- November 19, 2024
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Nurse practitioner Vanessa Hamalian unexpectedly found herself confronting a life-changing dilemma. It was the same one millions of other Americans faced time and again as well throughout 2021.
Earlier in the day, her employer of 71/2 years, a family physician in Greater Sarasota, informed his staff he had obtained a supply of Moderna vaccines and that every employee would be required to be vaccinated.
Hamalian drove home that evening, her mind spinning, somewhat stunned: “What?” she thought. “In modern medicine we are now accepting ‘no data’ equals ‘safe’ and ‘effective’ and ‘mandated’?”
Before she left work that day, she asked for time to research the vaccine. She was still breastfeeding her and her husband’s 7-month-old child, and she was concerned about the effects of the vaccine could have on her baby.
Hamalian spent that weekend reading as much as she could on the data and studies about the vaccines. What she found “was not much data at all.”
She made up her mind. “I was not comfortable doing something this new,” she says. “It has been accepted knowledge for a long time that mothers’ antibodies transfer to their children during breast feeding.”
The following Tuesday, Hamalian hand-delivered a letter to her employer (see below). She cited four sources — the FDA, the U.S. Surgeon General, the Moderna vaccine fact sheet and an article from PubMed, the Google for medical research. Each of them convinced Hamalian there still wasn’t sufficient evidence of the effects and efficacy of the vaccine.
That afternoon, she was fired — but she was given six weeks' notice.
What happened next, over the next 12 months was a dizzying and exhilarating — sometimes harrowing — 24/7 whirlwind, with Hamalian deep in the treacherous trenches and on the front lines of COVID-19. With her and husband’s savings, they took an all-or-nothing risk and opened her own family practice in Sarasota.
From July 2021 to mid-January 2022, Hamalian and her Latitude Clinic have treated 1,092 COVID-19 patients.
For most of them, she prescribed the much-disparaged drug, ivermectin, and to all of them the treatment protocols of the much-disparaged doctors of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance.
Her results would shame mainstream medicine: Only one of Hamalian’s patients died.
None was intubated.
None was put on a ventilator.
Only 10 were hospitalized.
The one who died was a man of advanced age with multiple end-stage comorbities.
Hamalian says, except for the one deceased patient: “all are better and have returned to their normal lives. Some of the long-haul patients we are still working with and do not know if they will recover to 100% of the pre-COVID health. Most of our long-haul patients say they have recovered completely. Most that are not fully recovered say they are 70% to 90% improved so far.”
Corey Green, 30, father of four children age 6 and under and owner of a fast-growing youth recreation business in South Florida, is lying in bed, eyes closed, body aching. He doesn’t even want to talk.
He has COVID-19. He has had it for 10 days. At one point his temperature reached 102.5; his oxygen level dropped to 93% — an alarming level for a usually healthy 30-year-old. Normal O2 is 97%-100%.
At this moment, he is calling his wife’s cellphone. It’s a struggle for him. Ashley Green is waiting for a Walgreens pharmacist to fill her husband’s prescription for ivermectin. Nurse practitioner Vanessa Hamalian in Sarasota had called it in.
Corey tells Ashley his temperature is rising and his oxygen saturation level has dropped to 96% again.
But the pharmacist resists. He tells Ashley ivermectin “is not a normal prescribed medicine. We need to verify the prescription and call (the prescribing practitioner).”
The pharmacist sends her to the end of a long line.
She waited for an hour. “I was so frustrated,” she says. “It was ridiculous. I had a prescription. Vanessa texted me that she was frustrated, too.”
The pharmacist finally complied and gave Ashley the ivermectin. By the time Ashley returned home, Corey’s temperature reached 104; his O2 was a dangerous 87.
Three days later, Corey beat COVID-19 — a result he and Ashley attribute, especially, to Vanessa Hamalian, her care and to ivermectin and the FLCCC protocols Hamalian prescribed.
For Hamalian, Corey’s case is etched in her mind. Corey was her first patient suffering from COVID-19 who came to her from her being listed on the FLCCC site and the first for whom she prescribed ivermectin.
Although she didn’t know how Corey would respond to her treatments, within three hours of his first doses of ivermectin and the FLCCC protocols on Tuesday, July 27, Corey’s temperature dropped to 99.9 from 103, and his O2 level rose to 98% from 93%.
