Anti-vax group vows to open own clinics
America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) organization, which opposes vaccination and other government measures to stem the spread of Covid-19, has promised to open its own clinics, inviting medical staff and pharmacists to join.
AFLDS and its associated companies are currently under investigation by Congress, while the California medical board is looking into the right-wing organization’s founder, Simone Gold, after mounting calls to strip her of her license in the state.
However, all the pressure and legal woes don’t seem to have affected the group’s plans to further expand its operations in the US.
“AFLDS is opening its first medical clinic in the coming months, with many more planned shortly after,” Gold said in a newsletter, which was distributed among supporters last week. The location of the maiden clinic and the date of its opening were not mentioned in the email.
She reiterated the claim that American medical workers are “having their rights stripped away by corrupt state and government actors” during the pandemic.
The newsletter included a special form so that doctors, looking to care for their patients “without interference,” and pharmacists, for whom “practicing good medicine means more… than bowing to corporate mandates,” could join AFLDS and work at its medical facilities.
Gold was among the Donald Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, and now faces several charges over those events. The emergency physician turned political figure has some 380,000 followers on Twitter.
Her account and the AFLDS page with over 200,000 followers are being used by the group to distribute videos and other materials relating to the supposed dangers of vaccination and coronavirus restrictions.
The probes into the activities of America’s Frontline Doctors and its founder were launched after media revelations in August and September. Time magazine and The Intercept reported that online healthcare companies associated with the group had earned millions of dollars after doctors who back the AFLDS cause prescribed hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 in thousands of patients through a telemedicine service. It was done despite there being no peer-reviewed studies to prove that those drugs were effective against the virus.
Back then, the chair of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, James Clyburn, branded AFLDS “predatory actors… touting misinformation and using it to market disproven and potentially hazardous coronavirus treatments.”
