Thursday, December 30, 2021

"Doctors affiliated with anti-vax groups briefed Maine lawmakers. One (me) faces licensing board scrutiny"

Kevin Miller

One of the physicians is facing scrutiny from the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine for admittedly lying to a pharmacist to fulfill a prescription of hydroxychloroquine for a COVID patient.

The admission by Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist in Ellsworth, was heard firsthand by the dozen or so lawmakers who participated in the Dec. 14 Zoom meeting, which was organized by Sen. Lisa Keim, R-Dixfield, and staffed by a spokesman for the Senate Republican office.

During the meeting Nass identified herself as a consultant for the Children’s Health Defense — recently described by the Associated Press as “anti-vaccine juggernaut” — and told lawmakers that she misled a pharmacist because they would only provide the drug for an approved illness.

"And so I lied and said the patient had Lyme disease, which is another legitimate reason to get this drug,” Nass said. “And so the pharmacist dispensed the medication only because I lied. If I had said the patient was getting it for COVID, they would not have received the drug."

It wasn't the first time Nass has made that admission. Prior to the meeting with state legislators, she self-reported to the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine and published a copy of the letter on her blog.

Nass told Maine Public Radio that she believes drugs like hydroxychloroquine are being suppressed by government officials who want to push newer, more expensive treatments and the COVID vaccines. It's a belief central to some factions of the anti-vaccine movement that often ascribe nefarious, profit-making motives to top health officials who promote or authorize vaccines.

Nass’ views on such matters are widely available on the internet, including on the Children’s Health Defense website, at one point earning her praise from the organization’s president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy earlier this year lauded her post purporting to show that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, had lied about the origins of the coronavirus.

“Thank you, Meryl, because this is the piece that's going to bring Tony Fauci down," Kennedy told her during the June podcast segment. “If we live in a just or rational world he will be out of a job tonight and he will be riding out of Washington on rails to be tarred and feathered and sent off somewhere where they send scientific crooks and charlatans.”

Misinformation experts have a similar characterization for Kennedy and his organization, which doubled its revenue in 2020 to $6.8 million.

Irwin Redlener, a physician who researches misinformation and directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, told Maine Public Radio that organizations like Children’s Health Defense are fueling A "wildly out-of-control misinformation campaign" that has rocked the public health community and contributed to vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. and globally.

“I shudder to think if his father was aware of what Bobby’s become,” Redlener said. “I can’t even imagine how he’d process this. He’s an extreme, radical, uninformed guy making a lot of money off of scaring people about vaccines. You know, I'm an old Kennedy fan, and I find his presence in this particularly noxious.”

Redlener was also vexed that doctors affiliated with Children’s Defense Fund and America’s Frontline Doctors — which he’s described as “21st century, digital version of snake-oil salesmen" — would gain an audience with state lawmakers.

He said doctors affiliated with such organizations are leveraging public trust in their profession to push unproven treatments.

“They're articulate. They're doctors. And it’s hard for a legislator, who's not a scientist, to sort through this. This is one of the things I'm really concerned about," he said.

Keim’s invitation was sent to the Legislature’s 186 lawmakers. In that context, the dozen or so legislators who logged into the Dec. 14 meeting is a small percentage.

Attendance might have been more robust if Rep. Michele Meyer, D-Eliot, hadn’t sent an email to House Democrats warning that the session might be ripe for misinformation. Meyer, a registered nurse, did not attend the session, but did provide data showing that the primary reason for the state's strained healthcare system in not Gov. Janet Mills’ vaccination requirement for healthcare workers, but rather, the high number of unvaccinated COVID patients.

“I'm just about 30 years in an evidence-based nursing practice and so I'm particularly sensitive to misinformation and disinformation,” Meyer said.

Rep. Vallie Geiger, of Rockland, was one of the Democrats who participated in the Dec. 14 meeting. Until she read Meyer’s email, she believed the session “was a legitimate education session being provided by our legislative leaders.”

Geiger, a nurse on a small chemotherapy unit at LincolnHealth in Damariscotta, said she attended anyway because she wanted to hear the physicians’ perspectives.

She logged off after 40 minutes — immediately after Nass’ remarks.

“What I resented was an education being presented as though this were a balanced presentation to provide information to representatives, when in fact, it was propaganda and misinformation in a state that's already having a surging number of cases, the majority of which are unvaccinated," she said.

Democratic Sen. Ned Claxton, a retired physician from Auburn, took a different view. He said Keim asked him to speak with a doctor who was concerned about the vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, to which he agreed. That doctor then worked with Keim to organize the broader briefing with other lawmakers.

