August 3, 2021

By Bill Berkowitz

I’m betting that just about right now, with the COVID-19s Delta Variant causing a surge of  hospitalizations and deaths, mostly among unvaccinated people, you might be asking yourself: Where in the world is  Dr. Stella Immanuel, the Hydroxychloroquine lady? About a year ago the Houston, Texas-based Immanuel burst onto the national scene at a Washington D.C., press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court building. Organized by Tea Party Patriots – a group that called itself America’s Frontline Doctors, touted Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the anti-malarial drug, as the answer to COVID. Immanuel, who gave a fiery speech at the event and was subsequently strongly praised by Donald Trump at his afternoon coronavirus press briefing. Now, Immanuel is back in the news with the filing of a $100 million defamation lawsuit against CNN and CNN anchor, Anderson Cooper.

According to Newsweek’s Cammy Pedroja, Immanuel’s claimed that, “in an effort to vilify, demonize and embarrass President [Donald] Trump, Cooper and CNN published a series of statements of fact about Dr. Immanuel that injured her reputation and exposed her to public hatred, contempt, ridicule, and financial injury."

At the July 2020 D.C. rally, without a shred of evidence, Immanuel “referred to doctors who declined to treat patients with hydroxychloroquine as ‘good Nazis’ and ‘fake doctors.’ “She called published research “fake science," NBC News reported at the time. Immanuel said: "You don't need masks, there is a cure...You don't need people to be locked down. All you fake doctors out there that tell me, 'Yeah. I want a double-blinded study.' I just tell you, quit sounding like a computer, double-blinded, double-blinded. I don't know whether your chips are malfunctioning, but I'm a real doctor...we have neurosurgeons, like Sanjay Gupta saying, 'Yeah, it doesn't work and it causes heart disease.' Let me ask you Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Hear me. Have you ever seen a COVID patient?"

Trump tweeted the video out and it went viral. In response, many in the media, including Anderson Cooper and CNN, debunked Immanuel's claims and exposed her history of other bizarre statements. One CNN video said Dr. Immanuel was "spreading conspiracy theories on COVID-19" and promoting an "unproven drug, hydroxychloroquine." The video of Immanuel was eventually removed from Facebook and Twitter.

On air, Cooper said: "Trump promoted a doctor who believes that women can be physically impregnated by witches in their dreams" and who "has, among other things, claimed that sex with 'tormenting spirits' is responsible for gynecological problems, miscarriages and impotence." 

Immanuel’s suit claims that Cooper and CNN were responsible for the deaths of thousands that “would have been spared if they had been treated early with HCQ."

The Wrecking Crew Called America’s Frontline Doctors

In late July, The Daily Beast reported that America’s Frontline Doctors  (AFD) “filed a motion demanding the pause of COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States.” According to The Daily Beast’s Pilar Melendez “Among other wild assertions in the predictably absurd document, … falsely claims the three vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S. do not actually curb the spread of the deadly virus. Also: that the coronavirus is not a public health emergency. This being the same pandemic that has killed over 600,000 Americans while showing signs of a nationwide resurgence in recent days with the extra-contagious Delta variant, which is almost exclusively harming unvaccinated people.”

On its website, America’s Frontline Doctors identifies itself as “a project of the Free Speech Foundation,” a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. This nonprofit apparently has no website of its own.

While certifiably on the medical fringe, last year America’s Frontline Doctors scored a meet-up with then-Vice President, Mike Pence. The group has been active in the anti-vax movement, attempting to convince conservative influencers to take up their cause. Dr. Simone Gold, who is currently facing charges for participating in the Capital riot, founded the organization. 

America’s Frontline Doctors takes positions that are a bridge too far, even for many conservatives. In a report posted by World, a respected conservative evangelical Christian magazine, Charles Horton, M.D. – World’s medical correspondent -- looked closely into America’s Frontline Doctors’ position paper on COVID 19, and “found a mix of truth and falsehood: The paper often twisted true statements to promote misleading ideas about vaccine safety.”

In an early July story titled “The Worst Charlatans of the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Gizmodo’s Tom McKay profiled some of the key perpetrators of vaccine misinformation. He left Donald Trump off the list “out of fairness to the other contenders.”

McKay’s list includes: Dr. Stella Immanuel; Robert Kennedy; Didier Raoult, “The French physician and microbiologist sprung to widespread fame after his research team posted a study in March 2020 asserting that the antiparasitic drug hydroxychloroquine, which is commonly used to treat malaria, is “significantly associated with viral load reduction/disappearance in COVID-19 patients and its effect is reinforced by” the antibiotic azithromycin”; Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, “a Cleveland-based physician with a reputation for spreading baseless claims about the novel coronavirus (which she called a “scamdemic”) and vaccines in general”; The Dorr Brothers, Aaron, Ben, Chris and Matthew who have a long history of staging far-right political stunts, had quickly assembled a network of five Facebook groups with total membership in the hundreds of thousands, which became key launching points for the [anti-mask0 rallies”; and author Alex Berenson, Dubbed the “Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” by the Atlantic, Berenson has no scientific background but has spun himself on Twitter and Fox News as a master interpreter of epidemiological and medical research fearlessly challenging nanny-state chastising about the coronavirus.”

When you combine the social media reach of long-time anti-Vaxers such as Robert Kennedy, with the Stella Immanuel-like Covid-cranksters, and the political opportunism of Fox, Newsmax and OAN, it’s sad, but not really surprising, that there are still 100 million unvaccinated Americans in the crosshairs of the virulent Covid Delta variant.

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