Take My Breath
The War Against Covid 19 Fake Doctors and Disinformation
Part 1 — Takedown
The phrase I can’t breathe is more than a protest mantra. Today, the phrase I can’t breathe is the primary symptom of COVID 19 patients. Those suffering the most severe effects are rushed to emergency rooms and administered oxygen. Then comes the big question. Have you been vaccinated? Most answer “no.” They are called the unvaccinated, and this is their pandemic.
But you’ve heard all this before. Even President Biden has turned up the heat on our country’s vaccine-hesitant. Per executive order, President Biden placed two-thirds of the country under a vaccine mandate. This action was covered in every newspaper and news media outlet across the globe. What you may not know, is about the heated behind-the-scenes battle waged by doctors, nurses, and other pro-vaxxers on social media. I’m currently riding with a group dedicated to fighting the fake doctors and disinformation actors on the social media app Clubhouse.
Clubhouse is a social audio app for iOS and Android where users can communicate in audio chat rooms that accommodate groups of thousands of people. For over a year, Clubhouse was in beta, or second round of tests. It opened to the public in July 2021. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter, under considerable pressure from the government and pro-vax advocates, began ending the accounts of an infamous group of doctors, scientists, and laypersons called the Disinformation Dozen.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s Anti-Vax Watch uncovered “…over 812,000 posts extracted from Facebook and Twitter between February 1 and March 16, 2021, showing that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen.” The group found “…that while many people might spread anti-vaccine content on social media platforms, the content they share often comes from a much more limited range of sources. Exposure to even a small amount of online vaccine misinformation has been shown by the Vaccine Confidence Project to reduce the number of people willing to take a Covid vaccine by up to 8.8 percent.”
The Disinformation Dozen include:
1. Joseph Mercola
2. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
3. Ty and Charlene Bollinger
4. Sherri Tenpenny
5. Rizza Islam
6. Rashid Buttar
7. Erin Elizabeth
8. Sayer Ji
9. Kelly Brogan
10. Christiane Northrup
11. Ben Tapper
12. Kevin Jenkins
Disinformation Dozen have many soldiers in Clubhouse rooms.
But one I.C.U. Nurse and a Geek online marketer decided to take on the foot soldiers of the Disinformation Dozen on Clubhouse. And, after going it alone for months, Doctors, Public Health experts, and Scientists have finally rallied behind them and Clubhousemisinformation.com.
The group calls itself the Nerdy News Network. They agree disinformation is killing people. A few days ago, they made their first takedown.
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The first takedown occurred at 2:00 am on September 11, 2021. The culprit was a woman who posed as a doctor. Her name is Erica Steele and she commanded Clubhouse rooms of over 1200 listeners. Upon investigation, it was found that Ms. Steele actually held a massage therapist license until it was revoked by the Virginia Nurses Association in 2013 for claiming she was a doctor in front of patients and staff. But Steele was undeterred. After discounting the revocation by the Virginia Nursing Association, Steele began perpetrating in earnest as a “Doctor.” A Google search revealed she holds multiple online degrees from Everglades University and the University of Natural Medicine. Her business, Holistic Family Practice, is located in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Yet, the screwy part is that Naturopaths can’t legally practice in the Commonwealth of Virginia. In fact, both the House and Senate in Virginia considered bills that legalized and regulated Naturopathy during the 2020 legislative session. But, both bills failed to move out of committee; thus, killing a nearly 15-year effort to have the profession recognized. Unfortunately, the lack of oversight by Virginia has allowed Erica Steele and one of the Disinformation Dozen, Kevin Jenkins, to thrive. If you enter a Clubhouse room featuring Erica Steele, you will hear word-for-word quotes she’s taken from Kevin Jenkins’ far-right funded Urban Global Health Movement.
Like most, I support Naturopaths. Naturopathic medicine is a system that emphasizes prevention and self-healing through natural therapies. The ideology and methods of naturopathy are based on vitalism and folk medicine our great grandmothers used. Some, but not all, Naturopathic practitioners commonly recommend against following modern medical practices, including but not limited to medical testing, drugs, vaccinations, and surgery. Instead, the naturopathic approach relies on unscientific notions, often leading naturopaths to diagnoses and treatments with no factual merit. These are the primary reasons why Naturopaths should not be confused with board-certified medical doctors who practice evidence-based medicine or EBM. In most states where Naturopaths are licensed and regulated, Naturopathic doctors must work with actual M.Ds. When they don’t align with M.Ds, they open themselves to being labeled Quacks!
Some of Erica Steele’s most inflammatory statements are -
- Anyone taking the vaccine booster will require a pill every day for the rest of their life.
- Your D.N.A. produces a spike protein.
- The vaccine’s spike protein can enter cells and alter D.N.A.
- Nasal sprays work against COVID 19. The bacteria would go to the stomach and be killed by acid. (Not Steele. But Steele didn’t stop the misinformation when a supporter spewed this as fact.)
- Masks don’t work on the Delta variant.
- You can perform randomized control trials on patients.
The day after the Nerdy News Network’s takedown of Erica Steele, she was back on Clubhouse. She had a different name but ran the same game. Yet, things had changed. Steele’s room only had 352 listeners — an 900 person decrease from the day before.
There are dozens of fake doctors and hundreds of disinformation actors circulating across Clubhouse. To demonstrate, I ran into one named Dr. Pooch only to discover he was a children’s book writer. Then there is the chiropractor to the rich and famous in Beverly Hills, Dr. Atousa Mahdavi, D.C., Q.M.E., B.C.I.M., AHP., Yogi. She insists she is a qualified Doctor who can speak about COVID 19 to patients. Chiropractors are respected medical providers in our community but not Doctors. To tell the truth, Clubhouse listeners probably couldn’t afford the co-pay for Dr. Atousa Mahdavi anyway. Then Steve Kirsch, CTO of Oneid and a prolific Covid disinformation actor, presented with study statistics he could not read, understand, or explain. As a result, he was summarily checked by a U.S. Military Geneticist. Then there was Bethany Adoni, cohost of the Shepard Ambellas Show, who stated she was a nurse and was immediately recognized as a fraud and called out.
The Nerdy News Networkers were quite busy last weekend.
Look for Part 2 of Take My Breath: The War Against Covid 19 Fake Doctors and Disinformation. In that segment, I will introduce you to some of the Nerdy News Networkers, reveal more Disinformation Dozen soldier takedowns, and examine why blacks in America are dying of blackness.
If you want to learn more about the correlation between deaths and disinformation check out these sources.
- The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s Anti-Vax Watch
- Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows — NPR.org
- De-platform The Disinformation Dozen — Forbes
- The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online — New York Times
- Facebook takes action against ‘disinformation dozen’ after White House pressure — CNN
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
