if it didn’t improve outcome for the sick then what exactly is the point??
Just for the record, here is the full history of cases, annotated with the start of the mass vaccination campaign. Interesting, eh?

(1) https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm#vaccine-outcomes
Saturday Night Fights at the Pharmacy
BY PIERRE KORY | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | JANUARY 13, 2022
I am exhausted: physically, emotionally, and morally. Although I am not sure moral exhaustion is “a thing,” the daily witnessing of masses of physicians and pharmacists abandoning their core responsibility of placing the welfare of the patient as their primary consideration is beyond wearying.
In the United States of Pharma, individual docs and pharmacists have been led so far astray, forgivably or unforgivably, due to the relentless barrage of dis-information targeted at them by the federal pharmaceutical regulators (further supported by relentless, daily propaganda appearing in both major media and medical journals).
Let us be clear about the rule and tradition. In the US, doctors are permitted to prescribe any medicine that has been approved by the FDA, even for indications the medicine was not originally approved for. Such “off-label” prescribing is both legal and historically encouraged by the FDA.
Pharmacies are there to fill prescriptions, and in only rare circumstances and in only a handful of states do they have the right to refuse to fill a valid prescription. Otherwise, what medicines are deployed, for whom, and for what purpose, is a matter between patient and doctor. This is the long-standing rule.
This principle has been violated now for almost two years. It has created a labyrinth of confusion over basic and well-tested therapies for dealing with a virus that can be very serious for many.
It is no longer the case that any doctor can depend on any pharmacist to distribute safe and effective medicines. They are very likely now to say no and they do so as a result of having been been unfairly intimidated by the threatening memos issued by federal agencies and the state medical and pharmacy boards. These reprehensible actions are just the latest salvo in the pharmaceutical industry’s decades-long war on off-patent, repurposed medicines.
What prompts me to write this was my most recent failure (and the resulting distress that led to terrible sleep last night) over not being able to get a pharmacist to fill my orders in the hours prior to closing of pharmacies for an acutely ill COVID patient that had contacted me reporting high fevers, sore throat, and body aches.
I immediately wanted to start him on a short course combination regimen of three, old, safe, cheap generic medications, all with large clinical trials evidence bases showing high efficacy against COVID (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, fluvoxamine). What is important to note is that, months ago I stopped trying to contact ANY pharmacy unless I KNEW they would fill my scripts for these off-patients medications because unless I knew a pharmacy was “safe”, I ran a high probability of entering an un-affordably time-wasting and ultimately losing argument with some smug, obstinate pharmacist.
As a result, we early treatment docs have long since been forced to build lists of “safe haven” pharmacies where we know we can easily get access to these medicines for our patients.
However, last night, I was inspired to make an attempt on a new, unknown pharmacy on behalf of my new patient as I had just read Steve Kirsch’s substack about my colleague and early COVID-treatment pioneer/expert Dr. Brian Tyson, in which was included the letter written by Dr. Brian Tyson’s attorney (also with the last name Tyson) that was used to “sway” a local pharmacy that had suddenly refused to fill.
The letter is thorough, deeply well-argued, and informs the pharmacists that they are; 1) violating the civil rights of patients, 2) interfering with a physician’s ability to practice medicine and 3) exhibiting behavior that constitutes the unlicensed and negligent practice of medicine.
Now, I had argued all these points before in previous “conflicts” with pharmacists, but never all at the same time, and rarely threatening a lawsuit. Duly and newly emboldened I made the call.
4:20 Pacific time (pharmacies close there at 6pm).
Transcript (from memory):
“Hi, I’d like to call in a prescription for a couple of patients.”
“OK, what’s the first patients name and date of birth?”
“Timothy Thomas (not his real name), born Nov. 6th, 1977.”
(pause, clacking of keyboard)
“OK, what does he need?”
(Wait for it)
“He needs ivermectin, 3 milligram tablets, I want him to take 15 each day as he is a big guy, and for 5 days with a refill. Then he needs, hydroxychloro…
“Doctor, I am sorry but I cannot fill the ivermectin. The owner has said we are not to fill for COVID, there is no evidence it works.”
“Listen, I don’t know who the owner is but you are the pharmacist on duty, and I am calling in a prescription to you, not the owner.”
“I, I, I am sorry but I can’t.”
I look at the letter, and then start spewing rapid fire arguments at him, “well unfortunately for you, my patient is an executive of a company and their lawyer is prepared to and will send a letter of intent to sue if it has not been filled because you are violating his civil rights, blocking my licensed ability to practice medicine and care for my sick patient, and you are clearly practicing medicine illegally and highly ignorantly. You should at least know what you are doing if you are going to do it without a license man.”
