Indiana doctor busted for peddling 'potentially dangerous' lies about COVID-19 to school boards

On Wednesday, the Indianapolis Starreported that Dr. Dan Stock, a physician who went viral after he spoke to the Mt. Vernon School Board about COVID-19, riddled his speech with false and misleading claims about the pandemic and the efficacy of safety measures against it.

Stock's most explosive false claim is that the COVID-19 vaccines are causing more infections, when the vast majority of experts say that increase is being caused by the more highly contagious delta variant of the disease.

"My jaw kind of hit the floor," Dr. Gabriel Bosslet, associate professor of clinical medicine in the IU school of medicine, told the Indianapolis Star. 'He looked really credible and he sounded really credible. He used language that sounded intelligent... It's just the substance of what he was saying was honestly just patently false, especially the stuff about the vaccine.'"

The Star report also examined Stock's credentials and his other controversial beliefs.

"Stock said he is a functional medicine doctor, a kind of medicine that looks for the root causes of disease and illness," said the report. "An archived version of his website shows a pre-occupation with vitamins and other alternative treatments for everything from cancer to autism. While he has an Indiana medical license, he doesn't appear to be board-certified, a higher level of medical credential, in family medicine, internal medicine or any other specialty."

Stock is one of a number of doctors who have earned fame in right-wing communities for aligning with their narrative. One such doctor in Houston, Stella Immanuel of the right-wing group America's Frontline Doctors, agreed with Trump's unproven belief in taking the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID. Immanuel also believes that modern medicine uses "alien DNA," that the government is run by lizard people, and that Americans are getting sickened by having sex with literal demons from Hell.

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