Grifting Along With America’s Frontline Doctors
COVID Fraudsters Soak the Suckers
America’s Frontline Doctors, a right wing front created to legitimize medical quackery during the pandemic, is embroiled in a scandal triggered by accusations of financial malfeasance.
The group’s leader stands accused of using the charity group's funds to buy a $3.6 million mansion for herself and her boyfriend. An audit revealed other expenses, including the purchase of three vehicles in Florida and payouts of roughly $50,000 a month on personal expenses—including $5,600 a month on house cleaning.
As is typical in such situations –remembering the “scandal” at the National Rifle Association not long ago–everybody is suing everybody, and for now a faction of the staff has been locked out of their emails.
A little background is in order.
From Time Magazine:
The emergence of AFLD was a coordinated political effort months in the making. The group was the brainchild of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive network of conservative activists. During a May 11 call of CNP members that was leaked to the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group, members complained that Trump was being slammed for his handling of the pandemic, including failing to follow scientific guidelines. The group needed their own medical professionals to promote their message, they said, in the face of data showing two-thirds of Americans were wary of restarting the economy.
“There is a coalition of doctors who are extremely pro-Trump, that have been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign on health care,” Nancy Schulze, a Republican activist married to a former Pennsylvania congressman, said on the call. “And these doctors could be activated for this conversation now.”
They first appeared on the media landscape via a press conference garnished with people wearing white coats on the steps of the Supreme Court in July, 2020.
Leading the group was Dr. Simone Gold, a licensed emergency-room physician and Stanford-educated lawyer who was working as a part-time, independent contractor in a hospital in Bakersfield. Gold shot to fame with MAGA types after she started prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug some on the right wrongly embraced as a COVID cure.
The event was hosted and funded by the Tea Party Patriots, a pro-Trump right-wing group.
A video of the sparsely attended function was re-Tweeted by then-President Trump, catapulting the organization into the heart of a burgeoning movement opposing public health measures instituted as a result of the pandemic. Soon after, it was removed from social media platforms for spreading misinformation.
The Daily Beast reported that one of the speakers at the event, Dr. Stella Immanuel, also believed that dream-sex with demons could cause dangerous medical conditions. While such absurdity would repel many people, it gave AFLD a boost with fringe groups.
Gold and other AFLD representatives quickly became darlings of the right wing media, with everybody from Fox News to KUSI hustling to get a respectable looking figure to convey messages denigrating the government’s scientists and university medical experts.
And they’re still at it:
While the message being presented has evolved, a central conspiratorial theme has remained. At first it was claimed that the dangers of COVID were being overblown, then they became the nation’s foremost peddlers of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and nowadays it’s tales about the dangers of vaccines.
From The Intercept:
America’s Frontline Doctors, a right-wing group founded last year to promote pro-Trump doctors during the coronavirus pandemic, is working in tandem with a small network of health care companies to sow distrust in the Covid-19 vaccine, dupe tens of thousands of people into seeking ineffective treatments for the disease, and then sell consultations and millions of dollars’ worth of those medications. The data indicate patients spent at least $15 million — and potentially much more — on consultations and medications combined.
At $90 a pop for a consultation as a condition for receiving prescriptions, the group was doing quite well. Too well, in fact, as users complained about never receiving meds.
As the confusion has mounted, some have questioned the group’s motives. A user named Vinod told TIME he had been a monthly donor to AFLD but had to call his credit-card company to stop repeated fraudulent charges and ask for a replacement card to prevent other fees from piling up.
Moderators for the AFLDs group on Telegram acknowledged to frustrated users that they were overwhelmed by the demand, although they said to “blame the CDC for the blockade” of ivermectin. But they insisted that once the physician fee is paid, “this is out of AFLDs hands operationally because of HIPPA [sic].”
Scam chart jpg
It wouldn’t be a fringe right wing group without lots of direct mail, and AFLD was no exception. VIP tickets were offered for an RV tour that frequently failed to show up. Supporters were urged to call their lawmakers demanding a “Vaccine Bill of Rights.” An AFLD boilerplate was used to draft proposed legislation in Wyoming, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota and South Carolina.
