A few days before she passed away at Wooster (Ohio) Community Hospital, Angie Plant made a desperate call to her sister, Crystal Boles. Angie mumbled over the phone that she wanted budesonide—an inhaled corticosteroid that Texas physician Dr. Richard Bartlett called a “silver bullet” for covid-19.
Budesonide—like other safe, early treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine—wasn’t a part of the hospital’s covid protocol.
So Angie couldn’t have it.
Angie passed away at Wooster Community Hospital at the age of 54, on September 16—eight days after her husband, Dave, passed away just down the hall.
During her call to Crystal, Angie pleaded for budesonide because her oxygen level was plummeting. Crystal had previously read studies that suggested that budesonide was successful for Angie’s condition, she testified to the Ohio House of Representatives’ Health Provider Services Committee in April 2023. The committee held a hearing at that time for HB73, the Dave and Angie Patient and Health Provider Protection Act.
Among other things, the legislation would authorize doctors to prescribe an off-label drug and generally require a pharmacist to dispense—and a hospital or inpatient facility to allow—the dispensing of the drug prescribed by a patient’s doctor. Had HB73 been in effect in September 2021, it would have compelled Wooster Community Hospital to give budesonide to Angie.
It may have saved her life.
It also may have saved my wife, Amy, who was unable to access the hydroxychloroquine prescribed by her doctor, in Ohio. Amy passed away a few hours after Dave lost his life.
In Amy’s case, it wasn’t a hospital that refused to fill her prescription. It was Ohio’s pharmacists who decided to play God and arrogantly play along with the science-defying mandates of Tony Fauci and other psychopaths whose goal was not to heal the sick, but rather to clear the way for a billion dollar bonanza for the vaccine industry.
HB73 passed the House in June 2023 by a resounding 75-17 bipartisan vote.
Eighteen months later, the measure remains roadblocked in the Senate Health Committee, which is chaired by Sen. (Dr.) Stephen Huffman (R-Tipp City), who is significantly funded by the medical establishment. Huffman’s cousin, Matt (R-Lima), is president of the Ohio Senate and is being supported by many republicans to be the next speaker of the house.
If the lifesaving legislation is not approved during an abbreviated legislative session in November, it will die. And it will be yet another blow to Ohioans’ medical freedom courtesy of the Ohio legislature.
Sudden illness
Crystal Boles said Angie and Dave became ill early in September 2021.
“Dave had gotten sick, kind of like flu type symptoms, and then he got to where he couldn’t breathe very well,” Crystal said. “[Angie and Dave’s sons] actually had it first, then Dave, then Angie.”
They wanted to try outpatient treatments to address their symptoms at home because they feared discrimination in the hospital because of their vaccination status.
They hadn’t taken the jab.
After speaking to—and seeing and reading the testimony of—countless others who experienced that discrimination in hospitals across the country, I understand Angie and Dave’s apprehension. Amy and I had the same apprehension before she apparently got covid.
One example that illustrates that discrimination is contained in an affidavit by Dr. James P. Miller, a former Washington surgeon who is now practicing as a primary care provider in Florida. Miller said his former colleague, Dr. George Diaz—who was nationally reported to be the first U.S. doctor to treat a covid patient with remdesivir—said that any individual who is unvaccinated for covid should not be permitted to engage in society or have a driver’s license. Healthcare providers at Providence Regional Medical Center, in Everett, Washington, where Miller and Diaz practiced, refused to provide care to unvaccinated individuals or people who requested “alternative treatments,” according to Miller’s affidavit.
Miller’s affidavit has been attached to a variety of lawsuits.
Unfortunately, Crystal said, because the treatments Angie and Dave wanted to try were not accessible to them, their symptoms continued to worsen at home. Finally, Crystal said, Angie and Dave’s children had no option but to take them to Wooster Community Hospital. They were admitted via the emergency room a day apart.
At Wooster, Crystal said, Dave and Angie continued to request “alternate” treatments that were not in the standard hospital protocol.
They were denied.
Dave reluctantly consented to treatment that conformed to the hospital’s protocol, including remdesivir, the Fauci-promoted treatment that has since been proven to be linked to kidney failure and other deadly side effects. Dave’s symptoms quickly worsened, Crystal said.
“He was pushed into being ventilated and died two days later from lung damage,” she testified at the House hearing. “After Angie witnessed what her husband went through, she didn’t want to take the same path.”
When Angie couldn’t breathe, she called her sister for help. She wanted budesonide.
Testifying to the Senate Health Committee in May 2024, Bartlett, a 33-year physician and past advisor to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, said more than 90 percent of covid deaths could have been prevented with budesonide—an opinion that he said was shared by Dr. Ben Carson, a member of the White House coronavirus taskforce. Budesonide was part of government covid protocols in India and Australia.
