Michael Flynn’s Anti-Vax Pals Want to Take Over This Florida Hospital

The sister of Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and a band of conservative anti-vax activists are running for the board of a renowned public hospital in Florida under the banner of “medical freedom.”

If they win, they’ll hold a majority over Sarasota’s award-winning facility where one of their allies—elected in 2022 with two other “health freedom candidates” to the nine-member panel—is already trying to peddle vaccine misinformation.

The rogues’ gallery includes Mary Flynn O’Neill, who directs her brother’s nonprofit and routinely appears on right-wing shows with QAnon conspiracy theorists; Tanya Parus, the president of Moms For America’s Sarasota chapter and co-owner of a “freedom-based” health clinic, and Tamzin Rosenwasser, a dermatologist who once railed against the Federation of State Medical Boards’s warning to doctors who spread COVID vaccine misinformation, comparing the organization to Stalin’s secret police.

A fourth contender, Dr. Stephen Guffanti, has a longstanding grievance against the hospital, Sarasota Memorial Hospital (SMH), related to his 2021 stay there for COVID. He filed a police report alleging false imprisonment, battery and theft and has dogged the facility’s officials ever since. In speeches, Guffanti has called the COVID vaccine a “bioweapon” unleashed by the FDA and big pharma.

O’Neill is the executive director of Michael Flynn’s nonprofit America’s Future Inc., which has paid her and other members of the Flynn family hundreds of thousands of dollars. She has billed herself as an anti-child sex trafficking expert, teaming up with QAnon promoter Liz Crokin and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Smith.

And Parus is known for her work with conservative group Moms for America—a Trump-loving network similar to Moms for Liberty, aimed at counteracting “radical feminists” and attacking public schools—and co-founding the anti-vaccine “We the People Health and Wellness Center.” Last October, the center put out a call to action to push the Sarasota County Commission to pass a “medical freedom” resolution providing a “protection against quarantine” and prohibiting “medical and/or vaccine passports.” A Herald-Tribune columnist stressed the proposal passed “with minimal discussion and almost no public awareness.”

Parus’s clinic partner is Vic Mellor, the businessman and former Marine behind the Hollow 2A, a 10-acre conservative stomping ground in Venice that Flynn has financially supported and used as a base to hobnob with the far-right Proud Boys and other extremists.

Now local watchdogs are sounding the alarm that the “freedom” crew could put the prized hospital on a path to privatization and the promotion of bunk science.

“If they are elected,” one retired doctor warned in a letter to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, “what is considered a very good hospital will be guided by a bunch of conspiracy theorists who do not believe that COVID-19 was dangerous.”

Last week, the Herald-Tribune revealed board member Victor Rohe wanted to add a warning about COVID vaccines to the hospital’s website—inspired by Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s January comments (widely slammed by medical experts) arguing they’re unsafe and could harm human DNA.

The resolution states that if anyone makes inquiries on the vaccine, SMH employees must refer them to the site, which would note in part, “there may be potential risks involved that outweigh any potential benefits of those injections. We encourage you to consider these issues before receiving any more COVID-19 mRNA injections.”

During a January board meeting, Rohe said community members sent him the proposed website resolution. He has not disclosed who the residents are and didn’t return messages left by The Daily Beast.

Rohe’s proposal drew the ire of residents fighting extremism on Sarasota’s school board. They appeared at the hospital panel’s March 26 meeting to decry what they called Michael Flynn and his flock’s attempts to infiltrate local government.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/medicalfreedomsrq.com

At the podium, Carol Lerner argued, “Putting this on the SMH agenda legitimizes quack misinformation based on conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. And who are these ‘community members’ who drafted this resolution? It’s Flynn and the people around him.”

Flynn and his sister Mary didn’t return messages seeking comment.

Lisa Schurr, a co-founder of the nonprofit Save Our Schools, thanked the nurses and doctors who cared for her last year in her emergency room. “I will do anything I can to make sure that this hospital survives,” she said.

Schurr told The Daily Beast that the hospital saved her life when her appendix burst.

To Schurr, the hospital election is a redux of the school board race that elected Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler—known recently for a threeway sex scandal—and her sidekicks. “These people want to dismantle the hospital the same way they want to dismantle public education,” she said. “It’s two sides of the same bloody coin.”