They offered a letter template chock full of misinformation for skeptics to utilize with employers or schools attempting to mandate Covid-19 vaccine. And they recommended, “Send to principals, superintendents, department of education officials, managers, corporate officers, etc. Put everyone on notice! Send on your own or unite with others’ signatures in support of your movement. Informed and united people are truly the greatest threat to tyranny!”
Founder Dr Simone Gold was arrested following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, and the email list was milked for more than $400,000 for her legal defense. The pitch to supporters was for “urgent and generous donations to withstand such aggressive assaults from the ruthless enemies of free speech.
From ARS Technica:
After joining the mob, she strolled into the rotunda, passing an injured officer without offering medical aid, and gave a speech against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and government-imposed lockdowns. The speech was filmed by her boyfriend, John Strand, an underwear model and AFLDS employee.
Gold was sentenced to 60 days in federal prison. Strand, 39, was found guilty on five offenses, including one felony, and is awaiting sentencing in January 2023. He faces up to 23 years in prison for the combined offenses.
While Gold was serving her time, a forensic audit took place. When she got out all hell broke loose.
From the Daily Beast:
In October, Gold began to demand that Gilbert and the other remaining board members, former sheriff Richard Mack and pastor Jurgen Matthesius, resign. In a furious Oct. 12 email to the three men, she threatened to unleash her fanbase on them unless they stopped “murdering” AFLDS. In the email, Gold described herself as a “popular folk-hero” and compared herself to a vengeful lion.
“Just as the mother lioness will not let her baby lion be murdered, neither will I,” Gold wrote, according to an exhibit filed in the lawsuit.
The board members refused to resign, and the fight over AFLDS escalated. In an Oct. 15 email, the group’s accountant discussed who could access the group’s bank accounts, writing that they contained at least $7.3 million.
The fight reached a new intensity in November. Gold and her supporters within AFLDS began harassing employees to hand over the organization’s online accounts, according to affidavits filed by the board’s lawyers. In one November email, an AFLDS employee described how Gold had seized control of the nonprofit’s Microsoft email accounts. Gossip ran wild, with low-level employees stunned that leaders like Gold had been paid what one staffer called in an affidavit “absurd amounts of money.”
Experts interviewed for stories about this conflict were inclined to believe this scandal will mark the end of America’s Frontline Doctors existence, but I’m not so sure. It’s not a partisan thing per se, but the question of grift does seem endemic to fringe causes, and the MAGA crowd holding the GOP’s gonads is all fringe, all the time.
AFLD is part of a network of groups supporting these causes, and now that the former President has thrown his hat in the ring, he’ll be depending on these sorts for on the ground support.
If you go to the political action page at the Awaken Church website, you’ll see America’s Frontline Doctors at the top of the list for resources.
This grift is everywhere, and sometimes it seems as though it’s worn as a badge of honor. A couple of examples before I sign off…
The January 6 House Select Committee has documented how Trump and his allies wielded the stolen election lie to raise up to $250 million from Republican and conservative voters. Yet the “Official Election Defense Fund” that was supposed to be the repository of these funds appears not to exist. Much of that money, the committee says, was channeled back to political outfits run by top Trump allies.
Take Georgia’s US Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who is the only thing standing between Republicans and complete Democratic procedural control of the upper house. You’d think getting him elected would be priority #1 for the GOP.
Four different GOP PACs (President Donald Trump’s Save America, the North Carolina Republican Party and the campaign committees of newly elected GOP senators J.D. Vance in Ohio and Ted Budd in North Carolina —have sent urgent please for donors in support of Walker’s candidacy.
The small print in these appeals says 90% will go to the PAC and only 10% will go to Walker. After this ratio was revealed on social media, the committees changed the split to 50-50. How white of them.
…And a late-breaking addition…
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Email me at: WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com