Beginning last week, the intake form began showing a similar disclaimer to all patients. “As a potential patient, I acknowledge and understand that the Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin have been deemed ‘Highly Not Recommended’ by the WHO, FDA, CDC, and NIH,” the disclaimer says. “Should a patient choose to not disclose their proper medical history, the clinician cannot be held liable nor can any medical license in any state be reviewed or held accountable.” Patients must check a box that says “I understand” to continue.
“In facilitating the doctor/patient relationship, our MD’s are fully licensed and operate within the rules and regulations of the medical profession,” Flinn, the spokesperson for SpeakWithAnMD’s parent company, said. “If a TeleMD in the Speak program decides any FDA medication is appropriate, then the MD can prescribe an FDA-approved medication off-label for any medical condition the TeleMD considers appropriate.”
Chart: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
“Extremely Pro-Trump” Doctors
The foundation for America’s Frontline Doctors was laid in a May 11, 2020,
conference call between a senior staffer in Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican activist group CNP Action. They reportedly discussed finding “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to go on TV and defend Trump’s plan to rapidly reopen the economy despite the more cautious safety guidance coming from the CDC.
Then, on June 24 of last year, Gold started an Arizona nonprofit called the Free Speech Foundation with a
million-dollar annual budget and
fiscal sponsorship from the Tea Party Patriots Foundation. America’s Frontline Doctors, which is a project of this nonprofit, launched on July 27, 2020. Gold, who NPR
confirmed is a licensed physician in California, along with
other doctors in white lab coats, held a press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court building where they falsely claimed that a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc could “cure” Covid-19. Another of the group’s doctors who spoke outside the court was Stella Immanuel, who called the use of masks unnecessary, and quickly earned viral fame when it was revealed that she had previously claimed that the uterine disorder endometriosis is caused by
sex with demons that takes place in dreams. The event was livestreamed on Breitbart, and videos of it were viewed millions of times on social media after being shared on Twitter by then-President Trump before tech companies
took them down for violating rules against pandemic misinformation. More recently, the group has been
promoting ivermectin as a miracle cure for Covid-19.
“[America’s Frontline Doctors] are really good at manipulating science to seem like the vaccine is not safe, or is not tested, or is not necessary, which is why they’ve been particularly impactful in the last year plus,” Koltai said.
But it wasn’t until early 2021, when over 345,000 Americans had already died from the pandemic, that America’s Frontline Doctors started to advertise $90 telehealth consultations to receive prescriptions for alternative treatments to Covid-19 on its site.
On January 3, Gold told a packed, maskless church audience in Tampa, Florida, that America’s Frontline Doctors made “hydroxychloroquine available for the entire nation by going to our website.” A video of the lecture, “The Truth About the Covid-19 Vaccine,” has been viewed 1.3 million times on the video-hosting site Rumble after being removed from YouTube. “Then you can consult with a telemedicine doctor. And whether you have Covid, or you don’t have Covid, or you’re just worried about getting Covid, you can get yourself a prescription and they mail it to you.” She added, “The big fight wasn’t the virus, it was the fear.”
Simultaneously, America’s Frontline Doctors began referring its followers for telemedicine appointments. Its website leads prospective customers through a series of preliminary questions before directing them to SpeakWithAnMD.com. “Find out how to obtain prescription medication for COVID-19 with our AFLDS-trained physicians in three easy steps,” it reads, before a prominent “Get Medication” button.
Signing up for a Covid-19 consultation with America’s Frontline Doctors. Screenshots taken Sept. 20, 2021.Screenshots: The Intercept
AFLDS reaches its audience through a variety of social media platforms. Gold, the group’s founder, has more than 340,000 Twitter followers, and she regularly posts anti-vaccine content, such as this video of podcaster Joe Rogan falsely claiming that ivermectin and other drugs that have been shown to be ineffective at treating Covid-19 has cured him of the virus.
On Saturday, Gold started an account on Gab, a social media site
popular with right-wing extremists, and she already has more than 36,000 followers who have posted thousands of comments on her page. AFLDS’s Facebook page has 112,000 followers, its Telegram channel has 184,000 subscribers, and 28,000 people are subscribed to the group’s channel on Rumble.
Their anti-vaccine propaganda also shows up in religious email newsletters, like this one from a group called Bridge Connection Ministries, which contains a plug for AFLDS that asks, “Have you been exposed to COVID by someone who was recently VAXXED?”
Bridge Connection Ministries newsletter.
Screenshot: The Intercept
Cadence Health
The two months’ worth of patient records that The Intercept has access to show that AFLDS referred over 255,000 people to speak with physicians in order to get Covid-19 treatments. Of those people, 72,000 paid $90 for phone consultations, and many of those had follow-up consultations costing $59.99 each. The hacked data from Cadence Health does not include payment data itself, but doing the math, in just that two-month period, patients appear to have paid more than $6.7 million for phone consultations alone. This data does not include all of the $90 phone consultations from January to July, when SpeakWithAnMD appears to have hosted the intake forms for $90 telemedicine consultations directly,
according to archived
versions of the site. The telemedicine site appears to be billing patients directly and not their insurance companies.
Espinal claims that Cadence Health didn’t collect credit card payments and that the $90 charges for telehealth were made using SpeakWithAnMD’s payment processor. Espinal told The Intercept he charged SpeakWithAnMD a total of $17,500 for using its platform and that SpeakWithAnMD was his first and only customer.
After The Intercept reached out to the companies for comment on Monday, SpeakWithAnMD’s parent company, Encore Telemedicine, had an emergency meeting with lawyers from AFLDS, according to Espinal, who briefly attended the meeting via Zoom. “There were 16 different attorneys,” he told The Intercept, though Gold was not present. According to Espinal, he told the lawyers, “I’m ending my contract with you guys immediately,” and then left. Afterward, he took down Cadence Health’s service, preventing SpeakWithAnMD from operating.
The hacked data from Cadence Health gives insight into the patients themselves. Of those 72,000 patients in that two-month period, 58 percent were female, 38 percent were male, and 4 percent chose not to answer the question. While people of all ages sought consultations with AFLDS’s health care providers, people in their 50s and 60s were more likely to engage than other age groups. According to
data provided by the CDC, Covid-19 patients aged 50 to 64 are four times more likely to be hospitalized and 30 times more likely to die than people aged 18 to 29. Covid-19 patients aged 65 to 74 are five times more likely to be hospitalized and 90 times more likely to die.
People in every state in the county, as well as Washington, D.C., sought the unproven Covid-19 treatments. 8,600 people in California paid $90 for telehealth consultations, as did another 8,000 in Florida and 7,400 in Texas. More than 1,000 people in each of an additional 21 states consulted health care providers through the service. The only states that contained less than 100 patients were Delaware and Vermont. Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Jacksonville all had over 300 patients.
This map, based on the hacked data, shows how many people sought unproven Covid-19 treatments from each city, for cities that have at least 10 users. Each dot is mapped to the geographic center of the city. No individual home addresses are represented in the map.