These doctors swear to harm, but spread vaccine misinformation

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(CNN) -

She was a frequent guest on Oprah Winfrey, an Ivy League college-trained OB-GYN who often spoke about women's health and holistic medicine.

She was a media darling, and in 2013 she was featured on Reader's Digest's annual list of America's 100 Most Trusted People.

If you go to Dr. Christiane Northrup's Facebook page, her posts giving advice on health and aging to her 558,000 followers seem to match that person from several years ago.

But Northrup also uses its Facebook page to direct its followers to Telegram, where another facet is appreciated.

On this platform of lax moderation, lies a miasma of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

"The best explanation I have seen for why covid injections are killers," says a post he shared.

"Me realizing that I do not have to take revenge on my enemies, since they have all been vaccinated," says a meme that he published at the end of August and that shows a Morticia from the Addams family with a cunning face.

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Dr. Christiane Northrup speaks at an event in New York.

"Another hero emerges," Northrup writes of a doctor who refused to treat vaccinated patients.

Northrup is one of a small group of doctors who have emerged as a great source of misinformation - either as

social media

or family doctors meeting with their patients in person - about covid-19 vaccines, which even now they have proven to be the most effective weapon against the deadliest pandemic of the last 100 years.

These doctors add fuel to the fire at a time when deaths from COVID-19 in the United States have already exceeded 724,000, and when casualties are increasingly coming from the ranks of the unvaccinated.

For the most part, they do so with impunity.

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In late July, the board of directors of the Federation of State Medical Boards issued a statement notifying doctors that promoting dangerous falsehoods about covid-19 vaccines could put their medical licenses at risk. Yet while several state medical boards told CNN that complaints about misinformation are mounting, only a handful of low-profile doctors have been formally punished to date. And high-profile doctors who spread misinformation to millions of followers have not faced such regulatory scrutiny.

"These doctors take advantage of the trust in them," says David Lazer, professor of political science and computer science at Northeastern University.

He cites a monthly survey from the Covid States Project that shows how, when it comes to professions and trust groups, doctors rank first among both Democrats and Republicans.

"They use the prestige of the term 'medical' to convey misinformation," says Lazer, who is co-leading the project.

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"The best thing that can happen to them is that they get covid"

Dr. Rashid Buttar appears often in his white coat promotional materials.

The biography for his 2010 book, "The 9 Steps to Keep the Doctor Away," which made the

USA Today

list, is a three-page compendium of credentials: double major in Biology and Theology from the prestigious University of Washington in San Luis;

Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine from the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences, Iowa College of Medicine and Surgery;

visiting scientist and nutritional scientist at North Carolina State University.

His website adds another: "MOST CENSORED Doctor."

Buttar has shared all kinds of outrageous claims and misleading statements about the pandemic: Most of the people who got vaccinated will be dead by 2025. It's all part of a "depopulation plan."

Covid-19, he wrote on Twitter - where he has 88,000 followers - was a "planned operation."

In a recent interview with CNN's Drew Griffin, Buttar stuck to all of those sayings.

"I have told people that the best thing that can happen to them is that they catch COVID," he said.

"Is getting COVID-19 the best thing that can happen?" Asked Griffin.

"Of course," Buttar replied.

"You are going to create your own innate immune system and then you don't have to worry anymore."

He later said falsely: "More people are dying from the covid vaccine than from the covid."

Northrup and Buttar are casting doubt on vaccines at a time when roughly a third of eligible Americans - a large portion of whom are Republican Trump supporters - are not yet fully vaccinated.

CNN recently interviewed Dr. Rashid Buttar.

Other high-profile physicians in this group include Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopath who has grown his supplement business into a flourishing company and was warned by the FDA for selling bogus cures for COVID-19;

Dr. Simone Gold, a former ER doctor who has referred to vaccines as an "experimental biological agent whose harm is well documented" and who faces charges for entering the Capitol during the January 6 riot (it has been declared innocent);

and Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, a longtime vaccine activist who testified to Ohio state legislators this summer that vaccines cause magnetism, which means metal objects like keys and silverware stick to people's foreheads.

CNN has reached out to all of them.

Only Buttar agreed to comment. But Mercola has told

that he believes he is being targeted for political reasons. Tenpenny was adamant in his testimony in an interview with

adding: "People should be able to choose what to inject into their body, because once it has been injected, it cannot be disinjected." Northrup said in a Facebook video that he is "doing God's work on the earth plane at this particular time, facing evil. What do we gain from it? Our souls. That is what interests us."

In addition to Mercola and Tenpenny, Northrup and Buttar were named in a list of the 12 most influential disseminators of disinformation about covid-19 vaccines published this spring by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an NGO that monitors disinformation. .

