Maine’s medical licensing board has extended the suspension of a doctor who has been critical of COVID-19 vaccines.
The Maine Board of License in Medicine (BOLIM) on Dec. 13 voted to extend the suspension of Dr. Meryl Nass until April 30, 2025.
Dr. Nass “exhibited incompetency” through various actions, including failing to obtain complete medical histories of patients she saw remotely and lying about the diagnosis of one patient in order to make sure they received hydroxychloroquine, the letter said.
Dr. Nass was fined $10,000.
Dr. Nass’s suspension can be lifted before 39 months pass if she complies with directives from the board, including completing ethics courses and undergoing a competency evaluation by an evaluator approved by the board.
Dr. Nass said she does not plan to comply with the terms.
“The terms the board gave me to get my license back would require me to not tell patients factual information and my educated opinions. This would require me to violate my oath to be concerned only with the welfare of the patient I am caring for,” Dr. Nass told The Epoch Times in an email.
Some complaints concerned Dr. Nass’s telemedicine care of several patients who sought her out for prescriptions of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which have frequently been prescribed by doctors for COVID-19. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has approved the drugs for other uses, and some other officials have said the drugs should not be used to treat the illness.
Dr. Nass first became licensed in Maine in 1997. BOLIM issued an emergency suspension of Dr. Nass’s license on Jan. 12, 2022. The suspension was later extended until a final decision from the board was handed down.
Hearings in the case took part across multiple days.
The three patients Dr. Nass saw all testified that they were satisfied with the care they received. Several doctors spoke in support of Dr. Nass while several others offered criticism of her actions.
Dr. Nass “repeatedly failed to comply with applicable medical standards and repeatedly violated her duties to her patients,” board staff said in written closing arguments in the case.
Dr. Nass said in her closing arguments that the case was “about censorship,” noting that the board eventually dropped charges related to her public speech. She said BOLIM then pressed forward with “de minimis or technical alleged violations.”
In the new order in the case, the board said Dr. Nass violated state law and board rules in her practice model, which included seeing patients “doing their own research and determining what prescriptions they wanted before reaching out to the licensee.”
Dr. Nass would obtain the patients’ medication lists and cross-reference it for drug interactions and prescribe doses of the drugs the patients wanted based on their weight. The model “was not comprehensive and was unsafe for patients,” the board said, adding that the “opportunity cost” of providing the requested medicine was neglected, “which resulted in a failure to evaluate what more effective treatments might have been available.”
Sarah Bishop, one of the patients Dr. Nass saw, testified during the hearings that her midwife’s office told her there were no treatments for COVID-19, prompting her to see Dr. Nass, who prescribed hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Ms. Bishop said she woke up the next day feeling “significantly better.”
Dr. Nass also failed to obtain relevant medical histories or informed consent for telemedicine from the patients, even though the patients did express that they wanted telemedicine visits and were receiving telemedicine care, according to the order.
“The licensee acknowledged that she lied intentionally, which was unnecessary, done without consideration of the impact to others, and was likely intended to require the board to take action against her, given that the licensee widely disseminated the fact that she had provided misinformation to the pharmacist,” BOLIM said.
Dr. Nass has said that pharmacists would not dispense hydroxychloroquine if the prescription said it was for COVID-19. She said she initially wrote no diagnosis on the prescription and the pharmacist called her demanding a diagnosis.
Dr. Nass has noted that a memorandum from the state pharmacy board told pharmacists to only dispense hydroxychloroquine for acute COVID-19 cases and that she understands pharmacists later refused to fill prescriptions for any COVID-19 cases. She outlined her case before the Maine legislature because she thought that there the board went beyond its authority.
“It is disingenuous or worse for the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine to claim that I was publicly describing how I was forced to lie to a pharmacist to save a patient as an effort to involve them in going after my license,” Dr. Nass told The Epoch Times in an email.
Dr. Nass has 30 days to decide whether to appeal the board order and the extended suspension.
Oral arguments in that case are scheduled to take place on Jan. 10, 2024.
