Dr. Stella Immanuel and “America’s Frontline Doctors”
Dr. Stella Immanuel and “America’s Frontline Doctors”
While Tenpenny’s beliefs may be absurd, another doctor somehow managed to one-up her. In July 2020, a group calling itself “America’s Frontline Doctors” staged a PR stunt of a press conference in D.C, telling reporters that the cure for coronavirus was hydroxychloroquine and urging the public not to wear masks.
Their video of the depraved event, as well as versions uploaded by sites like far-right clickbait operation Breitbart, suddenly went viral on—and were subsequently removed from—Facebook and Twitter. Cries that the doctors were being censored became a sort of cause célèbre on the right, with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson accusing social networksof censoring the event on behalf of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Dr. Anthony Fauci and suggesting criticism was rooted in racism.
So who were America’s Frontline Doctors, really? For one, their event was organized by the Tea Party Patriots, a sprawling network of conservative groups funded in part by anonymous donors. According to the Daily Beast, one of the group’s members was Dr. Stella Immanuel, a minister who believes that extraterrestrial DNA is being secretly inserted into medical treatments, vaccines are engineered to make people less religious, and, perhaps most alarmingly, that conditions including endometriosis, cysts, infertility, and impotence are caused by sex with “spirit husbands” and “spirit wives.” (Dr. Immanuel has filed a libel suit against CNN in which she disputes some of these claims.)
In Immanuel’s telling, these spirit spouses are actually Biblical “nephilim,” which are evil spirits that lust after sex with humans in their dreams. The Daily Beast wrote:
“They are responsible for serious gynecological problems,” Immanuel said. “We call them all kinds of names—endometriosis, we call them molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we call them cysts, but most of them are evil deposits from the spirit husband,” Immanuel said of the medical issues in a 2013 sermon. “They are responsible for miscarriages, impotence—men that can’t get it up.”
… “They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm,” Immanuel said in her sermon. “Then they turn into the man and they sleep with a man and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves.”
Other members of America’s Frontline Doctors included Dr. James Todaro, a bitcoin promoter whose Google Doc on hydroxycholorquine became a conservative chain letter extending to the president; Dr. Simone Gold, a reliable fixture on right-wing TV networks looking for someone to denounce lockdowns; and Dr. Daniel W. Erickson, a backer of the “herd immunity” theory that suggested letting the virus take its course so people could move on with their lives. Jenny Beth Martin, one of the principal leaders of the Tea Party Patriots organization, also spoke at the event.
Update July 29, 2021: Dr. Immanuel has filed a libel suit against CNN in which she maintains that hydroxychloroquine is effective in treating Covid-19. In the suit, she claims that CNN falsely attributed to her statements that she never made such as “alien DNA was used in medical treatments” and “demon sperm” and that CNN quoted from her personal spiritual sermons out of context.