“It was pretty shocking to see it work that dramatically,” Hamalian says.
Vanessa Hamalian’s year of treating COVID-19 patients with ivermectin — and no vaccines, and Corey and Ashley Green’s nine days of beating COVID-19 with ivermectin — and no vaccines — are microcosms of rarely told success stories in the war on COVID-19.
For two years, the national public health agencies, national medical establishment, national media and Big Tech social media have portrayed the doctors and practitioners who follow the protocols of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance as kooks and discredited and fringe physicians.
The heads of the Washington health agencies have refused to acknowledge the extraordinary success that such drugs as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and other treatments have had around the world saving lives and reducing COVID-19 outbreaks. And hospitals throughout the U.S., including Florida, have refused to allow ivermectin to be administered to patients.
Even after her husband’s remarkable recovery, Ashley Green recalled a father of one of the youths in their recreation program believes ivermectin had nothing to do with Corey’s recovery. It “was just a coincidence,” he told her.
But the details of Hamalian’s journey and the Greens’ experience with the coronavirus and ivermectin show how our governments’ mandates; the incessant push for vaccinations, constant flow of conflicting information, the partner-like relationships of Big Pharma with the Anthony Fauci and the nation’s Big Three health agencies, the no-visitation and draconian policies of the hospitals, and the national media’s often distorted and dishonest reporting all have compelled health care providers like Hamalian and consumers like the Greens to do what would not have been done pre-COVID: question, doubt and ultimately reject the medical establishment and, instead, seek other alternatives.
Hamalian is on the front edge of a spreading medical trend. Spawned by the tumult the pandemic has brought to institutional medicine and science, family medicine practitioners are reviving the old doctor-patient relationship. No insurers come between them to dictate treatments. Patients pay their doctors and medical providers directly. And as a result, the providers don’t feel compelled to see a patient every 15 minutes. They spend the time their patients need.
“Vanessa was texting me every day,” Ashley says, “which I thought was amazing.”
Likewise, the Greens are among untold Americans who are growing increasingly distrustful of and angry with authoritarian governors, President Joe Biden’s vaccine mantras and mandates, and the obfuscatory statements and conflicting information that come out of the national health agencies. These Americans don’t want Big Brother telling them what to do. Their distrust is compelling them to turn elsewhere to control their own medical destinies.
After being fired, Vanessa Hamalian, then 41, didn’t hesitate. This was the moment she dreamed about — to have her own medical practice. It was a dream she had since growing up in a tiny Mennonite community in Antwerp, New York.
She and her husband, Knight, immediately started working “fast and furious” to open her practice — dubbed Latitude Clinic, what she calls an a la carte concierge family medical practice.
They secured a speech pathologist’s former office in a 30-year-old business complex on Ringling Boulevard near the Sarasota National Guard Recruiting Office and Robards Arena.
Hamalian’s parents immediately flew down from upstate New York to help their daughter repaint and remodel the clinic in 10 days, the three of them often working until 2 and 3 a.m.
Knight Hamalian, a networking engineer, did all of the IT work — computers, phone system, email and website networking. When Hamalian would take her two kids home for bed, Knight and Hamalian’s father kept working. Hamalian and her husband designed the practice’s website, latitudeclinic.com.
If you go to the website, you’ll see the ease of making appointments and that Hamalian discloses in plain view the cost of visits — typically $85 per visit.
“My goal was to offer a different level of care without the high monthly payments,” she says.
Hamalian also is explicit on her website on the type of care she envisions for her patients: “Where individual rights meet professional advice.
“Here you are given the latitude to be the master of your own path and destiny,” the site explains. “We are here to support and guide you.”
Hamalian thought for years that’s what she would do. It stemmed from what she witnessed in her nearly 20 years as a nurse and nurse practitioner. She often saw physicians berate and scold patients who didn’t follow the physicians’ orders. Or, if, say, a patient smoked or was overweight, she frequently saw physicians “talk down” to their patients.
“I feel such passion to give primary healthcare access to all people that is free of judgment and condemnation and respects the individual’s intelligence and ability to make good choices for themselves and their families,” she says.
“My job is to treat them and show them a way that may be beneficial. It’s the patient’s right to take my advice or not. I want my patients to be respected whether they smoke or not.
“I’m here to support them, not dictate to them,” she says. “Give them flexibility, to meet them where they are. The name Latitude comes from giving them latitude in their decisions.”
