AZ lawmakers invited to COVID event health ‘experts’ who have spread medical conspiracies

Arizona GOP lawmakers heard hours of comments Thursday from a series of doctors, lawyers and other people known for disputing the use of vaccines and other public health measures to combat COVID-19 infections.

No representatives from hospitals or public health agencies that were involved with the response to COVID-19 are scheduled during the two-day Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee event, which continues Friday.

The committee is chaired by state Sen. Janae Shamp, R-Surprise, a registered nurse who has said she lost a nursing job because she refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

The vice chair of the group is T.J. Shope, a Republican from Coolidge who previously co-owned a family business, Shope’s IGA Supermarket. The other member of the committee is state Rep. Steve Montenegro, R-Goodyear.

The six-member committee includes three U.S. Republican members of Congress from Arizona: Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs and Eli Crane.

Facing a debt-ceiling debate in Washington, D.C., the three were not present Thursday.

Gosar provided prerecorded comments that were shown at the event, and spokespeople for Biggs and Crane said those Congress members also provided such remarks to be shown at some point during the event.

Joining the committee Thursday were cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, who earned a reputation for spreading misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Dr. George Fareed, who publicly promoted the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, though they were never authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as effective treatments.

The other person at Thursday’s event was Dr. Lela Lewis, an Arizona obstetrician/gynecologist who is part of a group called the Liberty and Health Alliance, which she told the committee helped people get religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Writing about the event Thursday, Rolling Stone noted that Lewis produced a YouTube video where she described the public health response to the pandemic as “Satan’s Wholistic Healthcare Plan.”

Event name, sponsor have ties to QAnon

The event has been labeled as a callout to people who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories because of its name and it is partially funded by The America Project, which Montenegro works for. He listed the political nonprofit on his financial disclosure form last year.

The America Project has promoted a host of unfounded conspiracies about elections. Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and Mike Flynn, once national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, founded the group.

Flynn had his Twitter account suspended when the social media platform cut access to people spreading QAnon conspiracies after the storming of the U.S Capitol.

The official committee name would properly be abbreviated NCSIC, because “southwestern” is one word, not two. But when Shamp tweeted out an America Project flyer for the event, she included the acronym “NCSWIC” in her message. NCSWIC is a common slogan used by QAnon.

Officials from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and a researcher from Arizona State University noted that the bizarre name of the committee appeared to be a call out to QAnon believers.

Within the QAnon movement, the acronym “NCSWIC” stands for “nothing can stop what is coming” and is used as a reference for the end of the “deep state” that former President Donald Trump will supposedly bring about. All three state lawmakers involved declined to answer questions about who named the committee and whether they followed the QAnon movement.

Shamp told Thursday’s meeting that some speakers from the medical community who were scheduled to speak at the event had to cancel “because they had concerns about malpractice insurance being collateral damage for participation here today.”

There was a large loss of life during COVID-19 that Shamp characterized as “largely unavoidable,” as well as an “unnecessary loss” of livelihoods and freedom during the pandemic, Shamp said.

Shamp also said she has never been tested for COVID-19 because she was worried about getting injured by putting a swab so far up her nose. But she said she has had symptoms consistent with a COVID-19 infection, she said.

“People have been canceled, people have been silenced and people have had their livelihoods threatened and their livelihoods lost, all in pursuit of standing up for what they believe to be true and right. I find it so saddening that these things are still happening,” she said.

Montenegro told the committee, as well as dozens of members of the public who attended, that masking and vaccination requirements did not respect individuals’ personal beliefs or medical autonomy. He referred to social distancing by using air quotes, which drew laughter.

“Many of us are asking, did we give up too much during this time?” Montenegro said, as choruses of “yes” came from several in attendance. “Did we give up too much of our personal independence? That was a rhetorical question…Did we let fear and the unknown not only influence the choices we made but also influence our very ability to make those choices? All too often, this is what happened during that time.”

As of May 20, 33,502 Arizonans had lost their lives to COVID-19 according to data from the Arizona Department of Health Services and Arizona by several measures has had one of the worst COVID-19 death rates in the country.

