It took Donald Trump only a few days to abandon his so-called tone shift. After just a few days spent vouching for the utility of masks and acknowledging the severity of the ongoing pandemic, on Monday the president retweeted a post from Stella Immanuel, a Houston doctor who touts hydroxychloroquine as a solution for COVID-19. “Covid has [a] cure,” read the tweet. “America wake up.” Twitter removed the post for violating its misinformation policy, but not before the president’s oldest son posted a video from the same doctor asserting that people “don’t need a mask” to combat the pandemic. Donald Trump Jr.’s account was temporarily suspended, disciplinary action his father dodged because he didn’t post Immanuel’s clips directly to the site. The social media company restricted access to Trump Jr.’s video and requested that he take it down, writing in a statement that “Tweets with the video are in violation of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.”
There was a time when Trump said or tweeted the word “hydroxychloroquine” seemingly every other day. But his obsession had died down of late, after several studies suggested the drug is not effective when used on coronavirus patients. On Monday night, however, he came back strong, retweeting another tweet accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci of lying to Americans about the effects of the drug, and rekindling, via Immanuel, his skepticism of protective masks. Immanuel helped fan the flames, going so far as to “double dog dare” Fauci to send her urine samples to prove he’s taking hydroxychloroquine himself. Fauci, who appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America this morning, denied the accusations. “I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances,” he told the network, adding that hydroxychloroquine’s “overwhelming prevailing clinical trials” indicate that it is “not effective in coronavirus disease.” thank
Immanuel, whose video Trump Jr. commended as a “must-watch” source on coronavirus prior to his Twitter account’s suspension, has racked up tens of millions of views on her latest COVID-19 videos, one of which has now been removed by Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. But the doctor and self-proclaimed deliverance minister has a history of medical quackery. She has previously claimed health disorders like cysts, endometriosis, miscarriages, and infertility are the result of patients having “astral sex” with demonic “spirit husbands” and “spirit wives” in their dreams, according to the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer. “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,” she asserted, per the Daily Beast, in a 2013 sermon posted on YouTube.
Immanuel, a Cameroonian immigrant who reportedly received her medical training in Nigeria, has gone so far as to push conspiracy theories about the world being run by an Illuminati cabal of reptilian humanoids, à la David Icke. According to the Daily Beast, she also believes the human world is at risk thanks to abortion, children’s toys, and TV shows—including but not limited to Pokémon; Harry Potter; and Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana—and same-sex marriage, which she described as “homosexual terrorism” shortly before the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling. Another one of her fears is that medical officials and scientists are using “alien DNA, to treat people” and are plotting to force microchips on the world’s population.
Despite her Trump-promoted claim that masks are an unnecessary precaution, Immanuel, in a Facebook video advertising her medical services, advised prospective patients to put on “a mask, or a scarf, or anything to cover your face” before seeking treatment at her clinic. During her Monday appearance lobbying Congress in Washington, according to the Daily Beast, she maintained that employees at her clinic avoided contracting COVID-19 by using medical masks, though at least one recent video of Immanuel on the job appears to show her wearing an N95 mask.