“But I am allowed to refuse, doctor.”
“That is what you think and what you have been told… But, I can promise you, that when you bring your arguments up in court as to why you refused, they will not hold up if any harm comes to my patient by your refusal. They will NOT HOLD UP, but you can try. The lawyer will serve the letter on Monday, I promise you, we are fed up out here and are fighting back, all of my fellow physicians being blocked by pharmacists are now using legal action (OK, so I overstated things a bit), I am sorry you are in the position you are in, but you have no rational or scientific evidence to support a refusal, but if you want to go to court to find out, we can make that happen for you”
“I, I feel intimidated.”
“Well, I am sorry for that, but you are hurting my patient and my ability to care for them. It is THEY who YOU are intimidating Sir. All you have to do is take my script, fill it, and we don’t have to go on like this. These medications are FDA approved, I am using them off-label based on a large body of evidence and experience in COVID, and off label prescribing is both legal and historically encouraged by the FDA. You are clearly practicing medicine and I promise that will be proven to you in a court of law. Please just fill it and you wont have to hear from me or my patient again.”
(Pause, silence)
“I cannot do it, I am not supposed to.”
“OK then, I will also remind you that you are legally required to provide me your name and license number as we will be pursuing legal action against you.”
“I am not giving you my name, I am not comfortable with that.”
“OK, so you think I can’t find it out? Fine, I am also documenting this refusal. Again, I am not interested in a contentious argument, I am asking you simply to fill the prescriptions for two sick patients who need my help, and if you do, you won’t have to hear from me or the patient’s lawyer.”
He whispers. “OK, tell me the rest of the prescriptions.”
I tell him the rest, then say, “my patient will be there by closing time, thank you and I apologize for my tone but I am just trying to do the best for my sick patients.”
Victory? Yes! Haven’t won one of these in months.
I finish telling him the rest of the scripts for my patient and his wife (I also needed to call in medicines for her so she could have some on hand and also begin ivermectin as a prophylactic agent given it ensures an easier course even if she is already or eventually becomes infected).
I then happily call the patient, tell him to get his wife to pick up the medicines along with the other over-the-counter compounds that have clinical trials supporting their use. And then I go to the couch to literally lay down (insane day of dozens of patient care requests, other zooms and phone calls, maybe 12+ hours on the phone).
30 minutes later… patients texts me… my wife went there and the pharmacist won’t fill.
Now, despite the fact that I co-wrote a document with Executive Director Kelly Bumann of the FLCCC and Unity Project Founder Jeff Hanson, called “Overcoming the Barriers to Access,” which is a document full of sound, pragmatic tactics and dialogue examples offered to patients (and docs) in order to help them navigate such pharmacist obstructions, they typically will not work when it is an hour before closing on a weekend.
So, here I am the next morning. Fortunately I was able to get two of the medicines filled through another pharmacy, with enough for his wife as she unsurprisingly fell ill overnight (omicron moves fast). Unfortunately, they will have to wait until tomorrow to get the third medicine from a “friendly” or “underground” pharmacy (not really underground but you get the analogy).
This is what it is like out here trying to fight for patients sick with COVID – widespread delays in care as blocking access to generic or “repurposed” medicines by ignorant/arrogant pharmacists is ubiquitous. The majority of pharmacists (not all!) have simply stopped thinking critically or devoting effort to review the evidence base, instead simply believing what they are told by their Boards (a.k.a. their “Ministries of Truth”). As if the insane numbers of ill omicron patients to care for is not challenging enough.
In the words of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who went after his state’s Pharmacy Board when they tried to scare the states pharmacists away from prescribing ivermectin by sending them threatening letters, “it is shocking that pharmacists are suddenly developing a conscience after spending the last decade handing out opiates like they were M & M’s”.
Well said and tragically absurd.
This newfound conscience influencing such actions is likely further fueled by a sometime resident psychology of pharmacists who may feel “less than” a physician given their limited scope of patient care tasks.
Emboldened by a seemingly legal opportunity to assert superiority and control over physicians, many find these irresistible. Consequently, they seem to be “getting off” from telling the “stupid” doctors that the Ministry of Truth has done the research for them and the Ministry has found, that in the name of science, doctors should stop using “ineffective horse de-wormer” to treat COVID.
Just another day in the life of an early COVID treatment expert.
A version of this article appeared on the author’s substack.
Pierre Kory is a Pulmonary and Critical Care Specialist, Teacher/Researcher. He is also the President and Chief Medical Officer of the non-profit organization Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance whose mission is to develop the most effective, evidence/expertise-based COVID-19 treatment protocols.