Claxton said he was not involved with inviting other doctors to participate in the briefing, nor did he view it as his role to “adjudicate” other speakers. Instead, Claxton said he was there to listen to the doctors’ viewpoints. And based on feedback from several doctors afterward, he felt the event was a success.

“There was never a conscious attempt to balance things,” he said. “We didn’t want this necessarily to be a debate. The intent was to have the physicians go away with a sense that they had been heard and having had the opportunity to talk to legislators directly, which is something that would be, I think, new to many of them.”

Redlener, the misinformation researcher from Columbia University, worried that giving voice to doctors affiliated with anti-vaccine organizations creates “a moral equivalence between the people who promote vaccinations and the people who resist them.”

He added, “There happens to be a right and wrong here. And I think we ascribe too much to quote-unquote balance — and the balance getting to be an argumenting force for people who have a different point of view, even though it is 100 percent wrong. It’s been refuted, it’s incorrect, it’s dangerous.”

To be clear, the 90-minute session was not dominated by anti-vaccine broadsides and only two of the five doctors who participated have known connections to anti-vaccine groups.

At times the meeting resembled legislative information sessions put on by interest groups promoting a bill or policy change.

Dr. Jake Brooks, an orthopedic surgeon who said he is vaccinated, lamented the staffing shortage that had delayed surgeries as he pushed for a compromise alternative to the mandate.

"You know, whether you're unvaccinated or vaccinated, we all have the same goal of caring for Maine people. That's why I'm here," he said.

Other panelists shared a different message, however.

Dr. Pam Shervanick, a Portland-area psychiatrist, claimed Maine's vaccination mandate for health care workers is causing psychological distress to staffers and undermining the state's medical system.

"So if the actual goal of the mandates is to improve the health of the citizens of the state of Maine, chronic fear is literally doing the exact opposite," she said.

Shervanick made no mention of it during the meeting, but she's affiliated with America's Frontline Doctors, a national group created in early 2020 to support former President Trump's pandemic response and that's now under investigation by a congressional committee for peddling COVID misinformation and unproven treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

The group's website is filled with videos containing patriotic messaging and imagery as well as "issue briefs" that question the effectiveness of the vaccines, oppose masking and rail against "medical cancel culture."

For anyone willing to pay the $90 consultation fee, America's Frontline Doctors will help set up a telemedicine appointment with an affiliated doctor in the person's home state who will prescribe hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin

The group's founder, Dr. Simone Gold of California, is among the hundreds of people facing federal charges for entering the U.S. Capitol during the deadly January 6 riots staged by Trump loyalists. In a video posted on the group's website, Gold states there is no health crisis and that "corrupt forces in the media, government and medicine have been lying to you."

Shervanick has posted numerous blogs to the website of America’s Frontline Doctors, which lists her as a “medical contributor.” In those blogs, she urged readers to stand together against mask mandates, spoke of a “vaccine nightmare” and personally thanked Gold as well as "the heroes that put fear aside to fight with her."

Shervanick was not available for comment.

Sen. Keim, who has participated in some of the demonstrations against the vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, told Maine Public Radio that she organized the meeting on her own. She said the session reinforced her belief that the vaccine mandate is ill-conceived, overburdens remaining health care workers and denies access to care across the state.

"The mandate is not the one thing that changed the trajectory of health care in Maine, but it certainly was incredibly bad timing to further impact our workforce when we were already on the edge," she said.

Asked whether the controversial backgrounds and statements from some of the doctors might undercut her efforts to persuade Democrats that the mandate is a problem, Keim said lawmakers constantly have to sift through outlandish statements and find “nuggets of truth.”

Keim said Nass' statement about lying to a pharmacist was unfortunate, but she was also disturbed about the doctor’s other admission during the meeting: that she had been reported to the licensing board for SPREADING misinformation.

Keim said she plans to write the board to express concern that doctors could be punished for ill-defined offenses.

“I think Maine is far too cavalier in ripping away someone's livelihood right now," she said.

Nass, for her part, said she plans to fight the board’s statement this fall that Maine doctors’ peddling misinformation could be sanctioned.

"They're creating crimes that did not exist previously without defining the crimes,” she said. “Does that sound like the United States of America to you?"

Nass also said she'll debate any licensing board on how to treat COVID.

She might just get the chance.

Medicine board director Dennis Smith last week confirmed to Maine Public Radio that he had received Nass' self-described confession letter.

