A GOP candidate for Wisconsin attorney general says she’ll prosecute doctors for murder if they refuse to prescribe ivermectin to dying Covid-19 patients (read story here).
Karen Mueller (photo, left), who runs a solo practice in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, also has brought lawsuits against mask mandates and sued to decertify Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election.
Clinical studies have shown ivermectin is ineffective against Covid-19, it isn’t approved for that, and the FDA and CDC have warned against its use because it could be harmful. Mueller has called those federal agencies “liars.”
Early in the pandemic, the medical profession did look at ivermectin as a possible Covid-19 treatment. Given that, doctors who prescribe it for Covid-19 might escape professional discipline and malpractice liability, even though the drug now has almost no support in the medical profession, and now exists mostly in the realm of quackery and Covid-19 conspiracy theories.
I don’t know what Mueller’s chances of getting elected are. She’s only one of several Republicans vying for their party’s AG nomination. It’s possible a Republican could win this race; the incumbent, a Democrat, was elected in 2018 by less than a 1% margin (see results here). As she just entered the race, her name doesn’t appear in polls (for example, here).
She’s clearly a fringe candidate, and this isn’t her first tilt at windmills (see blog post here), but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll get blown out in the primary, given the mentality of Republican voters (and, also, she apparently has some ties to the religious right). My guess is she will, and is only running to publicize her law practice, but we’ll see.
It’s also not clear to me that Wisconsin’s attorney general has authority to prosecute anyone (see “powers and duties” here); that’s ordinarily handled by county D.A.s. This could just be campaign rhetoric. She wouldn’t be the first candidate to play that game.
But as a thought experiment, let’s suppose this crackpot gets elected and follows through with her threats against doctors who follow competent professional guidance for treating deathly-ill Covid-19 patients.
First of all, we can rule out any doctors being convicted; that won’t happen. Even if judges allowed such cases to go to trial, she wouldn’t be able to prove the doctors broke any laws or did anything wrong, that the patients wouldn’t have died anyway, or that ivermectin could have saved them. None of those things will be true.
Second, it’s extremely unlikely any doctors who are arrested, booked, charged, and subjected to a criminal trial for not prescribing ivermectin to their Covid-19 patients won’t sue for false arrest, malicious prosecution, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, damage to professional reputation, and civil rights violations.
Each of those cases will result in seven- or eight-figure verdicts or settlements, and Wisconsin taxpayers will have to pay those judgments, because the state is liable for the tortious actions of its elected officials acting in the name of the state.
So yes, elections have consequences, right down to the taxes we pay, and if voters are stupid enough to elect someone like this to a position of authority, they will a high price when they get their tax bills.
This is America, and anybody can run for anything, on any platform. It’s up to parties whether to support them, and up to voters to separate the wheat from the chaff at the ballot box.
I guess we’ll find out whether Wisconsin’s GOP party establishment is smart enough to repudiate this candidate, and whether that state’s Republican voters are dumb enough to vote for her.