America's Frontline Doctors: Where the White Coats Went

In July 2020 a dozen doctors in matching white coats lined up on the Supreme Court steps and told America it did not need masks or lockdowns because hydroxychloroquine was a cure. Six years on, here is what became of the group and of each doctor's career.

👉 Pick a doctor: what happened to the three best-known faces of AFLDS

Simone Gold Joseph Ladapo Stella Immanuel

Simone Gold, MD, JD

Convicted · pardoned · law licence suspended

• Founded AFLDS and led the July 2020 summit.
• Pleaded guilty over January 6; served 60 days; pardoned January 2025.
• California reprimanded her in 2024, then vacated the reprimand in 2025.
• New York suspended her law licence for five years in February 2026.
• Runs GoldCare telehealth from Naples, Florida. Her Florida medical licence shows no discipline.

Full profileCalifornia case file

1. The White Coat Summit, 27 July 2020

The event was hosted and paid for by Tea Party Patriots, and the group was launched under the name America's Frontline Doctors (AFLDS). Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin was there, the only person on the steps not in a lab coat, and appeared to be running things. South Carolina Republican Congressman Ralph Norman introduced the doctors. Breitbart streamed it live. According to Gizmodo, the group's website had been set up only 12 days earlier.

The video drew millions of views within hours and was reposted by President Trump and his son before Facebook, Twitter and YouTube removed it. The speech that made it go viral was Dr. Stella Immanuel's claim that hydroxychloroquine was a cure and that nobody needed a mask. Within days reporters found her earlier sermons about "demon sperm" and alien DNA, and the story became about her.

The group immediately cast the takedowns as censorship. In Canada, Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati, who went on to represent Vaccine Choice Canada and Action4Canada in their COVID lawsuits, quote-tweeted Gold's complaint that YouTube had removed the summit video, and added one word: "Criminal."

The doctors who spoke on the steps, in order, according to the published transcript, were Simone Gold, Bob Hamilton, Stella Immanuel, Dan Erickson, James Todaro and Joseph Ladapo. Psychiatrist Mark McDonald and ophthalmologist Richard Urso were also on the group's roster, and Texas pediatrician Angelina Farella was later billed as one of its frontline doctors. The next day Gold and Todaro met Vice-President Pence.

2. Scorecard: where each one ended up

"No public action found" means just that: we searched news coverage and what boards have published and found nothing. It is not a clean bill of health.

Later AFLDS figures, beyond the original summit:

3. Timeline: the significant events

Every dated event in this file in one table, oldest first. Use the menu to show one person. A date given only as a month means the sources give only the month.

Show: EveryoneGoldImmanuelLadapoEricksonTodaroMcDonaldFarellaStrandColeCullenCulverGilbertAFLDS

Criminal Harm Regulator Business Political Legal Origin

4. Who appeared where

This chart maps where the doctors met, worked together and turned up in the media. A ● means the person took part or appeared. A ○ means they were named or listed but we could not confirm they took part in person. Scroll sideways on a phone.

5. The Trump connection

AFLDS presented itself as a grassroots group of independent doctors. The record shows a steady line to Donald Trump, his family, his White House and, since 2025, his health appointees. It ran from the 2020 reopening push through the pardons to the HHS shortlist. In the strength column, "direct" means a documented meeting, endorsement, pardon, shortlisting or shared stage. "Indirect" means the link went through an organization or a third party.

Every line runs through someone in power. The three AFLDS doctors connect to one another through the 2020 summit and the tour circuit, and each of them also connects upward: to the President who promoted and pardoned them, to the Governor whose state licensed and promoted them, and to the HHS Secretary whose agency backed Florida’s vaccine moves.

Three documents put the 2020–21 links in the group's own words. The first is a "Dear Freedom Family" email blast sent the day after the summit. It complained the video had been "banned everywhere", steered readers to copies on Brighteon, and embedded Gold's tweet: "We have just met with Vice President Mike Pence to request the administration's assistance." The second is a poster for a "Freedom Rally" at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, at 300 First St NE. It billed Joey Gilbert, the Nevada lawyer who later chaired the AFLDS board and sued Gold, alongside AFLDS collaborator Kevin Jenkins, Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos (both pardoned by Trump in December 2020), and ReAwaken co-founder Clay Clark. The third is a TV news banner recording the moment Trump's own sales pitch for hydroxychloroquine met the American Medical Association's reply.

The road to January 6: AFLDS on the "Stop the Steal" bill

Gold has said she turned up at the Capitol to give a health speech and simply followed the crowd inside. AFLDS's own posts, captured before Facebook and Twitter took them down, show something else: the group spent more than a week promoting her as a speaker at the "Stop the Steal" rally, and its posts mixed vaccine claims with stolen-election claims.

