How a group with right-wing connections tricked tens of thousands of Americans into buying COVID-19 drugs that don’t work

• America’s Frontline Doctors, a group with right-wing connections, is promoting fake COVID-19 treatment.

• He referred people to a telemedicine site for these treatments for a fee.

• His patients may have spent $ 6.7 million on medical advice and $ 8.5 million on prescriptions, The Intercept reported.

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For more than a year, a group called America’s Frontline Doctors has been stoking the flames of COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

The organization promotes itself as a non-profit organization that advocates for doctors and patients. In fact, he helped promote refuted and often dangerous COVID-19 treatments, and then referred people to a telemedicine site where they can get these treatments after a consultation.

According to hacked data recently obtained by The Intercept, America’s Frontline Doctors referred 255,000 people to the SpeakWithAnMD telemedicine site from July through September. During this period, approximately 72,000 people paid $ 90 for telephone consultations, plus some $ 60 for additional follow-ups. These calculations suggest that patients spent more than $ 6.7 million on medical advice from SpeakWithAnMD alone, The Intercept estimated.

After their consultations, Doctors at SpeakWithAnMD are prescribing drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine – falsely labeled as COVID-19 treatments – through a parent company called Encore Telemedicine. Encore sends orders to a digital pharmacy, Ravkoo, which ships medications directly to patients or calls for orders at their local pharmacy.

The total cost of these prescriptions reached at least $ 8.5 million, according to records of 340,000 prescriptions filled by Ravkoo from November 2020 through September 2021. That breaks down to $ 4.7 million for ivermectin, 2 , $ 4 million for azithromycin, $ 1.2 million for hydroxychloroquine, $ 175,000 for zinc and $ 52,000 for vitamin C.

Ravkoo CEO Alpesh Patel told The Intercept his company stopped doing business with SpeakWithAnMD and America’s Frontline Doctors at the end of August. The hacked data, however, suggests Ravkoo filled hundreds of prescriptions for U.S. primary care physicians in September.

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“We don’t control who sends us business,” Patel said. “Let’s put it that way. We do not have formal contracts with specific companies.

In some cases, patients have paid for SpeakWithAnMD consultations but never received a phone call from a doctor, TIME reported last month. In other cases, according to TIME, some people have been billed hundreds of dollars for drugs that never arrived.

Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University, recently told CNN that the service “prayed for desperate people, trying to sell them junk when they are in dire straits.”

Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine can have dangerous side effects

Some of the drugs sold through SpeakWithAn® can be dangerous. The Food and Drug Administration warns that large doses of ivermectin can cause serious harm, including nausea, vomiting, seizures, coma, and even death. From July to August, the 55 poison control centers in the United States saw a 245% increase in calls from people who took ivermectin.

The FDA does not recommend ivermectin for treating COVID-19 because the drug has only been approved for the treatment of certain parasites in humans and for the prevention of heartworm in certain animals. A March study found that ivermectin does not shorten the duration of COVID-19 symptoms.

The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine also does not reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms, other studies show. It also does not improve outcomes for hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Hydroxychloroquine, however, may increase the risk of heart problems, blood and lymphatic disorders, kidney damage, or liver problems, according to the FDA.

The other remedies prescribed by SpeakWithAnMD – vitamin C, zinc, and azithromycin (better known as Zithromax) – are also not known to be effective treatments for COVID-19.

America’s Frontline Doctors has ties to several right-wing organizations

America’s Frontline Doctors formed in July 2020 as part of the Free Speech Foundation, an Arizona nonprofit supported by a pro-Trump group called the Tea Party Patriots.

The Tea Party Patriots had previously helped organize and publish an open letter which called the event closings “mass casualties.” More than 600 doctors signed the letter, including Simone Gold, a California doctor now known for spreading misinformation about COVID-19. During the pandemic, Gold downplayed the severity of the virus and falsely suggested that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous.

Gold founded the Free Speech Foundation in June 2020. On the day her group launched America’s Frontline Doctors, Gold appeared outside the Supreme Court building to voice her opposition to blockades and mask requirements. One of the other doctors at the protest, Stella Immanuel, suggested that a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, zinc and Zithromax would “cure” COVID-19.

U.S. primary care physicians began referring people for telehealth services earlier this year, The Intercept reported. In January, Gold told a crowd of worshipers in Tampa, Florida that hydroxychloroquine was “available nationwide by going to our website.”

“You can see a doctor in telemedicine, and whether or not you have COVID, or you’re just afraid of contracting COVID, you can get a prescription and they mail it to you,” she said. added.

The group started touting ivermectin once the Delta variant took hold

Over the summer, as the Delta variant began to increase cases of COVID-19, frontline doctors in the United States began to heavily tout ivermectin, TIME reported.

As recently as August, Gold implored people to choose hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin over vaccines.

“Don’t text me when you test positive, I don’t want to hear it,” Gold told a crowd in Thousand Oaks, Calif. “I told you in advance to get the drugs.

Jim Flinn, a public relations officer working for Encore Telemedicine, told The Intercept that SpeakWithAnMD “is not part of the anti-vaccination movement and we are not opposed to vaccinations.”

Over the past eight months, Gold has had legal issues. She was arrested in January for her participation in the attack on the United States Capitol, after being photographed with a megaphone inside the building.

She faces charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct and entering a restricted building, to which she had pleaded not guilty.

Gold still retains his medical license, according to NPR.

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