“People slept through the whole school board debacle until it was too late and we got stuck with the candidates that we got stuck with,” Schurr said, “and we’re going to be looking at the same kind of shit if we don’t do something about this.”

Lerner, another Save Our Schools director, believes the medical freedom crusaders’ foothold on the board is part of a wider plan of taking over public institutions from the bottom up.

“When Flynn has his mantra of ‘local action has a national impact,’ that’s what he’s talking about. That’s how he’s using Sarasota.”

The board governs the Sarasota Memorial Health Care System and its flagship hospital SMH, which made Newsweek’s 2024 list of the world’s best hospitals and is Florida’s fifth best hospital in U.S. News, which also ranks it a high-performing facility for gastroenterology and other specialties.

Advocates for the publicly-owned hospital point out that as a nonprofit, it reinvests in the area with new facilities and services rather than filling private shareholders’ pockets.

But over the past couple years, right-leaning activists including Parus have painted SMH as a money-hungry enterprise profiting off COVID and covering up a spate of pandemic deaths in a “sinister scheme.” The hospital’s doctors denied these claims. After Rohe and two colleagues secured their seats in 2022, the low-profile local proceedings devolved into politicized clashes over the pandemic.

Agitators bashed the hospital for following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and using antiviral drug remdesivir while failing to treat patients with controversial drugs like ivermectin, an anti-parasitic, and hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial touted as a COVID cure by former President Trump. (The FDA says neither drug is safe or effective in treating or preventing COVID-19).

Others shared their grief, claiming relatives died because of the hospital’s COVID treatments or refusal to prescribe ivermectin, and that families were kept away from dying loved ones.

Under pressure from the detractors, the hospital agreed to conduct an internal study on its COVID protocols. After it unveiled its review last February, which showed the facility outperformed others nationwide in preventing deaths, the right-wing contingent demanded it commission a new third-party investigation.

Michael Flynn—who once expressed paranoia that the COVID-19 vaccine was in his salad dressing—attended the board meeting that month and tweeted that SMH “took what could have been a rebuilding of trust and further damaged this institution with a ‘fox inside the henhouse investigation.’”

“Their little report is not the end of the investigation,” Flynn added. “More to follow.”

Flynn also suggested the nearly century-old hospital should be privatized.

Rage against the hospital continued in the following weeks, with people leaving voicemails and sending hate mail to doctors and other staff, some of it laden with antisemitic slurs and death threats and prompting a Sarasota police investigation.

“Good morning, are you a patient advocate?” one voicemail highlighted by Mother Jones said. “They hung people at the Nuremberg trials when they were found guilty. They used piano wire. So do you want piano wire or hemp or nylon rope?”

Last year, hospital board member Tramm Hudson cautioned that the attacks were part of a “coordinated” campaign by outside activists using COVID misinformation to “strengthen their political standing in Florida.” And hospital spokeswoman Kim Savage told the Bradenton Herald that some provocateurs were affiliated with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, as well as Flynn and the Zelenko Freedom Foundation, a group launched by the late hydroxychloroquine-pushing doctor Vladimir Zelenko.

Dr. Kirk Voelker, a pulmonologist and medical director of Sarasota Memorial Health Care System’s Clinical Research Center, said hospital critics deserve to be heard.

“What happened during COVID was horrendous,” Voelker told The Daily Beast. “Because of our guidelines passed down from CDC and major academic institutions, we did have things like family members dying without anyone present. It was heartbreaking. It was traumatizing, and that should be acknowledged.”

But the medical freedom crowd’s objections, Voelker said, should lie with the CDC and Florida health department rather than the hospital, which was following official directives.

Voelker added the hospital did permit usage of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine until federal guidelines showed that they presented more risk than benefit. “I was probably one of the few physicians who actually prescribed ivermectin because the preliminary data behind it demonstrated the possibility of benefit,” he said.

While Voelker did research trials on ivermectin and other medications, he said the data showed that “it just did not do what we thought it had promised to do.”

The women on the “medical freedom” slate didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Giuffanti, however, had much to say about his feud with the hospital, one that galvanized others like Rohe to join his cause. (Rohe told the Washington Post Guffanti’s situation inspired him to self-treat COVID at home: “If I went to the hospital, I believed I would die.”)

“I am running because I want doctors to practice medicine the way it should be practiced,” Guffanti said in an email.