To be able to give that latitude, Hamalian made the decision that her practice would not accept patient’s insurance for payment. “If I take insurance,” she says, “I only get paid if the patients follow the insurers’ protocols.”
It took four months of non-stop preparations before Hamalian finally opened for business. It was May 2021 — at the moment when COVID-19 cases were on the verge of surging from 2.2 million cases in Florida since March 2020 to 4.2 million cases by the end of 2021, a 90% increase.
Was this a crazy time to be opening a no-insurance, fee-for-service family medical practice and risking the family’s savings?
“I felt like I didn’t have a lot of options,” Hamalian says. “Either we’d make it work or go to plan B.”
Asked what plan B was, Hamalian says: “We didn’t have a plan B.”
The start to Latitude Clinic was slow in May, June and July. Hamalian saw one or two new patients a week. She supplemented her practice performing physicals required by the Florida Department of Transportation for truck drivers.
Late in July, while scrolling through social media, she saw individuals asking for doctors who prescribed ivermectin. She also came across for the first time a reference to the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, a network of leading pulmonologists and critical care physicians from around the world who, based on their first-hand experiences, created treatment protocols for covid-19, including use of the anti-parasite drug, ivermectin.
Hamalian went to the FLCCC site and submitted her name as a practitioner who would prescribe the drug. “I knew something about it,” she says, “but after I signed up, I spent the weekend studying.”
Within hours of signing up, Hamalian started receiving inquiries from individuals who were seeking ivermectin as a preventive medicine and for the treatment of COVID-19.
On Tuesday, July 27, Hamalian received a call from Ashley Green. Her husband’s O2 level was dropping, and his temperature was at 102.5.
Hamalian’s slow family practice was about to become a blinding, non-stop hurricane of COVID-19 patients. In August alone, during the summer surge, Florida saw new COVID-19 cases increase to 635,989 compared to 276,170 new cases in July.
Hamalian saw 470 covid-related patients, and another 425 patients who wanted ivermectin as a prophylaxis, a preventive to getting COVID-19. She worked from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week.
“It was overwhelming,” she says. “It was brutal. I barely took time to eat or see the kids — too much caffeine and chocolate. Once I saw how early treatment was savings lives, I made a commitment not to go to bed if there was a sick person that needed help. I am proud to say that we have kept that commitment.”
On the second day Hamalian’s name appeared among FLCCC providers, July 27, Ashley Green called Hamalian’s office for an appointment. Corey Green was running a fever of 102.5 and his O2 level was 93%.
Ashley and her 30-year-old husband knew he had COVID-19.
Their 5-year-old youth recreation business exposed them to hundreds of children every week. Throughout all of 2020 and the first half of 2021, neither of them contracted the coronavirus. But they knew it was inevitable.
Even so, they decided against vaccinations, figuring that he was healthy and in good physical shape. At the same time, Ashley was breastfeeding the youngest of their four children and didn’t want to risk vaccination side effects on her newborn.
The inevitable finally occurred. In the week prior to calling Hamalian, at one of their youth recreation locations, 40 of 100 children contracted COVID-19.
Over that weekend, Corey began feeling run down. He figured he finally contracted the virus. He wasn’t the only one. Five of his fellow instructors were feeling the start of the symptoms as well.
Corey went to be tested: positive. “He was hoping it wasn’t going to be too bad,” Ashley says. But in two days, it hit him hard.
Ashley had been following stories and information about the FLCCC and ivermectin, thanks to her mother, who had been avidly following COVID-19 news — mainstream and non-mainstream. “I knew early treatment was the main thing,” she says. “I knew my parents had a lot of friends who took ivermectin prophylactically.”
That’s part of the reason she wasn’t concerned about all of the negative news condemning the drug. Plus, she says: “If you just Google ivermectin, what they were saying is just not true. If you look and research for five minutes, you’ll find more truths than are on the news.
“It has been around for years. I read the stories about the nursing home where only two people were taking it. They survived while practically everyone else died.”
What’s more, she says: “There seem to be zero side effects, so there was no harm trying it.”
She and her husband decided after reading and hearing all the stories about people dying in hospitals and families being unable to see their loved ones, going to a hospital “was the absolute last resort.”
