In this, our eighth year on the air, we devoted a lot of time to important stories of people who too often aren’t heard in today’s news media environment. One of our most-watched reports was our investigation where we heard from a brave group of doctors and other medical pros from the first hospital in the U.S. to require Covid vaccines.
Sharyl: You did not want to get vaccinated?
Dr. Venu Julapalli: No.
Dr. Venu Julapalli is among an outspoken group of medical professionals once affiliated with Houston Methodist. Methodist was the first hospital system in the nation to require Covid vaccines.
Dr. Mary Crow: I refused to get the vaccine.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden: I spoke out on social media saying vaccine mandates were wrong.
Carol Avila: And I said, “I don’t want to take it.”
Given Fessler: I ultimately gave my notice, and I went somewhere else.
Owen Robinson: I was suspended and then terminated.
It’s rare to find medical professionals from such a prominent hospital system speaking on camera on the topic — punished, they say, for using independent medical judgement, which they consider a hallmark of sound medicine.
Dr. Julapalli started an email group of more than a thousand of his colleagues to discuss and debate the policies. Many, he said, would only share their true feelings with him in private.
Julapalli: The level of fear among our colleagues, among the medical staff, in terms of expressing their opinion, whatever it was, because they were afraid that they were going to be retaliated against by the institution, Houston Methodist, was off the charts and continues to be off the charts.
Sharyl (on-camera): There’s still fallout at hospitals around the country from the firings and controversy over Covid vaccine mandates.
On another topic related to Covid, we also heard from someone challenging the controversial practice that emerged during the pandemic of pharmacies refusing to fill legal prescriptions for coronavirus.
In the small town of Albert Lea, Minnesota, where the Saliers live, two pharmacies refused to fill the Saliers’ ivermectin prescription. That included the local Walmart.
Bill Salier: It was the pharmacist himself, and he talked to my wife because I was kind of incoherent. And I remember her walking into the bedroom, and I heard her say, “You can’t do that. You can’t just not fill a prescription because you feel like you don’t want to.” And I could hear her responding to his answer of, “Yes I can, and I won’t fill it.”
Pharmacists do have the right to use their professional discretion to turn away prescriptions.
But ivermectin proved more than a fringe hope promoted by a handful of doctors. According to CDC, by November of 2021, more than 377,000 people a month were being prescribed ivermectin, a 24-fold increase compared to before Covid.
Nobody we spoke to could point to an instance prior to the pandemic where so many people were blocked from getting legally-prescribed medicine. The mass refusals have sparked a national debate over patient rights and whether pharmacists should overrule a doctor’s judgement.
Salier: It even ended up with our doctor becoming more firm and saying, “No, you need to fill this.” And the pharmacist at Walmart hung up on her.
Bill Salier says he turned to desperate measures. He consulted their doctor and their veterinarian, translated the horse formulation into a human dosage, and…
Salier: We squirted horse paste into applesauce, and down the hatch it went.
Sharyl (on-camera): Both Salier and his wife feel the ivermectin cured them. Though many studies have said ivermectin and other off-narrative therapies are effective for Covid, some public health officials dispute that and say they could be dangerous.
And perhaps one of our most popular stories is the report we did on the January 6 riots, with the FBI using armed SWAT teams to arrest protesters who committed, if anything, a nonviolent misdemeanor, and an FBI whistleblower who refused to go along with the heavy-handed tactics.
March 4, 2021. Surveillance video shows FBI agents, weapons drawn, surrounding the Texas home of Treniss Evans.
Sharyl: It looked like a dozen agents around your house?
Evans: Oh, it’s a lot more than that. Yeah, so there was 20-plus agents there. They had snipers, they had vehicles to block off the street. I mean, it was insane.
Sharyl: And your 13-year-old son is out on the front deck with his hands up?
Evans: Yeah.
That’s his son, blue shirt, hands up. Considering the presence of a small army from the FBI, you might think Evans was a vicious criminal, armed and dangerous. In fact, he had no history of violence.
This was his crime. He’s in the yellow hat, climbing through a window to enter the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 6.
Stephen Friend is among more than a dozen FBI agents reported to be blowing the whistle on the agency’s alleged political bias. He told me he was suspended after refusing to take part in SWAT raids of nonviolent January 6 suspects.
Sharyl: What did you think was so wrong about the raids?
Friend: I felt that there was definitely a harder hand in the way that the arrests and the searches were going to be carried out, regardless of the individuals’ involvement in January 6.
Sharyl (on-camera): By the way, Stephen Friend resigned from his FBI position in February after they refused to assign him work, quit paying him, and rejected his request to accept outside employment.
Watch here.
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