A group that once earned an audience with Vice President Mike Pence despite featuring a doctor promoting the medical perils of demon sperm is now on to its next venture: spreading unfounded fears about the COVID vaccine.
America’s Frontline Doctors went viral in July with a video that showed a handful of doctors promoting hydroxychloroquine in Washington, D.C. at an event hosted by the Tea Party Patriots. Donald Trump retweeted their video, and some of the doctors met with Pence. But the group faltered after The Daily Beast reported that Dr. Stella Immanuel, the doctor at the center of their summit, also believed that some medical ailments are caused by dream-sex with demons and that alien DNA is used in some treatments.
Now America’s Frontline Doctors are back, targeting the COVID-19 vaccines. Over the weekend, the group organized a meeting with conservative influencers and a small protest in front of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
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“We will fight against any experimental therapy being forced on anyone,” Dr. Simone Gold, who has become the face of America’s Frontline Doctors, tweeted on Sunday.
The group’s attack on the COVID vaccine comes even as the Trump administration tries to take credit for its development and promote its use. And the fact that America’s Frontline Doctors was able to get airtime with Pence and an RT from Trump, its current claims could end up having additional credibility with Trump supporters.
America’s Frontline Doctors didn’t respond to a request for comment. But in a video posted to YouTube, one of the event’s attendees said the summit was aimed at giving conservative internet personalities “the true information” about the vaccines.
“They had a private summit today for influencers, because they don’t want to go through the media,” pro-Trump activist Bevelyn Beatty said in a video.
Beatty, a Staten Island resident who rose to fame on the right this summer after vandalizing a Black Lives Matter mural, said in her video that the doctors had warned the conservative personalities with various allegations about the vaccines. The claims, according to Beatty’s account, included fear-mongering that the vaccines would make women infertile and that anyone who received them would be micro-chipped by Google and tracked for the rest of their lives.
“You’re going to be chipped, and they’re going to be tracking you,” Beatty said.
Beatty also implied that the vaccines were aimed at somehow injuring Black people, claiming that the vaccines would be distributed early to hospitals to target Black and Latino medical workers.
“If you’re dead, it’s too late to say ‘No, I changed my mind, get it out of me,’” Beatty said.
More than 84 percent of Americans say they’re willing to receive one of the COVID-19 vaccines, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll published on Monday. But anti-vaccine activists have made inroads from the GOP’s fringes into the party’s mainstream, with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) inviting a vaccine skeptic to a Senate hearing and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) suggesting that people would fare better fending off COVID-19 without the vaccine.
