A new report from Vice News documents how a "fringe" anti-vaccination group has succeeded in getting Republican state legislators to push bills that the website says are "stuffed with misinformation and conspiratorial language."
In total, Vice News has found that GOP state lawmakers in Wyoming, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and South Carolina have pitched legislation that uses very similar language to model legislation crafted by a group called America's Frontline Doctors, which the publication describes as "a pseudo-medical collection of physicians and not-at-all-physicians devoted to spreading the worst possible information about COVID."
The group's model legislation explicitly seeks to ban so-called "vaccine passports," and also bars employers -- including hospitals -- from forcing their workers to get vaccinated as a precondition of doing their jobs.
America's Frontline Doctors last year gained public notoriety when it held a press conference that featured Dr. Stella Immanuel, a hydroxychloroquine-promoting physician who has made bizarre claims about women getting sick from having sexual relations with demons, while also making demands that Dr. Anthony Fauci provide her with a personal sample of his own urine.
Read the whole Vice News report on the group's efforts to influence lawmakers here.