(Ken Silva, Headline USA) In 2020, a family called Dr. James Johnston to seek help for a grandmother dying from COVID-19.
The hospital where the grandmother was staying had refused to administer her ivermectin, leaving the family to turn to Johnston as one of the rare doctors—especially at that time—willing to prescribe alternative COVID treatments.
Johnston issued the prescription, and the family gave it to the grandmother without the knowledge of the hospital’s staff. Within days, she was discharged with a clean bill of health.
But when the grandmother’s primary care doctor found out that her family had secretly given her ivermectin, he was furious and filed a complaint against Johnston with the North Carolina Medical Board.
Luckily for Johnston, he said the family testified on his behalf about how the treatment helped save the grandmother’s life. With some added help from the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which provided him troves of studies about ivermectin’s effectiveness, he was eventually able to have the complaint against him dismissed.
Johnston then faced another complaint in 2021 for prescribing ivermectin, but defeated that one, too.
“Once again, thank you for your cooperation,” the board told him in a brief letter last October.
After two years of being put through the ringer, the political climate is finally warming to Johnston’s position, with multiple states having introduced laws requiring pharmacists to fill ivermectin prescriptions.
Johnston said he’s happy to put the complaints behind him and focus on his calling: making home visits to families who want to avoid what he calls the “militant stupidity” of the medical system.
Johnston wasn’t always such an outspoken critic of traditional healthcare. Trained at Ohio University, he told Headline USA that he adhered to CDC guidelines through the first decade-plus of his career.
However, Johnston said he always harbored skepticism, due in large part to his religious beliefs. A Christian with strong pro-life views, he said he opposed vaccines developed with aborted fetal tissue.
The final straw for Johnston was when he saw the CDC shoot down ivermectin as an alternative COVID treatment, ignoring studies about its safety and effectiveness. Johnston thinks the demonization of ivermectin stemmed from the fact that the pharmaceutical companies could only rush their COVID vaccines to market, if there were no recognized alternative treatments available.
“Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were eliminated as ‘safe and effective’ not as a result of the evidence, but as a precondition to pharmaceutical companies making hundreds of billions of dollars. And once I saw that and made those connections, I was furious,” he told Headline USA.
Now, Johnston has prescribed ivermectin to more than 3,000 patients. He said he’s only aware of one patient—an elderly person with cancer—who died from COVID after receiving his treatment.
Johnston’s practice isn’t just for COVID patients. Making home visits in the Charlotte area, he’ll perform everything from sports physicals to minor surgeries.
“I wanted to be one of those doctors who did everything,” he said.
Moreover, Johnston operates a free-market business model, accepting cash only and cutting out the insurance companies.
With the two major hospitals in Charlotte only accepting fully vaccinated patients, Johnston said his business model is becoming increasingly popular on both ends of the political spectrum—from the “granola” hippy to the conservative home-schooling Christian, he said.
“Those are the people I want to bring me on as a doctor,” he said, adding, “Charlotte’s the largest homeschooling community in the world, and most of those families don’t want to blindly follow recommendations and take all the vaccines.
“And so, they come to me.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