While he would not confirm that she's under investigation, he asked if there was a recording of the meeting because, "the practice of fraud, deceit or misrepresentation in connection with services rendered by a licensee constitutes grounds for possible disciplinary action."



12 comments:

  1. The one correct statement here is that there really is no moral equivalence between those spineless cretins pushing the injections and the courageous heroes advising caution. You are a hero Dr. Nass. Thank you for your strength and wisdom.

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  2. Wow, you even think about questioning the current medical dogma and you're accused of blasphemy! Oh, sorry, misinformation.

    Dr. Nass, watch out for those true-believer nurses. They think they're so analytical, but mostly they're just emotional decision-makers. I speak as a BSN.

    You are in my prayers.

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  3. Enjoy:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T18NpRqy7CQ

    ReplyDelete
  4. Keep up the good fight!!! Early treatment is the way out of this Pandemic. Thank you!!

    ReplyDelete

  5. Appreciate All You Do!
    Fauci & Big Pharma Pfizer Vaccine almost Killed my Wife, DVT Blood Clots!

    God I Hope So!

    “Thank you, Meryl, because this is the piece that's going to bring Tony Fauci down," Kennedy told her during the June podcast segment. “If we live in a just or rational world he will be out of a job tonight and he will be riding out of Washington on rails to be tarred and feathered and sent off somewhere where they send scientific crooks and charlatans.”

    'Think Of The Depth Of Evil It Would Take To Use Chinese Coronavirus Against The American People!'

    https://creativedestructionmedia.com/opinion/2020/07/20/think-of-the-depth-of-evil-it-would-take-to-use-chinese-coronavirus-against-the-american-people/

    ReplyDelete
  6. Interesting who they choose to place under scrutiny for fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation. Hmmmmm.......
    I keep wondering why Dr. Fauci still has a job. Maybe they can tell us. Remember M. Scott Peck's book "People Of The Lie"?

    ReplyDelete

  7. How can their be 'INFORMED CONSENT; if the Vaccine Insert INFO paper is Blank?

    CVS pharmacy is ask questions about the mRNA Moderna Vaccination!
    #4:42 MIN MARK, BREATHTAKING! MAKE SURE YOU ARE SITTING DOWN!
    Pharmacist admits he should not be giving mRNA Gene Therapy Vaccines?
    How long before Youtube Censors it?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaTZe3JfRvU

    ReplyDelete
  8. What a sad state of affairs. I'm sorry to see this spew, but then again, it's "public radio." NPR/PBS aren't officially members of the Trusted News Initiative (https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative-vaccine-disinformation), but they might as well be....

    Do you have a legal defense fund?

    For one thing, Irwin Redlener needs to crawl back under his toadstool with Gates's Ashish Jha (https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/provost/communications/announcement-school-public-health-dean).

    I could just barf in my oatmeal.

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  9. What an unbalanced piece of garbage this article is. The second the word ANTI-VAX is written into a piece it creates extreme bias and people who read this have made up their minds. Identified by the Associated Press as...? Who died and left them God and RKJ site is not Anti-Vax which shows the blogger never bothered to read it.

    ReplyDelete

  10. BREAKING!

    Exclusive — Kat Cammack: White House Wants to 'Cause Class Warfare Between Vaccinated, Unvaccinated'!

    https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/30/exclusive-kat-cammack-white-house-wants-to-cause-class-warfare-between-vaccinated-unvaccinated/

    ReplyDelete
  11. I do not listen to, nor do I support NPR (National Propaganda Radio).

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  12. speaking of medical boards - looks like the FDA is attempting to enlist them to prevent compounding pharmacies from providing Ivermectin.

    They'd issued this letter to the Federation of State Medical Boards around the 13th. https://trialsitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Ivermectin-Letter-to-FSMB-Final.pdf - and here's a recap and comments from a physician who's been covering these issues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opcf0WoL3Uo

    * Note that he's being sarcastic in his praise of this action, to avoid censorship.

    The obvious point is that if the FDA had legitimate claims and grounds to act, they'd simply do so themselves. And if they had legitimate reason to advise physicians that compounding pharmacies were acting illicitly, they would provide specific examples of that and define what violations may be occurring.

    And I'd bet you could find the contents of that letter in FDA released statements from over a year ago. The only significant information is what they'd added - that Ivermectin should be denied patients because it's seen to impede population vaccination, and that compounding pharmacies should be targeted to reduce supplies.

    ReplyDelete