One video that has been circulating on social media features a Montana physician named Dr. Annie Bukacek questioning the number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States (more than 26,000, as of Wednesday, April 15th).
Brandishing a stethoscope and white lab coat, she argues that the CDC is encouraging medical examiners to erroneously report COVID-19 as a cause of death in many cases, arguing that the actual cause of death in many cases may have been an underlying health condition. “Testing positive for COVID-19 does not mean a person is sick with it or, if the person died, that they died from it,” Bukacek says before concluding with a grand flourish, “based on inaccurate, incomplete data, people are being terrorized by fearmongers into relinquishing … freedoms.”
The video has been reposted on numerous far-right websites, including Zero Hedge and InfoWars. The channel posting this video, which has garnered nearly 800,000 views, is not a purveyor of legitimate medical or scientific information — it’s a religious organization, specifically the Liberty Fellowship, which describes itself as a “non-501(c)3 fellowship of patriot believers” and is run by Chuck Baldwin, a
far-right extremist and former presidential candidate for the antigovernment, anti-LGBTQ Constitution Party.
According to Rachel Carroll Rivas, the co-director of the Montana Human Rights Network, the Liberty Fellowship has been regularly congregating at a hotel in direct opposition to Gov. Steve Bullock’s stay-at-home
directive, and has been rallying against the government lockdown. (Another video, posted three weeks ago, describes COVID-19 in the title as “a pretext for civil tyranny.”)
Dr. Annie Bukacek is not an unfamiliar figure in the far right. The head of the Montana Pro-Life Coalition, Bukacek is well-known for bringing tiny plastic fetuses to the state legislature; in 2009, she was
under investigation for Medicaid fraud following complaints that she had submitted reimbursements for time spent praying with patients. (Bukacek did not return a request for comment.)