COVID craziness, August 30, 2021 edition
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(1) An Ohio judge has ordered a hospital to administer horse dewormer to a patient over the hospital’s objections to doing so:
An Ohio judge has ordered a hospital to treat a COVID-19 patient with the controversial livestock drug ivermectin.
Butler County Common Pleas Judge Gregory Howard issued the ruling last week, forcing West Chester Hospital to treat Jeffrey Smith with the 30 milligrams of the drug daily for three weeks.
Smith’s wife, Julie Smith, had sued the hospital after it refused to administer ivermectin—an animal dewormer that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have warned against in treating COVID-19.
Her husband tested positive for the coronavirus on July 9, according to court documents. He was hospitalized and admitted to the intensive care unit on July 15. On August 1, he was intubated and placed on a ventilator.
Julie Smith said she began researching other courses of treatment and found out about cases where patients had been given ivermectin.
She connected with her husband’s physician, Dr. Fred Wagshul—described in the lawsuit as an “expert on using Ivermectin in treating Covid-19″—who prescribed the drug. The hospital then refused to administer it.
I don’t know anything about how these sorts of conflicts between hospitals and doctors are normally resolved, but having a judge resolve it seems like a bad idea.
(2) Another right wing hate radio host who railed against COVID vaccines has died from COVID:
A conservative Florida radio host who spoke out against Covid-19 vaccines died after a weekslong fight with the virus, marking the third radio personality to die from coronavirus who publicly rejected vaccines.
The death of Marc Bernier, 65, who was a mainstay on talk radio in Daytona Beach, was announced Saturday night by WNDB, the radio station he was affiliated with for three decades.
(3) Don’t cry no tears for this guy either:
Robert David Steele, the conspiracy theorist who organized a far-right event in Belfast in July and called COVID-19 a hoax, has reportedly died of the disease.
Steele, a former CIA officer, was hospitalized with COVID-19 in early August, shortly after he spoke to a large crowd at the Crosby Center.
Known for anti-Semitic beliefs and falsely asserting that NASA operates a child slave colony on Mars, Steele was also a promoter of the sprawling QAnon conspiracy that centers on the baseless idea that former President Donald Trump will vanquish a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles.
Steele made an assortment of wild claims during the Belfast event, including that U.S. military bases are “lily pads” used for the smuggling of gold and children.
“We are normalizing pedophilia and idiocy!” he said. “We are normalizing the destruction of the family.”
The event also featured Yarmouth’s Christiane Northrup, who is among the nation’s leading purveyors of vaccine disinformation, and Republican state Rep. Heidi Sampson, of Alfred, who is under fire for recently comparing Gov. Janet Mills to a Nazi doctor.
Sampson and Steele both pushed for an audit of Maine’s 2020 election results that would turn over voter data to individuals involved in the highly controversial audit in Arizona.
(4) Approximately 800,000 more Americans have died since February of 2020 than would have died over that time frame if age adjusted mortality rates had remained the same (age adjusted mortality almost always drops from year to year). That’s an average of 1,416 excess deaths per day, or basically three 9/11 terrorist attacks every week for 19 months. It’s also equivalent to the total number of murders committed in America over the course of the last half century.