The report, dubbed "The 12 for Misinformation," prompted President Joe Biden to reprimand social media influencers for spreading data that is "killing people."

Buttar, who has downplayed its inclusion in the "12 for misinformation," suggests the vaccine is part of an elite plot to commit mass genocide.

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He compares Dr. Anthony Fauci - presidential adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases - with Adolf Hitler, and claims that the number of deaths caused by Fauci will exceed those of the Holocaust.

"Dr. Fauci is not an innocent bystander," Buttar told CNN in an interview filled with vague hints that the pandemic was somehow planned or allowed by shadow elites.

"He is very aware of what he is doing."

To date, there have only been three confirmed cases of deaths caused by the covid-19 vaccine - all three died of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, said Martha Sharan, spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Additionally, some 8,600 deaths have been reported to the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, often referred to as VAERS. None of those deaths have been confirmed (outside of three), and all must be fully reviewed and verified, Sharan said. Even if they were all confirmed to be related to the vaccine, it would be a total of 390 million doses administered. This represents 0.0021%, that is, about two deaths per 100,000 doses.

(Covid-19 mortality in the United States currently stands at about 220 deaths per 100,000 people, according to a trace by Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.)

Buttar, 55, has long been popular with anti-vaccine and parents of children with autism.

He has brought patients from most of the US states and from more than 40 countries (he speaks of 94 countries).

In one particularly high-profile case in 2009, then-celebrity couple Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, two well-known vaccine skeptics, recommended a woman who said she had fallen ill from a flu shot that she see Buttar. for their unorthodox treatments, according to the 2013 book "Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine" by vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit.

Buttar believes that environmental toxins, such as mercury and lead, are the cause of many chronic ills, from autism to heart disease to cancer.

He has treated patients - hundreds of them children with autism - with a proprietary cream that he claims removes poisonous metals from the body, according to Offit's book.

Buttar has been reprimanded twice by the North Carolina Medical Board, in 2010 and 2019.

The board's first reprimand was for treating several cancer patients with substances such as hydrogen peroxide, ozone, or glutathione, and for treating a child with autism using a skin application as part of a metal removal procedure. known as chelation therapy. One researcher has referred to these kinds of autism apps as a "modern scam." The North Carolina board then said, "Dr. Buttar's treatment modalities have not been shown to be effective in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies."

The second admonition concerned an accusation by another doctor that Buttar's treatment of a patient increased his "pain and suffering."

In that case the board concluded that Buttar's documentation for treating the patient did not conform to industry standards.

"It is dedicated to the industry of false hope, capitalizing on the fear that we all have that our environment is a toxic hell," Offit told CNN.

"It is the lowest level of charlatan, who takes advantage of parents who are desperate."

Buttar scoffed at this claim.

"It is an absurd claim," he told CNN.

"People go where they are going to get results."

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Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of CCDH, said that while he was glad that some social media accounts of the "12 of disinformation" were banned, too many of them - like Buttar - are still allowed to spread pseudoscience and conspiracy content. on conventional platforms like Twitter.

"What needs to be done is to reduce the rate of transmission of disinformation," Ahmed told CNN.

"The way you do that is by stopping giving them the biggest megaphone in the world in the history of communications, social media, where they can broadcast to millions of people at zero cost."

CCDH said these twelve were responsible for 65% of all anti-vaccine content on Facebook or Twitter.

Facebook, for its part, said these dozen people were responsible for only a small fraction of the vaccine-related content.

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In any case, the companies of the large social networks such as Facebook Twitter and Instagram made efforts to combat misinformation about covid-19.

For example, Facebook said in August that it removed dozens of Facebook and Instagram pages, groups and accounts associated with the so-called twelve of disinformation.

Following the release of the CCDH report in the spring, Buttar was banned from Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

In March, just before its publication, it had more than 1.2 million followers, according to the CCDH.

Now he only has the Twitter account with about 88,000 followers.

After CNN flagged some tweets by Dr. Rashid Buttar that contained false information about the coronavirus, Twitter demanded that Buttar delete those tweets to regain access to his account, the company reported Monday.

Buttar's account is still active.

A company spokesperson said Twitter is focused on improving enforcement of its COVID-19 disinformation policy and has suspended about 2,000 accounts for violations.

The company permanently suspended three members of the disinformation dozen for spreading false information, the spokesperson said, although only one, Tenpenny, is a doctor.

Even so, false claims continue to flourish on platforms.

And when users stumble upon a misinformer's page, Twitter and Instagram algorithms keep showing others.

The resulting repetition has a way of pinning people to their positions, said Joan Donovan, research director at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

"It is not the case that you act on a single piece of information that has passed your screen at some point," said Donovan.

"There is something in the rabbit hole ... that is very persuasive."

