Before last year, the public monthly meetings of the board of Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida, were sleepy affairs, typically drawing just a handful of attendees. The hospital, a 98-year-old public healthcare system that serves more than a million patients a year, was considered a crown jewel of the community: A highly rated public safety net institution composed of two hospital buildings and several clinics, its core mission is to serve people who are uninsured or underinsured. At a typical board meeting, members would discuss the hospital’s priorities, from finding healthcare providers who practiced in specialties that the community lacked to building a new cancer center.
So it came as a surprise late last year when attendance at the board meetings began to grow: More than a hundred people showed up in December’s monthly board meeting, then 200 in January, and 300 in February. The attendees, some traveling from hours away, lambasted the hospital for adhering to the CDC’s recommended Covid protocols, accusing emergency care physicians of murdering patients. “We were getting people complaining, and they’ve never even had a family member in the hospital, and they’re talking about the horrible treatment they’ve received,” Dr. James Fiorica, the hospital’s chief medical officer, told me. “You wonder if there is a different agenda than how we treated the particular patient.”
Indeed, the campaign against Sarasota Memorial appears to be part of a coordinated effort of a varied constellation of right-wing groups and individuals. Some have deep ties to the anti-vaccine movement; others are part of the “parents’ rights” movement that has sought to stack school boards with conservative members; a few are ardent Big Lie promoters with ties to the January 6 insurrection. The result is an increasingly unhinged and threatening campaign against the very healthcare workers who saw the community through the worst of the pandemic, says a hospital spokesperson, Kim Savage. “Our board meetings are open to the public, and for the first time, we feel like we have to wand people,” she says. “We worry that the language these groups use might incite someone who is not stable.”
In years past, the Sarasota Memorial Hospital Board hasn’t been a political group—most of the members were retired executives of local businesses who wanted to give back to their community. But in 2022, recalls Savage, the burgeoning medical freedom movement—which opposed pandemic restrictions such as mask and vaccine mandates and which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also has championed—was having a moment. Four hospital board candidates ran on a so-called medical freedom platform, and three of them successfully unseated former board members. “People were not sure what ‘health freedom’ stood for, but it sounded good,” Savage says.
The Sarasota Memorial Hospital had already developed a reputation in the medical freedom community. In 2021, a woman named Michelle Tavares went on a few right wing shows to accuse Sarasota Memorial of mistreating her father, who was critically ill with Covid. Tavares, it turns out, had been protesting pandemic restrictions since 2020: She was the executive assistant of Sherri Tenpenny, a leader in the anti-vaccine movement who drew media attention for her outlandish claim that Covid vaccines make people magnetic. Tenpenny, who was named a member of the Disinformation Dozen by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, appears to have been part of an effort behind the first protest at Sarasota Memorial in August 2021.
