COVID-19 politics leave a Florida public hospital shaken
SARASOTA, Fla. — The turmoil at Sarasota Memorial, one of Florida’s largest public hospitals, began last year after three candidates running on a platform of “health freedom” won seats on the nine-member board that oversees the hospital. Board meetings, once sleepy, started drawing hundreds of angry people who, like the new members, denounced the hospital’s treatment protocols for COVID-19.
An internal review last month found that Sarasota Memorial did far better than some of its competitors in saving COVID patients’ lives. But that did little to quell detractors, whose campaign against the hospital has not relented. By then, the hospital had become the latest public institution under siege by an increasingly large and vocal right-wing contingent in one of Florida’s most affluent counties, where a backlash to pandemic policies has started reshaping local government.
Some members of the Sarasota County Public Hospital Board and medical staff at Sarasota Memorial are bewildered and taken aback by critics’ continued preoccupation with COVID policy — chiefly the avoidance of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, drugs found to be ineffective or even harmful as COVID treatments.
“Most hospitals around the country are over COVID,” said Dr. James V. Fiorica, the hospital’s chief medical officer. “We’ve proven ourselves. Why aren’t we moving on?”
People who are part of the “health freedom” movement object to the fact that Sarasota Memorial closely followed guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which do not recommend using ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID patients. Sarasota Memorial did allow those drugs as treatments, the review said, but only with a staff physician’s order and, eventually, a waiver.
Board meetings in recent months have drawn speakers who lost loved ones to COVID, though some appear not to live in the Sarasota area or to have had relatives treated for COVID at Sarasota Memorial, according to the hospital.
Tanya Parus, the president of the Sarasota County chapter of Moms for America, a conservative group, told the board at its February meeting that the community does not trust the hospital’s leaders. Some patients, she said, had “pleaded” for treatments the hospital denied.
“It’s not about us being anti-vax. It’s not about us being COVID critics. It’s not about us having nothing to do all day but pick a public fight,” she said. “We know firsthand what happened upstairs in those hallways. We know how badly hearts were aching.”
Fiorica said he understood the grief of those who lost loved ones to COVID but emphasized the hospital’s strong overall performance during the pandemic, despite grueling work conditions.
“These are professionals dealing with life and death situations, and they adjusted all the way along, each year of the pandemic,” he said. “And we confirmed in our report that their work was outstanding.”
Harsh and misleading comments about the hospital and its doctors — including that a cardiovascular surgeon would not operate on patients who had not received the coronavirus vaccine — have been uttered in public forums or posted on review websites like Google, Yelp and Healthgrades. Michael Flynn, former President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, who is now a Sarasota resident with a devoted following, attended the hospital board’s February meeting and wrote on Twitter that it “may be time to privatize this hospital.”
A Facebook group called Sarasota Memorial Hospital – Transparency Project has said that the hospital should no longer be protected by a legal immunity shield that limits malpractice payouts to $200,000 to $300,000 per incident at Florida public hospitals.
The furor culminated last month in a disinformation-fueled campaign of insulting voicemail and emails to the hospital staff. “Traitorous,” one woman said in her expletive-laden message reviewed by The New York Times. “You’re going to be punished,” a man warned. When commenters on the Telegram app appeared to threaten the lives of two Sarasota Memorial doctors, using their names, the hospital called the police.
The campaign began after a contributor to The Epoch Times, a purveyor of conspiracy theories and political misinformation affiliated with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, posted a misleading video. The video, which was then widely shared on Telegram, showed security guards escorting a doctor out of the February board meeting who had spoken earlier in the meeting, without incident, in favor of using ivermectin to treat COVID.
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