Arkansas jail caught experimenting on prisoners with conspiracy theorists' favorite new COVID drug: report

A jail doctor has been caught using cow and horse pills to treat COVID-19 on incarcerated people, the Daily Beast reported Wednesday.

Concern was piqued when a Facebook conversation about conspiracy theorists' new favorite drug ivermectin was being discussed in a group. At one point, a doctor purporting to work for an Arkansas jail commented that he's been using the drug on those incarcerated at the Washington County jail in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Arkansas Times reporter Autumn Tolbert would subsequently publish a report that Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder confirmed that the jail was using the animal drug.

She spoke with Eva Madison, the justice of the peace for District 9, who explained that she too had been informed that Karas Correctional Health was using the drug on inmates.

Madison explained that the federal Food and Drug Administration has put out a warning against using ivermectin to treat COVID-19.

"I think we need to reevaluate who we are using to provide medical care if they are disregarding FDA guidelines and giving de-wormer to detainees at our county jail," Madison said. "It's very disturbing to me that that's the level of care we're providing."

As the FDA explained in March, the doses generally created for horses and cows are concentrated and much higher than what humans can handle. Thus, doses can be "highly toxic in humans."

As more people are spreading false information about the drug on Facebook, poison control agencies have seen an increase in calls, USA Today reported this week.

As the Daily Beast explained, Dr. Robert Karas, the man who has been experimenting on inmates with the drug, drew attention to himself when a county employee was sent to the jail to get a COVID test. The person was negative but Dr. Karas allegedly gave the person ivermectin anyway, with a dosage of 10 tablets per day for five days. The person contacted their doctor about the prescription and their primary care physician said "throw it in the trash."

"Madison said she is concerned that the more than 600 inmates rotating in and out of the Washington County Detention Center don't have the same ability to get a second opinion or question the treatment they're given," said the report.

"Our inmates do not have that choice," she explained.

The Prison Policy Initiative revealed in a 2018 study that approximately 80 percent of the people in jails haven't been convicted of a crime and are they're being held before their trials.

There are approximately 2.2 million people in American prisons, the most of any country in the world. And by the summer of 2020, the COVID outbreak was centralizing in those facilities. As John Oliver explained in an expose, those buildings weren't constructed to handle an outbreak of an infectious disease.

Madison said she brought the issue up to Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder on Tuesday, who she said she'd always had a good relationship. She expected Helder to handle the situation or at least express concern. But instead, she said, he defended Karas.

"I was shocked," Madison told The Daily Beast.

While many guilty inmates forfeit their rights, those who haven't been convicted fall under a different category. So, a doctor using them to experiment on could run afoul of the judicial system.

Holly Dickson at the ACLU of Arkansas noted that the use of experimental drugs "illustrates the larger systemic problem of mistreatment of detainees and over-incarceration in Arkansas that has persisted — even in the midst of a pandemic."

Dr. Charles Hall told the Arkansas Times that he sits on the Institutional Review Board and that any doctor can prescribe any medicine off-label for non-research purposes. And if his agency or the jail get(s) no federal funds, he probably doesn't need to have the 'research' approval by IRB. Essentially, private prisons can do whatever they want to inmates medically and the U.S. taxpayer is funding it. Most jails, however, are overseen by government entities.

Sheriff Helder dodged responsibility, saying that he doesn't know anything about drugs or medicine, so he's not qualified to make decisions about what jail doctors are or aren't doing.

"Whatever a doctor prescribes, that's out of my bailiwick," Helder told The Arkansas Times. "But I will stake their record against any medical provider in any correctional facility in the United States. Doctors prescribe. They've been to medical school. I haven't."