They took an oath to do no harm, but they are some of the most influential spreaders of misinformation about Covid vaccines

“Another hero emerges,” Northrup writes of a doctor who refused to see vaccinated patients.

Northrup is among a small group of doctors who have emerged as a huge source of misinformation — whether as social-media influencers or family doctors meeting with patients in person — about Covid-19 vaccines, which have thus far proven the most effective weapon against the deadliest pandemic in 100 years.

For the most part, they do so with impunity.

‘The best thing that could happen is you get Covid’

Dr. Rashid Buttar often appears on his promotional materials donning scrubs or a white coat.

The bio in his 2010 book, “The 9 Steps to Keep the Doctor Away” — which landed on USA Today’s best-seller list — is a three-page compendium of credentials: double major in biology and theology from the prestigious Washington University in St. Louis; doctor-of-osteopathic-medicine degree at the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences, College of Medicine and Surgery in Iowa; visiting scientist and nutritional scientist at North Carolina State University.

His website adds another: “MOST CENSORED Doctor.”

Buttar has shared all manner of outrageous claims and misleading statements about the pandemic: Most people who took the vaccine 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 stood by it all.

“I’ve told people the best thing that could happen is you get Covid,” he said.

“The best thing that can happen is get Covid?” Griffin asked.

“Of course,” Buttar replied. “You’re going to build your own innate immune system and then you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

He later said, falsely: “More people are dying from the Covid vaccine than from Covid.”

CNN has reached out to all of them.

Buttar, who has made light of his inclusion on the “disinformation dozen,” suggests the vaccine is part of a plot by elites to commit mass genocide.

He likens Dr. Anthony Fauci — presidential adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — to Adolf Hitler, saying 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 insinuations that the pandemic was somehow planned or enabled by shadowy elites. “He’s very well aware of what he’s doing.”

Buttar, 55, has long been popular among anti-vaxxers and parents of children with autism. He has reportedly drawn patients from most US states and more than 40 countries. (Buttar puts the country count at 94.) In an especially high-profile case in 2009, then-celebrity couple Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey — both noted vaccine skeptics — referred a woman who said that she’d been sickened by a flu vaccine to Buttar for his 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 is a believer that environmental toxins such as mercury and lead are at the root of many chronic maladies, from autism to heart disease to cancer. He has treated patients — hundreds of them children with autism — with a patented cream that he claims removes poisonous metals from the body, according to Offit’s book.

The second reprimand pertained to an accusation from another physician that Buttar’s treatment of a patient was adding to their “pain and suffering”; the board concluded that Buttar’s documentation for treating the patient failed to conform to industry standards.

“He deals in the industry of false hope, capitalizing on the fear we all have that our environment is a toxic hell,” Offit told CNN. “He is the lowest level of charlatan, taking advantage of parents who are desperate.”

Buttar scoffed at this claim.

“That’s just an absurd statement,” he told CNN. “People go where they’re going to get results.”

Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of CCDH, said while he was pleased to see some social media accounts of the “disinformation dozen” get banished, too many of them — such as Buttar — are still allowed to spread pseudoscience and conspiracy content on mainstream platforms like Twitter.

“What you’ve got to do is reduce the transmission rate of misinformation,” Ahmed told CNN. “And the way you do that is stop giving them the world’s biggest megaphone in the history of communications — social media — where they can transmit to billions of people for zero cost.”

In any case, mainstream social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have made efforts to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation. Facebook, for example, said in August it took down more than three dozen pages, groups and Facebook or Instagram accounts associated with the so-called disinformation dozen.

In the wake of the spring release of CCDH’s report, Buttar was booted from Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. In March, just before its release, he boasted a combined following of more than 1.2 million people, according to CCDH. He now just has the Twitter account with about 88,000 followers.

After CNN flagged some tweets from Dr. Rashid Buttar that contained coronavirus misinformation, Twitter required Buttar to delete those tweets in order to regain access to his account, the company said on Monday. Buttar’s account remains active.

A company spokesperson said Twitter is focused on improving the enforcement of its Covid-19 misinformation policy and has suspended about 2,000 accounts for violations. The company permanently suspended three members of the disinformation dozen for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, the spokesperson said, although only one — Tenpenny — is a medical doctor.

Still, false claims continue to flourish on the platforms. And when users stumble across the page of a misinformationist, algorithms on Twitter and Instagram continue to serve up others. The resulting repetition has a way of hardening people in their positions, said Joan Donovan, research director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

“It’s not the case that you take action on some single piece of information that has floated by your screen at any point,” Donovan said. “There’s something about the rabbit hole … that is very persuasive.”

A Montana doctor claims Covid threat ‘exaggerated’

But while celebrity doctors are broadcasting bunk vaccine information to mass audiences on social media, other physicians are spreading misinformation at the local level the old-fashioned way: face-to-face.

Across the country, complaints to state medical boards about doctors misinforming patients about Covid-19 are on the rise, said Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, president of the Federation of State Medical Boards. He told CNN that at least a dozen directors of state medical boards have told him that they’re receiving “a lot” of complaints about physicians sharing coronavirus misinformation.

But few have led to disciplinary action, he acknowledged.

“The system has been set up as a complaint-based system,” Chaudhry said. “These state boards simply do not have the resources … to monitor what’s happening on the internet or what’s going on even in an individual patient encounter.”

A case in point is Dr. Annie Bukacek, a Montana fixture who believes the response to the pandemic has been an orchestrated attempt by elites to control the masses.

