Hospitals in New Hampshire and elsewhere threatened by ivermectin advocates

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Tue, 2022-03-01 10:46 — mike kraft

This hospital tried to save a man with covid. Then the threats started. Valley Regional Hospital was flooded with calls and emails connected to its treatment of a covid patient. Joanna Slater Washington Post

CLAREMONT, N.H. — It was still dark when Jocelyn Caple pulled into the parking lot of Valley Regional Hospital one morning in early December.

Nearly two years into the pandemic, covid hospitalizations in New Hampshire were at a record high. The small community hospital Caple leads was full, its employees exhausted.

As soon as Caple arrived inside, a colleague told her that something strange was happening. Calls were flooding into the switchboard, and senior staff members were receiving a flurry of voice messages and emails to their work accounts.

The callers were impassioned and vehement, demanding that the hospital begin treating a covid patient in its care with ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug. As the day went on, the volume of calls grew so large that the hospital shut down its main number.

That morning was only the beginning. The calls and emails — mobilized by a group calling itself the Truth Seekers 88 — continued for more than a week. The hospital limited access to one entrance, and local police posted a cruiser there 24 hours a day.

Several of the communications were threatening, Caple said, including a voice mail in which a caller warned of a “military extraction” of the patient from the hospital. Nine days after the calls and emails began, she said, the hospital received a bomb threat for the first time in its history.

Caple and her staff were deeply shaken. “No matter what, when things heat up at work, we can’t just close up shop and go home,” said Caple, 57, a pathologist by training who became chief executive of the hospital in 2020. “I was angry that anyone would endeavor to make my staff’s jobs any harder or more stressful than they already are.”

What happened at the hospital, located in the small city of Claremont, is a dramatic example of how hostility toward the medical establishment has flourished during the pandemic, encouraged by misinformation campaigns, anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists.

While doctors and nurses say they’re accustomed to encountering anger from patients and their relatives, the level of distrust surrounding covid and its treatment represents a new and disturbing phenomenon. It’s an environment in which some families view clinical decisions with suspicion, leading to threats and lawsuits.

Jack Lyons, a critical care physician in St. Cloud, Minn., said it’s understandable that people lash out when a family member is ill or dying. What’s different now, he said, are the fundamental disagreements about the medical facts and the outrage that sometimes accompanies such interactions. ...

The mistrust has led to spiraling tensions between hospitals and families of covid patients, particularly surrounding ivermectin. The drug — used to treat parasitic infections and head lice — has been embraced as a miracle cure for covid by many skeptical of vaccines, despite a lack of evidence for its effectiveness.

Ivermectin is not recommended for the treatment of covid by the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration or the World Health Organization. Large-scale clinical trials of its effectiveness against covid are currently underway in the United States and Britain.

Still, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against hospitals across the country to compel them to dispense ivermectin to patients, sometimes successfully. In Montana and Alaska, local Republican officials reportedly intervened with hospitals when family members wanted their relatives to be treated with ivermectin.

Ivermectin has also become a focal point for conspiracy theorists, including QAnon adherents, leading to situations such as the one in New Hampshire, and similar episodes in Illinois and Washington.

In September, a large hospital in Chicago was the target of a coordinated campaign over its treatment of a vocal QAnon adherent who was ill with covid. The hospital received hundreds of calls and emails, prompting it to ask police to bolster patrols on the campus. When the patient died, police were present to assist with a small group of people who gathered outside the hospital, said Timothy Nelson, the spokesman for AMITA Health Resurrection Medical Center...

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