A doctor whose false claims that COVID-19 vaccines could magnetize you (and that this was also somehow connected to 5G cell towers) has lost her medical license. The State Medical Board of Ohio decided that Dr. Sherri Tenpenny’s license should be suspended indefinitely due to her refusal to cooperate with its investigation into more than 350 complaints against her.
Tenpenny’s July 2021 testimony in front of Ohio legislators made headlines because of how bananas in the belfry her claims were, including her statements that videos of people claiming to be magnetized by vaccines were real evidence. "You can put a key on their forehead, it sticks,” she said with a straight face. “You can put spoons and forks all over and they can stick because now we think there is a metal piece to that.”
And while the board’s indefinite suspension of Tenpenny’s license was not directly tied to her erroneous claims, the report released with the decision includes a lot of unanswered questions regarding proclamations Tenpenny has made in her capacity as a medical professional over the years.
Some of the questions still lingering in the wake of Tenpenny’s investigation include:
“The Interrogatories asked for information regarding Dr. Tenpenny’s practice in general as well as asking specifically about her practice regarding recommendations concerning, and administration of, vaccines and whether any of her patients subsequently contracted certain illnesses. The Interrogatories also specifically ask how many doses of COVID-19 vaccines she had provided and whether she had personally received a COVID-19 vaccine. ”
And:
“The Interrogatories also asked Dr. Tenpenny what scientific evidence she had, and specifically asked that she cite her sources for this evidence, regarding COVID-19 vaccines causing people to become magnetized or creating an interface with 5G towers; regarding the COVID-19 vaccine not injecting a real virus but strips of genetic material and patients suffering complications such as abnormal bleedings, myocarditis, strokes, and neurological complications; and regarding some major metropolitan areas liquifying dead bodies and pouring them into the water supply.”
One of the board members, Dr. Amol Soin, explained the decision in language even a person with a spoon stuck to their forehead can understand.
“The license to practice medicine is not a right. It’s a privilege,” Soin said. “A privilege that is earned, and a privilege that you have to uphold. And as you get that license, and as you obtain that privilege, you consent to certain reasonable things. And a reasonable thing you consent to... is to cooperate when someone complains about you. In this case, 350 complaints. It is a very reasonable thing to cooperate in that scenario.”
The Trump administration’s botching of our public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as an epic failure. After spending a year trying to figure out how to blame the pandemic on everybody and everything and even helping to promote the idea that it wasn’t that bad in the first place, Trump realized that the only success his administration might be able to hang its hat on was getting an effective and safe vaccine to Americans in under a year.
Unfortunately for Trump and the Republican Party, the toxic cauldron of anti-science rhetoric and bad public health proposals meant they had trained the most vociferous members of their voting base to be anti-vaccine. In the months after the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were rolled out, anti-vaxxers made all kinds of unsubstantiated claims, and Tenpenny’s wild accusations were just one of the more headline-grabbing instances.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