 A study published March 23 in The Lancet found that Arizona had the highest cumulative standardized COVID-19 death rate in the U.S. for a period between Jan. 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022. The study standardized death rates by adjusting for each state’s age profile and the prevalence of chronic health conditions such as cancer, diabetes and smoking rates. Authors of the study included researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Better management of the pandemic in Arizona, including human behavior, could have saved up to half the lives that were lost to COVID-19, said Dr. Bob England, who is interim director of The Arizona Partnership for Immunization and said he was not invited to speak at the GOP event.

England said misinformation about vaccines and masks cost lives and created a “preventable national tragedy” caused by politics.

“If you look at our death rate compared to other states in the pandemic. Without much more economic cost I think half of the deaths could have been prevented,” England said. “We’re up over 33,000 deaths. … At least 10,000 probably closer to half (could have been prevented) had politics not been played. If it’s half the deaths, it’s half the hospitalizations, half the trauma. It’s so frustrating to me.”

The America Project solicits donations from event

Even though the Arizona Legislature offered a free webcast of the hearing, The America Project, which paid for the travel and accommodations of the speakers, also provided a webcast on its site, complete with a link to donate to the group.

Byrne, who was a major donor to the Arizona Senate GOP “audit” of the 2020 election, said his aim was not to raise money off the event.

“In general, these are at best breakeven events for us,” he texted The Arizona Republic. “Are you kidding You’re writing about them as if we’re there, making money off them. We simply aim to educate the public and defray as much of our expense as we could with the meeting.”

During the interlude for lunch, The America Project showed various promotional videos on its webcast. That included a discussion with men affiliated with an Oregon group called Citizens Restoring Liberty that protested various COVID mitigation efforts in their state, including protesting at the Bandon Dunes golf course.

After that they showed footage of former President Donald Trump discussing the federal Right to Try Act, signed in 2018 allowing patients access to experimental treatments.

Arizona Democrats also attempted to raise funds off the event, sending a solicitation during the hearing and calling it an “unbelievable waste of resources.”

“This committee should consist of actual doctors, scientists, and public health experts. Instead, it’s a group of misinformation-peddling opportunists looking to pander,” the email solicitation said.

Lawmakers intend to propose changes in law

Shamp said Thursday at the meeting that she intends to propose legislation to mitigate public harm should Arizona ever experience another, similar pandemic.

The Arizona Legislature already has limited the type of government response allowed to a pandemic with a law Gov. Doug Ducey signed last year.

Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale, sponsored Senate Bill 1009, because she was troubled by governors who used their emergency powers during the pandemic to impose restrictions that had no clear end date.

Shamp and Montenegro asked how state officials could prevent federal overreach in another pandemic.

McCullough on Thursday suggested Arizona consider restraining medical boards to allow doctors more freedom when treating patients as they see fit.

Speakers disparage vaccines

The speakers, including McCullough, spent much of the day disparaging COVID-19 vaccines, as they have at previous appearances.

Montenegro shared a story of falling ill with COVID-19 in 2021 and, despite treating himself with vitamins and hydroxychloroquine, he wound up in the hospital. He said the doctor was rude to him because Montenegro was not vaccinated, and sent him home.

“She popped her head in. She says you have COVID pneumonia. You need to go home. If you make it out of this maybe you will think about getting vaccinated,” he said, to gasps from the audience.

Despite ending up with blood clots in his lungs he survived, he said.

Fareed suggested that perhaps Montenegro got so ill because he wasn’t taking the proper dose of hydroxychloroquine. McCullough said Montenegro’s story provides many teaching points, and suggested that had he gotten a COVID-19 vaccine after that affair it might have killed him.

In any risk benefit analyses, the risks of the COVID-19 vaccine have far outweighed any harms it might cause, England said. And he said deaths from the omicron variant would have been much lower had more people received a booster dose.

“The vaccine is spectacular,” he said. “In January of 2022 in Arizona, that month with Arizona Department of Health Services data, if you were fully vaxxed and boosted you were at 1/180th at risk of dying as if you weren’t vaccinated at all.”

“We are incredibly fortunate to live in era where within a year we pumped out a vaccine for a pandemic and that’s going to happen again the next time. But we also live in an era where we are so divided that people are willing to further conspiracies and cause people to take risks to their lives for political purposes.”

Reach health care reporter Stephanie Innes at Stephanie.Innes@gannett.com or at 602-444-8369. Follow her on Twitter @stephanieinnes.