Montana doctor says COVID-19 threat is "overkill"

While famous doctors spread false information to a mass audience on social media, other doctors spread misinformation locally in the old-fashioned way: face to face.

Across the country, complaints to state medical boards about doctors misinforming patients about COVID-19 are increasing, said Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, president of the Federation of State Medical Boards.

He told CNN that at least a dozen state medical board directors have told him they are receiving "a lot" of complaints about doctors sharing false information about the coronavirus.

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But few have led to disciplinary measures, he acknowledged.

"The system has been established as a complaints-based system," Chaudhry said.

"These state boards just don't have the resources ... to monitor what is happening on the Internet or what is happening even in a one-on-one encounter with the patient."

One such example is Dr. Annie Bukacek, a Montana figure who believes that the response to the pandemic has been an attempt orchestrated by elites to control the masses.

Bukacek, 63, is not only a practicing physician, but also sits on the Flathead City Health Council, which is the local authority on how to manage public health outbreaks like COVID-19.

Dr. Annie Bukacek in a photo on her Facebook account.

"Imagine a vaccine so safe that they have to threaten you to get it, for a disease so deadly that they have to do tests to know that you have it !!!", said a message that he published last month in Facebook.

Bukacek, a popular doctor who often calls herself "Dr. Annie," lives and works in Flathead County, a deeply conservative county of about 104,000 residents in which just over a third of residents are fully vaccinated.

The death toll in Montana recently topped 2,000, and Montana is among a handful of states where the number of cases was on the rise earlier this month.

"So you can have a vaccinated man sleep with an unvaccinated woman ... and she will become INFERTILE," read a February Bukacek Facebook post, which flagged the claim as false.

"If COVID were so dangerous, we would see people dying left and right," Bukacek said at a school board meeting later that month.

"It is widely accepted that the danger from covid-19 was overblown," he told a local audience in March.

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CNN caught up with Bukacek in late September at a "Rally for Freedom" held every Friday night by anti-vaccines in the town of Kalispell, where she runs a Christian provider called Hosanna Healthcare.

Standing with other people on a sidewalk near a park next to the courthouse and holding a banner that read "The only thing that mutates is the covid lie," Bukacek was among the dozens of people who lined up next to a public thoroughfare for chanting slogans and shouting or greeting passing motorists.

A large pickup truck was driving down the block, its Trump and United States flags flapping in the wind.

When CNN approached Bukacek and asked why he was anti-vaccine, he was angered.

"I'm not vaccinated," Bukacek said.

"It was a pleasure talking to you."

When asked if he felt any responsibility towards the more than 2,000 Montanans who have died from COVID-19, he turned to his friends and asked, "Could you take a picture of these guys from CNN?"

Several Montana doctors contacted by CNN declined to discuss Bukacek, in part because they feared backlash from his followers.

But Dr. Peter Heyboer, a primary care physician and member of the health board, said she has intentionally undermined the work of the board.

"Doctors who use their authority in their position as trusted advisor to spread disinformation ... share some of the responsibility for the level of illness and death that we are experiencing," he told CNN.

Dr. Annie Bukacek participates in the "Rally for Freedom" in Montana.

Dr Cory Short of Logan Health in Kalispell, Bukacek's hometown, said he has seen the ravages of Covid-19 firsthand.

He said that when patients arrive at his hospital, they often "have reached that point where they have a lot of difficulty breathing."

"When they arrive, they are scared."

In December, about 50 Montana residents signed a complaint against Bukacek filed with the Montana Medical Compliance Unit.

"She claims that covid-19 death certificates are tampered with, discredits PCR testing, and by the nature of her medical profession and her status on the board of health, she is guiding naive community members to promote and participate. in the propaganda against the use of masks that is putting our citizens in danger, "says the complaint obtained by CNN.

Ten months after the complaint unit received the letter, the board's website shows that no disciplinary action has been taken against the doctor, who is popular locally.

Bukacek was appointed to her public office by the Flathead County Commission.

There was a request to remove her from office, but an even greater one to keep her.

A spokesman for the Montana Department of Labor and Industry said no cause had been found in any complaint filed against the doctor.

Throughout the country, there are exceptions to the rule of impunity.

CNN contacted the medical boards of all 50 states;

half of them responded.

Only two - Rhode Island and Oregon - said they had defined disciplinary measures against doctors for their misinformation about COVID-19 or related violations.

In Rhode Island, Dr. Mark Brody, who describes himself as an "integrated medicine" physician specializing in adult and child psychiatry, sent a letter advising patients "not to accept the coronavirus vaccine." and it warned of "the possibility of sterilizing all women in the population who receive the vaccine," according to a consent order. (Studies have found no link between vaccines and fertility problems.)

Brody, whose practice incorporates homeopathy, agreed to pay $ 1,100 and pass a course in medical ethics, but in July his license was suspended for five years for violating regulations related to patient care and medical records.

