Anderson Cooper calls Trump a 'snake oil salesman' for touting doctor who believes in 'demon sperm'
Anderson Cooper immediately laid into President Donald Trump on Anderson Cooper 360 Tuesday night for, once again, pushing hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the coronavirus, despite numerous studies showing otherwise, including a recent study from the New England Journal of Medicine. Also, the Food and Drug Administration revoked the emergency authorization for the drug in June.
Said Cooper: “149,000 Americans are dead, which this self-proclaimed wartime president again did not mention in his prepared remarks that he was reading off that paper. And like a snake oil salesman, he’s still promoting disproven medical treatments. It is unconscionable.”
Monday night, Trump retweeted a video of Dr. Stella Immanuel touting hydroxychloroquine and discouraging people from wearing masks. The video was eventually removed from Twitter and Facebook, after amassing millions of views, for violating their policies against spreading COVID-19 disinformation. As Cooper pointed out, Immanuel believes a lot of things that are not accepted by the scientific community.
“The president is now promoting a doctor whose viral video has been very popular suddenly among QAnon conspiracy theorists and COVID deniers,” Cooper said. “She’s a doctor from Houston who also believes that women can be physically impregnated by witches in their dreams.”
Cooper not only played a video of Immanuel saying just that, in another video Cooper showed, she claimed that a woman at her ministry had gotten pregnant simply by fantasizing about a movie star.
An article by The Daily Beast outlined some of Immanuel’s beliefs, including that alien DNA is currently being used in medical treatments, scientists are working on a vaccine to keep people from being religious, and the government is run in part by “reptilians” and other aliens. Immanuel thanked The Daily Beast for summarizing her ministry and “exposing incubus and succubus.”
Still, at a press conference earlier on Tuesday, Trump doubled down on his support for Immanuel.
“She was on air along with many other doctors. They were big fans of hydroxychloroquine,” Trump said, “and I thought she was very impressive in the sense that from where she came — I don’t know which country she comes from — but she said she’s had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients, and I thought her voice was an important voice…” And despite tweeting out Dr. Immanuel’s claims to his roughly 84 million Twitter followers, Trump finished with, “but I know nothing about her.”
Cooper believes that Trump is simply willing to overlook some of Immanuel’s wilder beliefs because she’s touting the drug that he once pushed so hard.
“Dr. Immanuel apparently believes that lusting after movie stars can conjure demons that can make women physically pregnant with demon babies by impregnating them in their dreams,” Cooper said. “Again, this evening, the leader of the free world, overseeing the singularly failed response to the pandemic, retweeting her claims about a disproven drug therapy, praising her for essentially agreeing with his nonscientific gut beliefs.”
Anderson Cooper 360 airs weeknights at 8 p.m. on CNN.
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