A retired Albert Lea, Minnesota marine is ready to take Walmart to court after he was refused a prescription for ivermectin to treat his illness of COVID-19.
BIll Salier is a Marine Corps veteran who had served in Somalia and also is a former candidate for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota as well. He shared his story on the “Steve Deace Show” detailing how one local Walmart pharmacist would not fill a doctor’s prescription for ivermectin for both him and his wife, who were both afflicted with COVID-19.
Salier, 53, told BlazeTV host Steve Deace that he started feeling sick on October 1st, and after taking the COVID test it was revealed that he did indeed have it. After his diagnosis, Salier told the host that he had attempted to receive monoclonal antibody treatments by applying to the Minnesota Resource Allocation Platform, but no one answered his question one way or the other.
“We never so much as heard a word back, not even in acknowledgement that the requests had been put in,” Salier said.
Once that didn’t work out, Salier attempted to get a doctor’s prescription for ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug but not one that had been approved for use against COVID-19. The Biden Administration, state health departments, and even the manufacturer of the drug, Merck, have all warned that this drug is not to be used for the treatment of COVID-19.
The FDA continues to warn against the use of ivermectin to treat or prevent the onset of COVID-19. Their latest statement said the following: “Currently available data do not show that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.”
“Clinical trials assessing ivermectin tablets for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in people are ongoing,” the agency said.
Nevertheless, there are a number of groups such as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors that continue to tout the benefits of the drug, claiming that this Nobel-prize winning option would be great for treating the coronavirus. However, there are plenty of scientists that disagree, highlighting flaws in the studies cited in support of ivermectin as a COVID treatment and urging people that more research is needed before they could prescribe the drug for COVID-19 patients.
In response to this characterization, many pharmacies and hospitals in the U.S. have generally followed the government’s recommendations and they have proceeded to deny ivermectin to COVID-19 patients. Salier says that’s what has indeed happened to him and his wife.
“The prescription was sent in to our local Walmart, here in Albert Lea, Minnesota, and it was refused to be filled by the pharmacist. This pharmacist contacted my wife, telling her that he would not fill it. My wife stated that he did not have the right to stand between our physician’s prescription and the patent, he asserted that he did have that right and he refused to do so,” Salier said.
Salier has furiously said that he and his wife had been left in “limbo” after their pharmacy continued to deny them access to the ivermectin, even after they had a phone chat with their physician to discuss the matter.
“We were faced with either continuing to suffer and quite possibly ending up in the hospital,” he told Deace, explaining that they were so desperate for the drug that they tried to get a horse-paste version of the drug that is easy to overdose on.
“I was forced with this decision and I was either going to lay there, suffer, and be at life’s peril of losing my time with my family, or I was going to eat that horse paste. And down the hatch it went,” Salier said.
Salier was very fortunate though. He didn’t overdose on the horse-paste version, and he reported to Deace it was only “within eight hours” that he began to feel relief from his coronavirus symptoms.
Now, Salier is ready for a reckoning with Walmart and the pharmacy that denied him access to this ivermectin.
“If you ever wanted to find out what it is to punch a Marine in the face and what type of response you’re gonna get, well, America, you’re about to see the type of response that you get. Because if you take on me and my family, and you stand between our physician and the health care that they have prescribed to me as a life-saving thing — in my opinion that is what it did — then you have got a fight on your hands and I am coming for that fight.”
This is one of the main reasons why Salier is partnering with We the Patriots USA, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to defending civil liberties, in an effort to raise money to file a federal lawsuit against Walmart and the pharmacist.
Brian Festa is an attorney with We the Patriots USA and he told Deace that he thinks it is “abhorrent” for the Walmart pharmacist to “play God” with the lives of the Salier family.
Festa even observed that the FDA itself will often acknowledge that there are circumstances where health care providers might prescribe certain drugs for unapproved use “if they judge that it is medically appropriate for their patient.”
“You may be asking yourself why your healthcare provider would want to prescribe a drug to treat a disease or medical condition that the drug is not approved for. One reason is that there might not be an approved drug to treat your disease or medical condition. Another is that you may have tried all approved treatments without seeing any benefits. In situations like these, you and your healthcare provider may talk about using an approved drug for an unapproved use to treat your disease or medical condition,” the FDA stated in a FAQ on its website.
“So, this is talking about off-label usage. This has been done for years,” Festa said. “We’re talking about a drug, ivermectin, that was part of a treatment protocol that won the Nobel Prize in 2015 as an anti-parasitic for malaria. This is FDA-approved, it’s been used for decades as an anti-parasitic, and now you’re suddenly telling us in 2021 that it’s unsafe because it’s being used for off-label usage? Which again, is so common in the practice of medicine.”
Festa added that the pharmacist “had absolutely no right to tell Bill and his wife that he was not going to fill this prescription” and he believes that Walmart should be held accountable for the pharmacy’s decision.
So far, Festa has noted that the Patriots USA has committed to $25,000 for use in Salier’s legal fund and once the group is able to raise $50,000 to cover legal fees, they are going to file the lawsuit on their behalf.