Brody did not respond to CNN requests for comment by email and phone.

In Oregon, Dr. Steven LaTulippe had his license suspended in December for telling patients that face masks are not effective in reducing the spread of the coronavirus and that Covid-19 is less dangerous than the flu, according to medical board documents.

In September his license was revoked.

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The board stated that LaTulippe refused to comply with protocols for covid-19 and was negligent in other aspects of medical practice.

A LaTulippe attorney, Kristina Heuser, said in an email to CNN that her client "had an impeccable record until she dared to express a professional opinion that differs from that of

medical

" and that she is challenging the medical board's decision. in the court.

'I will not get the vaccine'

For Northrup, the threat of a lost license carries no weight: She voluntarily withdrew hers in 2015 without explanation, a representative from the Maine Medical Licensing Board told CNN in an email.

But she and other famous doctors have a brand that thrives regardless of the license.

However, credentials are a big part of that brand, and Northrup often touts his Dartmouth College degree, as well as his OB / GYN major.

For many years, those credentials were reinforced by their popular appeal.

While it is true that Northrup - who did not respond to CNN's multiple calls and emails seeking comment - was occasionally the subject of media scrutiny in the years leading up to the pandemic, she was generally a media favorite. whose

on women's health led to flattering portraits in outlets like NBC News, Today, Vogue, and, yes, CNN.

"Having recently spent (20? 50? 80?) Hours with her, I've come to believe that 'The Wisdom of Menopause' is a masterpiece," a contributor to The Atlantic commented on Northrup's book in 2011.

In 2018, Northrup participated in a women's

health and wellness

and spoke not only about the importance of keeping abortion legal, but also about how patriarchy for centuries has exploited "women's ovaries for the benefit of the patriarchal system. ".

In chatting with

Sara Avant Stover, Northrup sympathized with "our black and tan sisters" who have complained that white women have aligned themselves with "white male power structures."

Recently, in August 2020, Northrup appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show podcast, which offers archival interviews.

The episode appears to have since been removed.

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Now fast forward to this summer.

"I just saved a ton of my tax money by changing my citizenship status to an illegal immigrant," reads a meme he posted on Telegram in August.

"And it comes with free health insurance!"

A fines de julio, Northrup fue maestra de ceremonias de un programa itinerante dirigido a los republicanos de Trump llamado "Arise USA: The Resurrection Tour", organizado por Robert David Steele, un exespía de la CIA convertido en teórico de la conspiración que culpó a los "judíos sionistas de élite" del Holocausto y fue un promotor temprano de la conspiración QAnon de que Trump ha estado luchando en secreto contra una camarilla de pedófilos adoradores de Satanás.

En el evento en su estado natal de Maine, Northrup hizo una broma al presentar a Kevin Jenkins, un activista negro antivacunas que intenta disuadir a la comunidad negra, que también ha demostrado tener dudas sobre las vacunas, de recibir las inyecciones.

"Kevin y yo nos conocemos de los 12 de desinformación, que Joe Biden personalmente ha dicho que son responsables de la muerte de tantos", dijo, entre un aplauso entusiasta.

Esa noche también presentó a Steele, quien afirmó ser la primera persona en calificar al covid-19 un engaño. Con un sombrero de vaquero, Steele, que había hablado a Mercola y Northrup en Twitter, abrazó a Northrup y le puso una gorra roja en la cabeza mientras salía del escenario.

“Los tres grandes problemas de los que he estado hablando son el fraude electoral, la traición y el crimen de Wall Street y luego la pedofilia satánica”, dijo a la multitud de unas 150 personas en la ciudad de Belfast.

Aproximadamente un mes después, Steele, de 69 años, murió de covid-19.

“No me pondré la vacuna”, escribió en su última publicación en su blog.

Su muerte no consiguió interrumpir el flujo constante de información errónea sobre covid-19 en la cuenta de Telegram de Northrup.

El 1 de septiembre, pocos días después de que se confirmara públicamente la muerte de Steele, Northrup publicó una grabación de audio de 10 minutos de ella misma aconsejando a sus seguidores de Telegram sobre cómo resistir “pacíficamente” los mandatos de mascarillas y de vacunación.

En el mensaje, hizo la afirmación infundada de que las personas que reciben dosis de refuerzo experimentan síntomas neurológicos preocupantes.

"La gente se está desorientando, algo que empieza a perder cognitivamente", dijo.

Northrup continuó contando la historia de una pareja no vacunada a la que se le preguntó en un lugar público si habían recibido las vacunas.

"Her husband says, 'oh, of course, yeah. We got both (doses),'" Northrup said. "That's a peaceful breach."

With information from CNN's Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Audrey Ash and Benjamin Naughton.