In August 2021, Jeremy Parker had a telehealth appointment through the anti-vaccine group America’s Frontline Doctors. Parker wanted hydroxychloroquine, a drug that he falsely believed could prevent or treat Covid-19, though he didn’t have any symptoms at the time. According to a lawsuit filed by Parker’s family, he spoke with Dr. Medina Culver, who wrote him a prescription. In early February 2022, Parker began having cold-like symptoms and took the drug, and the next morning, he was found dead. The cause, according to his death certificate, was “sudden death in the setting of therapeutic use of hydroxychloroquine.”
Parker’s wife, Jelena Hatfield, and their three children sued AFLDS and Culvera year after his death, claiming that it “was caused by the negligence of Dr. Culver and by falsehoods spread by America’s Frontline Doctors.” The wrongful death lawsuit claims that Culver never performed a physical examination of Parker, then 52 years old, nor did she run any diagnostic tests to ensure that drug would be safe to prescribe.
AFLDS records, provided to The Intercept by an anonymous hacker in September 2021, corroborate parts of Hatfield’s account. Culver is included in the list of 225 AFLDS physicians who prescribed disproven Covid-19 drugs, and consultation notes from Parker’s telehealth appointment confirm that no physical examination took place. While the hacked data — hundreds of thousands of medical and prescription records from AFLDS’s telehealth partners — includes lists of physicians and patients, it doesn’t link physicians to specific patients.
“It’s disappointing that people like America’s Frontline Doctors were able to get away with this for so long,” Hatfield told The Intercept. “How many other people are there out there that have gone through this? That have lost their husband, or their wife, or daughter, or mother? They really pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.”
In a court filing responding to Hatfield’s lawsuit, AFLDS described itself as “a civil liberties organization with a purpose of providing Americans with independent information regarding health care from the top experts in medicine and law” and stated that it “is not a medical organization that consults with patients, provides diagnosis, or prescribes treatment.” In short, AFLDS denied that it prescribed hydroxychloroquine to Parker, claiming that it only provided him with medical information and opinions, despite the evidence to the contrary.
Culver and AFLDS did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. In June, a judge denied both of their efforts to get the lawsuit thrown out. Culver then filed an emergency petition asking Nevada’s Supreme Court to challenge the denial, but a judge denied that petition as well on August 4.
Dr. Jonathan Howard, an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU Langone Health and the chief of neurology at Bellevue Hospital, told The Intercept that the biggest issue is that a doctor prescribed hydroxychloroquine to Parker for Covid-19 at all, since the medication had been shown to be ineffective at treating the virus. Howard also pointed out the the consultation notes don’t mention any discussion about the risks and benefits. “Any small risk posed by the medication outweighed the benefits,” Howard wrote, “which were zero.”
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