Anti-Vaccine Movement · COVID Misinformation

Stella Immanuel: The Doctor Who Said “There Is a Cure”

A Houston pediatrician and deliverance minister went viral on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2020. The President retweeted her. She went on to become the country's top prescriber of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and she now tells audiences the COVID vaccine is “Luciferian.”

Twenty-four hours of fame

On 27 July 2020 a group calling itself America's Frontline Doctors, organised by Simone Gold and backed by the Tea Party Patriots, held a press event on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. The “White Coat Summit” was livestreamed by Breitbart. Its most memorable speaker was Stella Immanuel, a Houston doctor few people had heard of. Standing in the same row of white coats was Dr. Joseph Ladapo, then a UCLA internist. He did not call hydroxychloroquine a cure; he argued that doctors should be free to prescribe it. Fourteen months later, Governor Ron DeSantis made him Florida's Surgeon General, and at his confirmation hearings he defended his support for the group. See the Ladapo running file.

Immanuel said hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin were “a cure for COVID.” She said she had treated more than 350 patients and lost none, and that she kept herself and her staff on hydroxychloroquine as prevention. The video drew tens of millions of views before Facebook, YouTube and Twitter removed it. President Trump retweeted it, and Donald Trump Jr. lost Twitter privileges for sharing it.

The next day, asked why he trusted a doctor who had preached about alien DNA, the President said he found her “very impressive,” while adding that he knew nothing about where she came from. Moments later he walked out of the briefing. On 31 July the Texas Medical Board issued a statement reminding physicians that there could be no “false, misleading or deceptive” claims of a cure for COVID-19.

The sermons

Within hours, The Daily Beast had gone through her sermons and videos for Fire Power Ministries, which operates from the same address as her medical practice. Among the claims they found:

• Gynecological problems such as endometriosis, cysts and infertility, along with miscarriages and impotence, are caused by sex in dreams with demonic “spirit husbands” and “spirit wives.”
• “Reptilian spirits” who are “half-human, half-ET” help rule the country (2015 sermon).
• Alien DNA is used in medical treatments, and scientists are working on a “vaccine” to stop people from being religious.
• Homosexuality is the “agenda of the Devil” and “perverted, vile behavior that is being taught to our children” (Media Matters).
• Her ministry website offered a prayer for deliverance from “generational curses” passed on through the placenta.
• “Children need to be whipped,” though she added that she did not believe they should be “abused” (2015). She was speaking as a pediatrician.

Her reaction was to thank The Daily Beast for doing “a great job summarizing our deliverance ministry,” and to offer deliverance to anyone who needed it.

Where the beliefs come from. Writing for Patheos days after the video went viral, religion scholars Andrew Chesnut and Kate Kingsbury, the latter an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta, placed Immanuel within African Pentecostal “deliverance” ministry. In that tradition, illness, infertility and misfortune are often blamed on evil spirits, and healing rites are led by pastors who need no formal training. Their conclusion was blunt: her faith “has a profound influence on her medical practice,” and the claim that her religious beliefs should be off-limits to criticism does not hold when she is treating patients. Catholic writer Mary Pezzulo, who grew up in a charismatic prayer community, made a related point from experience. Teaching people that every illness is a demon to be bound is not harmless eccentricity; it frightens the vulnerable, children most of all.

The regulator's response: $500

The Texas Medical Board investigated. Immanuel appeared before a board panel by video on 12 June 2021. On 15 October 2021 the board entered a remedial plan, its mildest formal tool, finding that she “failed to give adequate informed consent to one patient for the prescription of hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID-19.” She neither admitted nor denied the finding. She was ordered to:

• update her informed-consent document for all off-label treatments and file it with the board;
• adopt a policy requiring patients to review and sign consent forms before any off-label treatment; and
• pay a $500 administrative cost.

Texas classifies a remedial plan as non-disciplinary. One patient, one consent form and $500 was the whole response to the doctor who had told tens of millions of people that COVID had a cure and masks were unnecessary.

Seventy thousand prescriptions in a year

In March 2023, MedPage Today analysed national prescription data and found that Immanuel was the country's top prescriber of both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

Immanuel told MedPage Today the prescriptions were written “both in clinic and under the umbrella of our telemedicine service and all the doctors working for me,” and warned that her “legal team” would be in touch if the disclosure caused “negative backlash.” Her website invited visitors to “register to get Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin via a telemedicine consultation,” with the drugs shipped by small pharmacies. Experts told MedPage Today the volume was too high to be consistent with careful care and pointed to “substantial rogue and potentially dangerous prescribing.” Her X profile now says she has “Treated 100,000+ COVID-19 Patients.”

The Texas board's 2021 order covered one patient. As far as the public record shows, these prescribing numbers have never been the subject of a board action.

From “cure” to “Luciferian” vaccine

As with Zev Zelenko, the hydroxychloroquine promoter became a vaccine opponent.

