what I find interesting in this court issue is… what they are talking about is “off-label” prescribing… in which day in and day out… off label prescribing is a significant percent of all prescriptions filled. But “they” seemed to dance around and side-step around the very issue of off-label prescribing. Off labeling prescribing typically has NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE for what the med is being prescribed for, but here our legal system … uses no scientific as a reason for siding with the defendants. In reality, there is a growing mountain of scientific evidence that these mRNA vaccines, may not be a “vaccine” in the truest sense, and may only – at best – provide some passive immunity to a pt. In fact, 100 of millions of vaccinations where administered under FDA’s EMERGENCY USE AUTHORIZATION and only having a very brief/abbreviated short term clinical trial.
This was just posted today: The CDC director just got COVID. She got the new bivalent booster a month ago Pres Biden and Dr Fauci also was tested positive once or twice after getting all the recommended vaccinations… Yet the CDC is getting ready, at a very minimum, to mandate COVID-19 vaccine for all kids in school. It would seem that POLITICAL SCIENCE is dictating what our healthcare is doing/recommended. Someone must be making a lot of money or has a vested interest in all of these mandated vaccinations.
Court addressed how and why a pharmacist may legally decline to honor a prescription
https://www.pharmacytoday.org/article/S1042-0991(22)00798-8/fulltext
The important question of whether a pharmacist may legally decline to honor a scientifically unsupportable prescription continues to be addressed by courts. In December 2021 and March 2022, I reviewed 4 legal cases in which hospitalized patients challenged the hospital’s refusal to administer ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19. All 4 cases resulted in court rulings favoring the hospital.
A recent case from Minnesota considered similar claims in a community pharmacy setting. The legal rationale of these cases extends beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, to include any situation in which a pharmacist declines a prescription based on scientific evidence.
Background
In the late summer of 2021, a Minnesota husband and wife became ill with COVID-19. They both obtained a prescription for ivermectin from a Missouri physician through a telehealth appointment. The wife also later obtained a prescription for hydroxychloroquine from the same physician.
Two local pharmacies refused to honor the prescriptions. The first pharmacist explained that “it is not appropriate to treat COVID-19 patients with ivermectin.” The second pharmacist cited “corporate policy to refuse ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine prescriptions to treat COVID-19.”
The patients alleged that the pharmacists’ refusal to honor their prescriptions endangered their lives and forced them to use veterinary ivermectin, after which they “experienced rapid and significant improvement.”
The patients sued the pharmacies for “replacing [the physician’s] reasoned judgment and [the patients’] own reasoned decision-making” with “baseless political conclusions” (in the case of the first pharmacy) and a “one-size fits all corporate policy based on political fearmongering” (in the case of the second pharmacy).
The pharmacies moved to dismiss the case.
Rationale
The judge first considered the plaintiffs’ claim that they were asserting their “common law right to self-determination.” The judge reasoned that the implications of recognizing “not just the right to do whatever you want with your own body, but the right to force others to help you (so much for their right of self-determination) would be mind-boggling.”
The judge stated that the recognition of such a right would “completely upend” the regulation of health care professionals.
The judge then reviewed the plaintiffs’ allegation that the pharmacists’ refusal to honor their prescriptions was “extreme and outrageous” conduct, noting that to meet this legal standard, the conduct must be “so atrocious that it passes the bounds of decency and is utterly intolerable to a civilized community.”
The judge acknowledged that “there might be circumstances under which a pharmacist’s refusal to dispense life-saving medicine to a severely ill person because of the pharmacist’s political beliefs (or because of a policy of the pharmacist’s employer) could be extreme and outrageous.” However, the judge concluded that “this case does not remotely approach those circumstances.”
Lastly, the judge reviewed the plaintiffs’ allegation that the pharmacists had interfered with the physician’s performance of her contract to treat the patients.
However, the plaintiffs conceded that the physician had not breached her contract with them. A person cannot have interfered with a contract between other persons if the contract was actually fulfilled. The judge ruled that the pharmacists had taken no affirmative action to interfere with the physician-patient relationship. They had merely declined to participate.
The case was dismissed.
Takeaways
In the hospital-based ivermectin refusal cases, the courts deferred to medical standards of care that had been approved by hospital committees based on carefully reviewed scientific evidence. In the present case, the judge deferred to the evidence-based judgment of an individual pharmacist (at the first pharmacy) and to corporate policy (at the second pharmacy). These are two different examples of how and why a pharmacist may legally decline to honor a scientifically unsupportable prescription.
Political disagreements have found their way into pharmacy practice. It is uncomfortable, yet it was inevitable. Individual pharmacist decisions and corporate policies that are based on scientific evidence can legally justify prescription refusals in the face of patient insistence due to political factors or other nonscientific beliefs.
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