As his condition worsened on that Tuesday morning, “I wasn’t yet in the high worry zone. But I figured I better be cautious.” She went on Vanessa Hamalian’s Latitude Clinic website and set up an appointment.
Corey Green’s COVID-19 ordeal demonstrated the volatility of the Alpha version of the virus.
Hamalian first spoke to him and his wife via zoom at 9:30 a,m. that Tuesday, July 27. She prescribed a starter round of ivermectin, and the antibiotic, azithromycin. He wasn’t able to take the first doses until 4:30 that afternoon.
In three hours, his temperature had fallen from 102 to 99.9 and his oxygen level had risen to 98% — heading back to normal.
For Hamalian, on only the third day after she signed on as a practitioner on the FLCCC site, “It was pretty shocking to see [the protocols] work that dramatically.”
The next morning, Green had no fever, and he ate for the first time in two days. He finished his small batch of ivermectin capsules.
Three days later, with Corey’s temperature and oxygen level back to normal, Hamalian recommended he continue taking ivermectin. She sent another prescription to the pharmacy.
Ashley was unable to fill it the same day. It took an extra day. And that’s when Corey’s temperature began rising again — past 100, and his oxygen level fell to 93. This is when Ashley ran into resistance at Walgreens obtaining ivermectin.
In addition to more ivermectin, Hamalian also prescribed fluvoxamine, used to fight inflammation, and doxycycline, another antibiotic.
Once Ashley returned home with the new round of drugs, within 12 hours Corey’s fever subsided and oxygen level was rising.
Corey’s vitals were back to normal. He was still weak. Today, her husband “is fine now,” Ashley says. It took him a month to fully recover.
When Ashley looks back — especially recalling how quickly her husband declined in a matter of hours, she says the scare with COVID-19 and their experience with ivermectin “prompted us all [the Greens, their families and friends] to have ivermectin on hand.”
She is grateful to Hamalian. “She was so attentive,” Ashley says. “I have referred her to everyone.”
It didn’t take Hamalian long to become convinced of the efficacy of ivermectin and the FLCCC protocols — that “early treatment saves lives.” Nor did it take long for her to become skeptical of the vaccine mania and how the hospitals and medical establishment were treating COVID-19 patients.
She saw with her own eyes how ivermectin was helping her patients.
“I realized people were not dying that would have died because of these protocols,” she says.
One day after Corey Green’s case began, she encountered another case involving a 62-year-old woman who had been sick with COVID-19 for six days. Her husband also had it.
The woman contacted Hamalian at 7 p.m. She was distraught, not only because she was sick but because her husband had just been taken to a hospital emergency room.
Hamalian immediately prescribed ivermectin for the woman.
Two days later, the woman’s symptoms did not worsen. Her husband, meanwhile, fell to critical condition.
Three days later, the woman’s declining condition began to reverse, continuing to improve for the next 11 days. Her husband, meanwhile, was moved to the hospital’s intensive care unit.
Fourteen days after the woman started her ivermectin and the FLCCC protocols, she reported feeling “completely better.”
Asked how her husband was doing, the woman told Hamalian: He died two days before.
She had not seen him for nearly a month and did not get to see him to say goodbye.
Hamalian is well aware that much of the medical establishment — it’s probably more accurate to say “most of the medical establishment” — disavows ivermectin, and certainly it would disavow Hamalian’s use of it for her patients.
But she looks at it this way:
“Picture yourself standing on a river bank, and you see someone in the middle of the river struggling and calling for help.
“Now picture a piece of Styrofoam on the river bank nearby.
“Now we know Styrofoam is not approved by the government as an official lifesaving device. But let me ask you: Would you pick up that unapproved Styrofoam and throw it to the person in need?
“Now take it a step further. A member of the Coast Guard is standing next to you, and he says the Styrofoam is not a government approved lifesaving device.
“Are you going to let that person drown and let this Coast Guard person, who has no authority, or perceived authority, to dictate to you not to throw the Styrofoam? Or are you going to proceed?
Hamalian pauses.
“What if that person were my mom, my sister or my husband? Once you see that Styrofoam and later on see that client having Thanksgiving with his children, I can’t stop helping people.”
Footnote: Starting in 2022, Hamalian changed her practice and began accepting patients age 65 and over. So far in the first two weeks of 2022, Hamalian has treated 250 patients for COVID-19. One of the those patients was the advanced-age man with comorbidties who died.