Friends, platforms and a bid for HHS

• The December 2020 paper. Immanuel was a co-author, with Zev Zelenko, Joseph Ladapo, Jane Orient of AAPS and 53 others, on Peter McCullough's “sequential multidrug treatment” paper in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine. See the Zelenko page for the full network.
• ReAwaken America. In 2022 she joined the ReAwaken America tour, whose headliners included Michael Flynn and Eric Trump. A tour-linked video promoting her telemedicine site carries the promo code “Clay,” after co-founder Clay Clark.
• Media. She has appeared on The Stew Peters Show, Real America with Dan Ball (OAN), Diamond and Silk, Flyover Conservatives and Alex Stein's podcast. Twitter suspended her account in 2020, and X restored it in January 2023 after Elon Musk dropped the COVID misinformation policy.
• A run at HHS. After the November 2024 election she issued a news release saying she had been “nominated to join the Trump administration” at the Department of Health and Human Services, and urged followers to “vote” for her to join Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s team. No appointment followed.
• Back on the steps. In August 2025 she posted video of herself speaking at a “Health Freedom Summit” on the Supreme Court steps: “Five years later.”

In court: Immanuel v. CNN

In 2022 Immanuel sued CNN for $100 million, claiming the network had portrayed her as unfit to practise and a peddler of dangerous disinformation. CNN had the case moved to federal court in Houston. On 1 August 2022, Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal dismissed it, finding that CNN's statements were not false, were protected opinion, were fair comment on a matter of public concern, or were made without actual malice (Immanuel v. Cable News Network, Inc., No. 4:22-cv-02031, S.D. Tex.).

She has also been on the receiving end of a lawsuit. According to the Shreveport Times (31 July 2020) and Business Insider, the family of a Mansfield, Louisiana, mother who died in 2019, shortly after being in Immanuel's care, filed a malpractice suit, alleging she failed to remove a broken needle fragment from the patient's arm. The paper reported that deputies could not serve her because she had moved to Texas. QuackeryWatch has not found a public record of the outcome.

The pediatrician question

Immanuel describes herself as a pediatrician. Her prescribing records show prophylaxis offered to all comers. She has preached that children need whipping and that infertility comes from demons, and she now tells parents that a vaccine recommended for children is a satanic tool. Through all of it, the only formal finding against her in Texas concerns one adult patient's consent form.

That gap between what a doctor says to millions and what a regulator will act on is the story of the COVID misinformation years. It isn't confined to Texas: the same pattern appears in the worldwide ivermectin discipline record and in Canada's colleges.

Sources

1. Texas Medical Board, Remedial Plan, In the Matter of Stella Gwandiku-Ambe Immanuel, M.D., Licence S3994, entered 15 October 2021; TMB statement on COVID-19 treatment claims, 31 July 2020 (reported by Becker's Hospital Review and The Texan).
2. Houston Chronicle, “Texas Medical Board takes ‘corrective action’ against Dr. Stella Immanuel over hydroxychloroquine prescription for COVID patient,” 1–2 November 2021; KHOU/KVUE, Daily Beast, Yahoo News coverage, November 2021.
3. MedPage Today, analysis of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin prescribers, March 2023 (summarised by the University of Nebraska Medical Center, 14 March 2023).
4. Will Sommer, The Daily Beast, 28 July 2020 (sermons); The Daily Beast, January 2022 (“Luciferian” vaccine); TRT World, SBS News/AFP, CNN, July 2020; Religion News Service, 29 July 2020.
5. On Ladapo at the summit: The Daily Beast, October 2021; Science-Based Medicine, 2021; coverage of his Florida Senate confirmation hearings (via inkl).
6. Coverage of the 27 July 2020 “White Coat Summit” and the 28 July 2020 White House briefing: KTLA/Nexstar, Fox4KC, The London Economic, Media Matters.
7. Right Wing Watch, as reported by Raw Story and Joe.My.God (clone and “666” claims); Charisma News, “Christian Frontline Doctor Talks COVID-19 Vaccine from a Spiritual Perspective.”
8. Mark Wingfield, “Stella Immanuel is campaigning to join RFK Jr.'s team at HHS,” Baptist News Global, 18 November 2024.
9. Jackson Walker LLP, “Texas Federal Court Dismisses Doctor's $100M Defamation Suit Against CNN,” 25 October 2022; Immanuel v. Cable News Network, Inc., No. 4:22-cv-02031 (S.D. Tex., dismissed 1 August 2022).
10. Andrew Chesnut & Kate Kingsbury, “‘God's Battle Axe and Weapon of War’ – The African Pentecostalism of Trump's COVID Doctor, Pastor Stella Immanuel,” Patheos (The Global Catholic Review), 30 July 2020.
11. Mary Pezzulo, “Saint Therese, Stella Immanuel and the Charismatic Renewal,” Patheos (Steel Magnificat), 3 August 2020.
12. Media Matters, “Trump-promoted Dr. Stella Immanuel said homosexuality is the ‘agenda of the Devil,’” July 2020.
13. Shreveport Times, report on the malpractice suit by a Mansfield, Louisiana, family, 31 July 2020; Business Insider, July 2020 (both linked in the Chesnut and Pezzulo articles).
14. The Town Talk (Alexandria, LA), as cited by Grey Faction (Louisiana practice).
15. P.A. McCullough et al., Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine 21(4):517–530, 30 December 2020.
16. IMDb listings for Stella Immanuel (media appearances); her X profile, @stella_immanuel (accessed November 2026).