Reached by The Daily Beast, Rosenwasser declined to share why she was running and what issues she found important with the board.

“I can comment to the public without going through a leftist, Marxist organization,” she said. “If it’s the Daily Beast, it sounds like it is a leftist, Marxist organization.”

The freedom candidates shared toned-down campaign press releases with the Herald-Tribune, with Mary Flynn O’Neill declaring: “I am committed to ensuring our community hospital, Sarasota Memorial Hospital, remains publicly supported while respecting health freedoms of our county’s citizens.”

“I want to ensure the public can trust our community hospital to continue doing so into the future without undue outside influence,” she added.

Rosenwasser announced she opposes “medical corporatists” and that she’s a “vehement proponent of public hospitals answerable to the voters.” The doctor—who’s written editorials decrying Medicare and Medicaid, Obamacare, and Critical Race Theory—is also a past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

While its name has the patina of the medical establishment, AAPS is a tiny but vocal fringe group that once boasted Rand Paul as a member, has cast doubt on measles vaccines, and sued in an attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

“I was orphaned at age 15, and I have worked very hard all my life,” Rosenwasser fumed in one LinkedIn comment. “The US gov’t has confiscated my earnings, and bestowed them on other citizens who are strangers to me. I am forced to pay for all those on Medicaid and Medicare. After paying back all my educational loans, now Socialists in the USA want me to pay for everyone else’s education.” In another comment, she bemoaned having to “pay for everybody else’s retirement, and their parents’ medical bills.”

Rosenwasser’s views seem in direct conflict with the spirit of the Sarasota hospital, which boasts on its website, “We are proud to serve as the region’s safety net hospital, delivering the lion’s share of inpatient Medicaid and charity care.”

For her part, Tanya Parus shared a statement announcing her “main focus will be to bring full accountability and transparency” to the hospital and again impugned the facility’s internal COVID review, calling it “a whitewashed report.”

A former EMT, Parus previously told The Daily Beast that she connected families to doctors who issued kids’ mask waivers or prescribed off-label ivermectin. “I was seeing this huge, huge need,” she said. When she launched her clinic, she searched for doctors who’d been canned over their COVID beliefs. “Those are the doctors you want there,” she said. “Those are the doctors that are going to stick up for you as a patient.”

“One of the reasons why I have the clinic and I wanted to be the medical specialist here and I wanted to run for hospital board,” Parus said at a national Moms for America panel last month, “is because people are scared to death to go to the hospital. They’re afraid.”

In a December 2022 interview with QAnon conspiracy theorist Ann Vandersteel, Parus accused the media of mischaracterizing the first round of hospital board candidates.

“It’s not a political thing, we’re trying to save everybody’s lives, we’re trying to get the word out about what’s going on in the hospitals—and then they contort it into ‘it’s a political agenda,’” Parus said. “So this just goes to show you it’s all about taking back our country.

“We have to do that from all these institutions, including the medical institutions.”

Joseph DeVirgilio, a Republican incumbent who lost to a “health freedom” hopeful in 2022, told The Daily Beast the prior election wasn’t a choice between incumbents and the fringe group but among three different GOP slates. The split votes, he said, led to some health freedom members being voted into office.

Voters should pay close attention in 2024, DeVirgilio said, to avoid the same fate. In Parus’ race against Republican incumbent Sarah Lodge, whoever wins the August primary will get elected to the board, so long as there is no challenger from another party. The other contests, which feature Democrats, will be decided in November.

As a believer in vaccines and science, DeVirgilio is opposed to the medical freedom camp and says some of its candidates may not have an understanding of the board’s advisory role—especially in light of Rohe’s anti-vax resolution.

“The danger of any of that stuff is once an organization, Sarasota Memorial, begins getting a reputation for non-mainstream medicine … you’re going to begin losing some top quality professionals,” he said. “We have world-class medicine here.”

At least two Democrats are also vying for hospital board seats: George Davis, a retired family physician who specializes in palliative care, and John Lutz, who has over 40 years of hospital, insurance, and consulting experience.

Davis is facing off against O’Neill, and another Republican, Pam Beitlich, the hospital system’s executive director of Women & Children’s Services who is set to retire. “It doesn’t matter what party you belong to,” Davis said. “It’s really important that people step up because we have to protect our hospital.”