After speaking with Angie, Crystal called the hospital to speak with Angie’s nurse.
According to Crystal’s House testimony, the nurse claimed that the hospital didn’t have access to budesonide. However, Crystal said, she had spoken to the hospital’s pharmacy two days earlier and confirmed that “they had plenty of it in stock in two different forms. Angie and I continued to plead with staff for that breathing treatment [budesonide] and the nurse then stated that the medication could not be given to a BIPAP [a noninvasive device that assists breathing] patient. I later came to find out this was absolutely untrue. A team of doctors came in and bullied Angie and her daughter, continuing to insist that their antiviral protocol [remdesivir] and ventilation was the only option for Angie. Angie consented to the antiviral drug under duress, but she continued to refuse to consent to the ventilator.”
Angie’s daughter told Crystal that Angie was then “denied hydration and nutrition because of her refusal to be vented,” Angie said. “The staff claimed they were justified in the denial because it was ‘not safe’ for her to receive nutrition unless she was ventilated. … Ultimately, Angie’s children had to painfully watch their mom succumb to effects of dehydration rather than from the illness itself. Why is it okay to starve a patient to death to ‘protect’ them from the possibility of aspiration? Why did my sister not have a right to decide what risks she was willing to take with her nutritional intake? Angie was punished, to the point of death because she refused the interventions that the hospital approved of.”
Crystal said that after Dave passed, a nurse at Wooster explained that he had “holes in his lungs.” The holes, she said, could have been caused by covid pneumonia—or by the ventilator.
“I asked her what her opinion was and she said she definitely thought it was from the vent, not from the supposed pneumonia,” Crystal said.
Bullying the patient
That opinion reinforced the family’s opposition when the hospital wanted to put Angie on a ventilator. When Angie called her sister in desperation asking for budesonide, Crystal had already familiarized herself with the corticosteroid before Angie and Dave got sick.
“I had looked up some information, did some research and just wanted to educate myself to be prepared in case covid came back in 2021 and would hit me or my family,” she said. “Unbeknownst to me, it sure did. So I knew that budesonide was very good in helping people who were unable to breathe. A couple podcasters who I listened to at the time had mentioned Dr. Bartlett and his promoting of budesonide. I had read studies about how it was such a benign drug that they used it on preemie babies. So I was very confident suggesting this to the nurse for my sister. I told her, ‘whatever you’re doing, it’s not working. I already had a brother-in-law who died. So you need to get her some budesonide.’ To make a very long story short, Angie ended up dying too. It was also due to dehydration and starvation.”
Around the same time Angie and Dave passed away at Wooster Community Hospital, Angie and Crystal’s brother, Brent, also was a covid patient in the hospital. He was treated better than Angie and Dave were, Crystal suspects, because he had been vaccinated for covid.
“[Brent] was fed and he was not dehydrated,” Crystal said. “He was treated fine. What was the difference? The only thing I could come up with—and I found out later it is a thing [in hospitals]—is that he was vaccinated. Angie and Dave were not, and I felt like Angie and Dave were being punished.”
Crystal said Angie was in the hospital for three weeks and her family was not allowed to see her until the very end of her life.
“Her kids were allowed in only near the end when she was dying,” Crystal recalled. “Her lips were dry and cracked and she was begging for food and water at that time, but they would not give it to her. There was one time that [Angie’s daughter] called me screaming at the top of her lungs because this team came in and tried to bully Angie and her daughter to put Angie on the vent. I told her not to let them because they had already killed Dave on the vent. They’re trying to force her mom to die the same way.”
One nurse—Angie called her an angel—advocated for the family against the “bullies.”
“She told them that Angie didn’t want to be vented,” Crystal said. “She said that [Angie’s] husband had already died that way and that they should let Angie make up her own mind. She did end up dying, but she didn’t die on the vent.”
Hospital protocol failed
In the end, the hospital’s protocol didn’t keep Dave and Angie alive.
No person should die for want of a safe medication that doesn’t meet a hospital’s “protocol” or doesn’t comply with a pharmacist’s whim or agenda.
There is no way of knowing for sure whether the treatment prescribed by Amy’s doctor would have saved her life. There is no way of knowing for sure whether the treatment prescribed by Dave and Angie’s doctor would have saved their lives.
But they should have had the chance to try.
The members of the Ohio House of Representatives apparently understood that. That’s why HB73 passed overwhelmingly by a vote of 75-16, with bipartisan support in June 2023.
The Ohio Senate must do the same.
The Huffman boys need to defy the unconscionable medical establishment that controls them and allow the passage of this common sense, lifesaving legislation before the present legislative session ends in December.
Stephen Huffman’s Senate Health Committee on May 22, after a long delay following the bill’s overwhelming passage in the House, held a hearing on the bill and received more than 80 letters of support (my letter is here) from doctors, medical professionals and victimized families whose loved ones were denied potentially lifesaving treatments by hospitals and pharmacists.
