Here’s what they mean by ‘Freedom’: Event promotes bill to jail docs who use vaccines | Opinion

“I thought we believed in a patient-doctor relationship. So why is the government stepping in and telling these doctors that they can’t do that (administer drugs they believe are effective) to their patients?” asked Sen. Tammy Nichols at the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s “Capitol Clarity” event on Thursday.

That’s a decent argument. It just sounds a little strange coming from the mouth of a lawmaker who is in the midst of promoting a bill that would jail doctors, nurses and pharmacists who administer most brands of COVID-19 vaccines.

But Nichols was talking about ivermectin, an anti-parasite medication that has repeatedly shown no efficacy in treating COVID-19, not vaccines, which have demonstrated a high degree of efficacy in preventing severe disease and death.

Along with cosponsor Rep. Judy Boyle, R-Midvale, Nichols was promoting House Bill 307. The bill and its predecessor have both been printed by the House Health and Welfare Committee, but neither has been granted a hearing. The purpose of the Freedom Foundation’s Capitol Clarity event was to try to get supporters to contact their lawmakers and get it moving.

With the bill, Nichols and Boyle are seeking to place the government — the police specifically — right in the middle of the doctor-patient relationship. The bill would make it a misdemeanor to administer vaccines that use mRNA technology, like the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, punishable by up to a year in jail.

On top of the jail time, there’s a bonus for charging doctors with a misdemeanor, Nichols told the gathered audience of around 30 people. They’ll lose their license after they get out.

The bill has already been rewritten once. The first draft would have banned mRNA vaccines for both humans and other mammals, but the agricultural sector had objections. So it was rewritten so that a vet could give a cow an mRNA vaccine, but a doctor would go to jail for giving one to you.

Speaking of veterinary medicine — many ivermectin advocates get angry if you refer to it as “horse paste.” True, it is available as a paste for treating horse parasites, but it also comes as a pill, long FDA-approved for humans and stocked at many pharmacies, they like to point out.

After the presentation on Nichols and Boyle’s bill, participants at Capitol Clarity discussed various means of obtaining ivermectin: a sympathetic local compounding pharmacy, a mail-order chemist in India, etc. And then there are other methods.

“There’s nothing wrong with taking the horse paste,” said one older man in the audience.