Lutz is running against Guffanti and Kevin Cooper, a Republican and Iraq War vet with years of experience working in the nonprofit sector.

“As a person who has spent my entire career in healthcare leadership … I live it every day and understand the complexity that it takes to do it,” Lutz said. “A lot of these other folks seem to have more of an agenda. I’m not sure whose purpose it serves.”

Stephen Guffanti, the anti-vaxx former emergency room doc, insists that he’s running for the hospital board because of his own harrowing experience during COVID. It’s a tale he brings up repeatedly—most recently at the March 26 hospital board meeting, when Guffanti asked every panel member to review his medical chart.

“I was attacked because I documented patient abandonment of my roommate who went on to die,” Guffanti told The Daily Beast in an email.

He denied enlisting this year’s medical freedom candidates to run for the board. He said he only recruited Victor Rohe, a Republican and former New York City police officer, to campaign under the “health freedom” platform.

“Victor picked me up and brought me to get oxygen after I left the hospital. We’re friends. And when the others decided to run I helped as best I could,” Guffanti wrote. “You asked if I recruited them. Helping a candidate and recruiting a candidate are two different things.”

“Our board needs people who understand medicine or else they miss that which would be obvious to a doctor,” he said, adding, “I would prefer not to run, but I love medicine and what it is becoming is too disturbing to stay on the sidelines.”

Guffanti has rallied for the 2024 cycle of candidates too.

During a February talk at a “medical freedom” forum in Oklahoma, he shared his hospital horror story and solicited money for the Florida race. “We don’t have the candidates we need to run for the hospital board,” Guffanti said, before announcing a sign-up sheet for pledges. “When we do get the candidates, I will contact you and ask you for your donation.”

In August 2021, Guffanti filed a police report over his stay at Sarasota Memorial Hospital though cops said there wasn’t evidence to support a case.

Guffanti says he was admitted to the hospital for a COVID infection on Aug. 1, 2021 and received a roommate the next day: a 51-year-old father of five who died after being placed on a ventilator.

In a faxed statement to police, Guffanti said he watched the man’s condition worsen and asked him on Aug. 11 if he could serve as his patient advocate. According to Guffanti, the roommate said yes, and they reviewed his labs with a nurse.

A trained doctor himself, Guffanti believed the man had a bacterial infection and pneumonia and questioned why the hospital wasn’t treating it. “On 8-12-21 at 2 am the patient was having difficulty maintaining oxygen saturation levels,” Guffanti wrote to police. “The nurse used a mask to up the levels, but didn’t contact the doctor.”

After Guffanti called an “infectious disease specialist” and tried to get the nurse to speak with him, he was removed from his room and accused of violating HIPAA.

He claims security stopped him from leaving the hospital against medical advice. “Two security guards held down my arms while 2 nurses held my legs down as I struggled,” Guffanti wrote, adding that he was held in four-point restraints.

One doctor ordered Guffanti to be held under the Baker Act, a Florida law that permits patients to be involuntarily confined during mental health emergencies. Guffanti claims this doctor put a psychosis diagnosis on his chart without ever evaluating him. Another physician released Guffanti a few hours later.

Hospital documents obtained by police showed staffers alleged Guffanti’s behavior was “aggressive, disruptive, erratic and dangerous” and that he had snapped photos of the other patient to post on social media. “At this point in the investigation,” the cop noted, “there is no evidence to support the allegations claimed by Guffanti.”

Despite this, Guffanti has requested the board conduct an independent investigation related to his case and to eight other people who died during the pandemic.

Kim Savage, the hospital’s public information officer, told The Daily Beast that in November 2022, the hospital board voted to conduct a review of the system’s COVID-19 care. As part of it, the board’s Committee for Professional Enhancement “conducted an in-depth evaluation of the medical care provided to nine patients, including Dr. Guffanti.”

“While we cannot provide information about individual patients due to privacy laws, the CPE (made up of physicians with experience and special training in peer review and professional practice evaluation), found all nine cases met the standard of care,” Savage said.

Savage said Guffanti’s claim was also reviewed by the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration, and at his request, nonprofit accreditation body the Joint Commission, and an outside expert physician hired at Sarasota Memorial’s expense who was recommended by personal injury firm Morgan & Morgan.

“None of the reviews substantiated his complaints,” Savage said.