Doctor suing Mayo Clinic for 'silencing' him during Covid will get jury trial--in more than a year

The following is an excerpt from Becker’s Hospital Review.

Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic is set to go before a jury in July of 2025 for a lawsuit filed by a physician who alleges the health system “silenced” him, KTTC reported Feb. 15.

Michael Joyner, MD, filed a lawsuit against the health system in November 2023 alleging Mayo Clinic violated his protected speech rights by disciplining him after he made statements to the media in January 2023 regarding his research findings.

Mayo Clinic clarified that the disciplinary action against Dr. Joyner was not related to his remarks about his research. Instead, it was in response to treating coworkers unprofessionally in violation of Mayo policy and for making unprofessional comments about the National Institute of Health’s guidelines for convalescent plasma.

In an interview with CNN in January 2023, Dr. Joyner said he was “frustrated” with the National Institutes of Health’s “bureaucratic rope-a-dope,” criticizing the agency’s Covid-19 treatment guidelines for convalescent plasma and the NIH’s hesitancy to make it available to patients.

Dr. Joyner was principal investigator on a government-funded study on convalescent plasma.

The case is scheduled to go in front of a jury in July 2025.

Mayo Clinic’s CEO, Gianrico Farrguia, MD, and Carlos Mantilla, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at Mayo Clinic, are part of the lawsuit. However, the defense is trying to get them taken out of the case.

Mayo told Becker’s some of Dr. Joyner’s claims are lacking legal support under Minnesota law, and that it has filed a motion to dismiss some of the allegations.

Link to article here.