Bukacek, 63, is not only a practicing physician; she also occupies a seat on the Flathead City-County Health Board, which is the local authority on how to manage public health outbreaks like Covid-19.

“Imagine a vaccine so safe you have to be threatened to take it — for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know you have it!!” said a message she posted last month on Facebook.

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

“If Covid is so dangerous, we’d be seeing people die left and right,” Bukacek said at a school board meeting that same month.

“It’s widely accepted Covid-19 danger was exaggerated,” she told a sympathetic local audience in March.

Standing with others on a sidewalk near a park beside the courthouse and holding up a placard that read “The only thing mutating is the Covid lie,” Bukacek was among dozens who lined up alongside a thoroughfare to chant slogans and shout or wave at passing motorists.

A large pickup truck thundered up and down the block, its Trump and American flags flapping in the wind.

When CNN approached Bukacek and asked why she — a doctor — was anti-vaccine, she bristled.

“I’m not anti-vaccine,” Bukacek said. “Nice talking to you.”

Asked if she felt any responsibility towards the more than 2,000 Montanans who have died of Covid-19, she turned to her friends and asked, “Could you take a photo of these CNN guys?”

Several Montana doctors reached by CNN declined to discuss Bukacek, in part because they feared the blowback from her followers. But Dr. Peter Heyboer, a primary care physician — and a fellow member of the health board — said she has intentionally undermined the work of the board on which she serves.

“Physicians who use their authority in their position as a trusted adviser to spread misinformation … they share part of the responsibility for the level of illness and death we are experiencing,” he told CNN.

Dr. Cory Short, a hospitalist at Logan Health in Kalispell — Bukacek’s hometown — said he has seen the ravages of Covid-19 firsthand.

He said by the time Covid-19 patients get to his hospital, they’ve often “reached that point where they are having a very difficult time breathing,” he told CNN. “When they come in, they’re scared.”

In December, about 50 Montana residents signed on to a complaint submitted to Montana’s medical compliance unit against Bukacek.

“She states that Covid-19 death certificates are manipulated, she discredits PCR testing, and by the nature of her medical profession and health board status is leading naïve members of the community in promoting and participating in anti-masking propaganda that is endangering our citizens,” states the complaint, which CNN has obtained.

A spokesperson for Montana’s Department of Labor and Industry told CNN that no cause has been found on any complaint filed against Bukacek.

Across the country, there are exceptions to the rule of impunity. CNN contacted medical boards in all 50 states; half of them responded. Only two — Rhode Island and Oregon — said they had disciplined doctors for coronavirus misinformation or related violations.

Brody, whose practice incorporates homeopathy, agreed to pay $1,100 and pass a medical ethics course, but in July his license was suspended for five years for violating rules related to patient care and medical records. Brody did not respond to CNN’s requests by email and phone for comment.

An attorney for LaTulippe, Kristina Heuser, said in an email to CNN that her client “had an unblemished record until he dared to express a professional opinion that differs from that of the medical establishment” and that he is challenging the medical board’s decision in court.

‘I will not take the vaccination’

For the high-profile Northrup, the threat of a lost license carries no weight — she voluntarily withdrew hers in 2015 without explanation, a representative of the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine told CNN in an email.

But she and other celebrity doctors have a brand that flourishes independent of licensure. Credentials are a big part of that brand, though, and Northrup often touts her degree from Dartmouth College as well as her OB-GYN bona fides.

For many years, those sterling credentials were bolstered by mainstream appeal.

In 2018, Northrup — a former abortion provider — went on a women’s health and wellness podcast and spoke not only about the importance of keeping abortion legal, but also about how the patriarchy for centuries has been mining “women’s ovaries for the benefit of the patriarchal system.” In the talk with podcaster Sara Avant Stover, Northrup sympathized with “our Black and brown sisters” who have complained that White women have aligned themselves with “White male power structures.”

As recently as August 2020, Northrup was featured on the podcast of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which serves up interviews from the archives. The episode appears to have since been removed.

Fast forward to this summer.

“I just saved a bunch of money on my taxes — by switching my citizenship status to illegal immigrant,” reads a meme she posted on Telegram in August. “AND it comes with free health insurance!”

At the event in her home state of Maine, Northrup made a quip when introducing Kevin Jenkins, a Black anti-vaccine activist who tries to dissuade the Black community, which has also shown to be vaccine-hesitant, from getting the shots.

“Kevin and I know each other from the disinformation dozen, which Joe Biden personally has said is responsible for the deaths of so many,” she said, to a rousing applause.

“The big three problems that I’ve been talking about are election fraud, Wall Street treason and crime and then Satanic pedophilia,” he told the crowd of about 150 people in the city of Belfast.

His death did nothing to interrupt the steady stream of Covid-19 misinformation on Northrup’s Telegram account.

On September 1, just days after Steele’s death was publicly confirmed, Northrup posted a 10-minute audio recording of herself advising her Telegram followers on how to “peacefully” resist masking and vaccination mandates.

In it, she made the baseless claim that people who are getting booster shots are experiencing troubling neurological symptoms.

“People are getting disoriented — kind of starting to lose it cognitively,” she said.

Northrup went on to tell a story of an unvaccinated couple who were asked in a public setting whether they had gotten the shots.

“Her husband goes, ‘oh, of course — yes. We’ve had both of them,'” Northrup said. “That’s peaceful non-compliance.”