28 Dec 2020. AFLDS posts on Facebook: "Dr. Gold Will Be Speaking at Stop The Steal US Rally on January 6th!" It links to WildProtest.com, the Stop the Steal coalition's site, which carried Trump's 19 December tweet: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"

Late Dec 2020. WildProtest.com lists "Dr. Simone Gold" among its invited speakers and featured guests. Others on the list included organizer Ali Alexander, Roger Stone, Reps. Paul Gosar and Lance Gooden, incoming Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, and Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots, the group that had hosted and paid for the AFLDS summit five months earlier.

1 Jan 2021. AFLDS's Facebook page, nominally a medical group's, complains that Trump's Georgia election lawsuit still has no judge.

3 Jan 2021. Gold tells a church audience in Tampa never to call the shot a vaccine but to "always use the word 'experiment'", according to The Intercept.

5 Jan 2021. AFLDS posts: "Transparency is absent in medicine, and in elections." Gold will speak "in DC today & tomorrow". The post carries the "Trump wants to see you in DC" banner for Freedom Plaza, the Ellipse and the Capitol. That afternoon, according to CNN, Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander introduced her at Freedom Plaza, and she called the vaccine an "experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine".

6 Jan 2021. Gold and Strand go to a "Rally for Health Freedom" on the Capitol's east side. Gold told the Washington Post the speeches were cancelled around 1 p.m., that she followed the crowd up the steps and inside, and that she spent about 20 minutes in the building, using some of it to give her speech in the Rotunda by megaphone as police gestured for people to leave. She insisted that where she stood it "most emphatically was not a riot." The Intercept reported that she appeared as No. 21 on the FBI's flyer of people sought for the violence at the Capitol.

11–18 Jan 2021. Gold confirmed to the Post that she was the woman with the bullhorn in the FBI photos. According to the criminal complaint, as reported, that interview helped alert federal agents. She and Strand were arrested on 18 January.

Within days. AFLDS launched an urgent "Dr. Gold needs your support" donation page. It claimed the summit video was "the most viral video of all time" and said that when she arrived on 6 January, "the event was inexplicably cancelled." Donations were for her legal costs, with anything left over going to AFLDS. Facebook posts told followers that censorship was coming and urged them to "sign up IMMEDIATELY".

Same morning, same steps. At 9 a.m. on 6 January a group called Global Frontline Nurses held a "summit" in Washington, followed at 10:30 by a press conference outside the Supreme Court with Vladimir Zelenko as "special guest". Its speakers included two Ontario nurses, Kristen Nagle and Sarah Choujounian. That afternoon a Massachusetts addiction doctor, a Los Angeles anesthesiologist and a Capitol Hill chiropractor went into the building along with Gold. Their stories are on our page Scrubs at the Capitol: The Health Professionals of January 6. See also Global Frontline Nurses and the CNO cases 🍁 and Zelenko's page.

Other findings in the same reporting:

• The Intercept named Gold as one of the 27 "extremely pro-Trump" doctors whom Republican activist Nancy Schulze proposed to the Trump campaign in 2020, the list behind our "Some assembly required" cartoon. It also reported that Gold was involved with Turning Point USA.
• The Intercept reported that Gold received more than $150,000 in three separate bailout grants in June 2020. Adventist Health Bakersfield said her last shift there was in the summer of 2020.
• CNN reported that the "MAGA Freedom Rally" near the Capitol on 6 January, the event whose poster billed future AFLDS board chair Joey Gilbert, was organized in part by a political action committee run by anti-vaccine marketers Ty and Charlene Bollinger. On stage, Charlene Bollinger told the crowd her husband had left to join the people storming the Capitol. Anti-vaccine physician Sherri Tenpenny shared Gold's post about the rally with the #StopTheSteal hashtag.

6. Profiles

7. The business model

8. The implosion

While Gold was in prison in 2022, board chairman Joseph "Joey" Gilbert, a Nevada lawyer, ran AFLDS day to day. The board audited Gold's spending. On 4 November 2022 AFLDS and Gilbert sued her in federal court in Fort Myers. They alleged she had used charity money for personal benefit, including a Naples mansion, vehicles, a housekeeper and a security detail, and that she wanted a $1.5 million signing bonus and a $600,000 salary to come back as a "fundraising consultant". Gold's side said Gilbert had known about the house and accused him of misconduct. Staff found themselves locked out of their email.

The court denied the board an emergency injunction and dismissed the suit in December 2022 for lack of jurisdiction. Gold countersued. Today the AFLDS website, Telegram channel and Supreme Court briefs all present her as founder, and the channel promotes GoldCare. TIME reported that the group's Arizona charitable registration, under the name Free Speech Foundation, was listed as "pending inactive" and that it had never filed financial disclosures.

Where to complain in the United States

If you or someone you know was harmed by a telehealth doctor, a COVID “treatment” or a misleading health ad, these are the places to report it. Anyone can file, including Canadians: I filed from Waterloo. Every agency below accepts written complaints. Be specific: give the practitioner’s full name and licence number if you have it, dates, what was said or sold, and copies of receipts, emails and screenshots. Use a separate complaint for each practitioner.

In Canada? See our guide to Canadian complaint routes: Health Canada, the Competition Bureau, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre and the provincial colleges.