Opponents of the bill are generally members of, and organizations that represent, the medical establishment—the same medical establishment that botched, whether nefariously and/or incompetently, the nation’s response to the covid pandemic.
Stephen Huffman was elected to a four-year term in the Ohio Senate in 2022 and was promptly assigned as chairman of the Health Committee by his cousin.
During that election cycle, according to Transparency USA, Stephen Huffman’s top campaign contributors were:
- $11,500—Friends of Ohio Hospitals;
- $10,000—Ginni D Ragan;
- $7,500—Ohio Dental Association;
- $7,500—Ohio Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist PAC;
- $7,500—Ohio Optometry PAC;
- $7,500—Affiliated Construction Trades Ohio Foundation;
- $7,500—Realtors PAC;
- $7,000—Managed Care with Heart Co.;
- $6,500—Beer & Wine PAC;
- $6,000—Ohio State Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters PCE;
- $5,000—Dominion Energy Inc. PAC – Dominion PAC;
- $4,500—Molina Healthcare Inc. PAC.
He also received $3,000 from both the Ohio Association of Health Plans PAC, the American Society of Anesthesiologists PAC and the Ohio State Medical Association PAC (Osmapac), and $2,500 from CVS Health PAC.
In the 2024 election cycle—a year in which he wasn’t on the ballot, these were the largest contributions to Stephen Huffman:
- $8,500—Affiliated Construction Trades Ohio Foundation PCE;
- $6,973—Caresource Mission PAC (Caresource Mission PAC);
- $5,000—Friends of Ohio Hospitals;
- $5,000—Ohio Optometry PAC;
- $4,000—Molina Healthcare Inc. PAC;
- $4,000—Beer & Wine PAC;
- $3,500—Ohio State Medical Association PAC (Osmapac);
- $2,500—Abbott Laboratories Employee PAC;
- $2,500—Elevance Health PAC Federal;
- $2,500—Ohio Dental Association PAC (Odpac);
- $2,500—Ohio Optometry PAC #329.
He also received $2,000 each from CVS Health PAC–Federal and Merck Mutual of Ohio and $1,500 from Eli Lilly & Company PAC.
Medical freedom is self-evident
It is so self-evident that it shouldn’t need to be stated that a person has the God-given right to make his or her own medical decisions. It is even more obvious when those decisions make the difference between life and death. Such decisions are not games to be played, points to be made and shouldn’t be subject to financial or political agendas.
After Amy’s passing I spoke with several pharmacists in Strongsville about the reason they refused to fill safe, FDA-approved prescriptions to treat patients with covid—prescriptions that were, in doctors’ judgment, the best options for their patients. Two pharmacists cited their employers’ corporate policy for their refusal to fill. One pharmacist incredibly told me that it was her decision—not her company’s policy, but her’s—to refuse to fill potentially lifesaving prescriptions. This pharmacist took it upon herself to be the almighty arbiter who stood between doctors and their dying patients.
This can no longer be tolerated.
If a person’s right to medical freedom—the right to make his or her own life and death health decisions—is taken away, so also are his or her fundamental rights to life and liberty.
In the interest of ethics, morality and basic human decency, Stephen Huffman and other members of the Senate Health Committee should vote for medical freedom and in favor of the Dave & Angie Patient and Health Provider Protection Act.
In October, the Republican Party of Cuyahoga County adopted a resolution to encourage the passage of HB73. The Middleburg Heights GOP and the Cuyahoga Valley Republicans followed by passing the same resolution.
Among other provisions, the legislation that Huffman is blockading would:
- authorize a doctor to prescribe an off-label drug and generally require a pharmacist to dispense—and a hospital or inpatient facility to allow—the dispensing of the drug;
- authorize, under certain circumstances, an off-label drug to be brought into a hospital or inpatient facility for administration to a patient;
- generally prohibit the denial of nutrition or fluids to a patient;
- generally prohibit a licensing board from pursuing an administrative or disciplinary action against a prescriber who prescribes the off-label drug, a pharmacist who dispenses it or a hospital or inpatient facility that allows it to be dispensed.
Please contact Huffman and the following members of the Ohio Senate Health Committee—as well as your state representative and senator—and tell them to stop holding up Ohioans’ right to take the treatment of their choice when they are critically ill:
Call to action: Here’s how you can help get HB73 passed into law: https://www.ohioamf.org/legislative-action
You can learn more about people across the country who were killed by hospital covid protocols at the Former Feds Group Freedom Foundation.
Here is the full May 22, 2024 hearing of the Ohio Senate Health Committee:
https://ohiochannel.org/video/ohio-senate-health-committee-5-22-2024
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