ST. PAUL, Minn. (Legal Newsline) - A couple who claimed they were forced to use “horse paste” ivermectin to treat their Covid infections have no case against Walmart and another pharmacy that refused to fill prescriptions by an out-of-state doctor, a federal appeals court ruled.
Calling the claims “frivolous on their face” and the legal argument of their right to “self-determination” baseless, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of lawsuits filed by Minnesota residents William and Karla Salier against Walmart and Hy-Vee Inc.
The Saliers obtained prescriptions for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine from Missouri physician Dr. Mollie James in October 2021 but pharmacists in both stores refused to fill them. The Saliers claimed the refusal forced them to resort to veterinary ivermectin and caused them emotional distress. The Walmart pharmacist in particular was “paternalistic and rude” and substituted the advice of their doctor with his own “political judgments,” the couple alleged.
Walmart’s refusal to fill William’s prescription “endangered his life and forced him to improvise with a version intended for horses, not humans, to save his own life,” the Saliers claimed. Both of them recovered from Covid after about two weeks.
A federal judge dismissed their case last year, finding no basis in Minnesota law for the “self-determination” claim. The Saliers relied on a 1977 Minnesota Supreme Court decision, Cornfeldt v. Tongen, which mentioned the policy importance of a patient’s “self-determination” in dicta, or language outside the formal holding. But the decision dealt with a doctor’s failure to inform a patient about important information before she consented to surgery, not a pharmacist’s refusal to fill a prescription.
The Eighth Circuit agreed the citation to Cornfeldt was inappropriate in its Aug. 7 decision.
The district court correctly refused “to recognize a `sweeping new right’ based `on a fragment of sloppy dicta in an opinion that analyzed a different issue’ -- dicta that has not been cited a single time by a Minnesota appellate court,” the Eighth Circuit ruled. “We share the district court’s confidence that the Supreme Court of Minnesota would not recognize the `right to self- determination’ asserted by the Saliers,” the court said.
The court also dismissed as “absurd hyperbole, if not outright falsehoods,” the Saliers’ claim that their prescriptions were refused for political reasons and rejected their argument the legal question at the core of the case should have been referred to the Minnesota Supreme Court to decide. The Saliers chose to sue in federal court, the Eighth Circuit said, so they can’t complain later when a federal court declines to send a question back to state court for an answer.