Fact Check: 19,000 Doctors Were NOT Indicted for ‘COVID Crimes’
Did an unnamed source with the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) disclose to Real Raw News that there are about 19,000 sealed indictments held on U.S. physicians and medical staff for criminally coercing patients to get the COVID-19 vaccine in an unlawful and unethical partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)? No, that’s not true: This baseless article is fiction from a website that “on the advice on legal counsel,” has a disclaimer stating “this website contains humor, parody, and satire.” This website has published many fabricated stories that include secret sources, sealed indictments, military tribunals and people being held or executed at Guantánamo Bay. This COVID crimes indictments article is yet another fictional narrative.
The story appeared in an article published by Real Raw News on July 16, 2023, titled “19,000 Doctors Indicted for Covid Crimes” (archived here). It opened:
The next time you need an annual physical, you may have to schedule an appointment with the receptionist at Guantanamo Bay. There are approximately one million practicing physicians in the United States, and the United States Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps is holding sealed indictments on about 19,000 of them–general physicians, specialists, surgeons, emergency room, and urgent care staff.
This is how the article appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: realrawnews.com screenshot taken on Tue Jul 18 17:29:47 2023 UTC)
The article continues:
A JAG source familiar with the indictments told Real Raw News that the indicted doctors took part in an unethical and unlawful partnership with the CDC and NIH during the Covid Plandemic. The CDC/NIH incentivized the offending physicians to coerce patients to get vaxxed even if the patients remonstrated against the potentially lethal jab. Health professionals were encouraged to do everything short of physically striking a patient to win compliance.
A search for the title of this article (archived here) produces duplicate copies of the article republished on sites such as rumormillnews.com, trusttheq.com and bestnewshere.com. There is no publicly available information to back this unverifiable claim dependent on a secret source and sealed indictments.
It’s true there have been a number of physicians charged with a variety of pandemic-related crimes, but the crimes described by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) do not match the specific details, nor the number of physicians involved in the purported “Scamdemic” crime presented in this Real Raw News story.
On April 20, 2023, the DOJ issued a press release about a “Nationwide Coordinated Law Enforcement Action to Combat COVID-19 Health Care Fraud” (summary of charges here). Similar summaries of charges filed by the DOJ were also published in previous years on May 26, 2021, and April 20, 2022. These list crimes such as fraud schemes involving false billing from federal health care programs, billing for additional and unnecessary testing, fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan applications, plus selling forged COVID vaccination record cards. On July 11, 2023, a doctor and son were sentenced in California for hoarding and price-gouging N95 respirator masks.
The DOJ has a searchable database of entries about coronavirus fraud cases, most involving people who were not in the medical field; there are currently 2,087 entries (each not necessarily representing an individual case) in the database.
Real Raw News
Real Raw News is a website that consistently publishes made-up stories about U.S. politics. The well-written English and news-style layout of the website make it look like a legitimate news source, so it often fools people into believing the stories are real. Screenshots and copies of the stories regularly turn up on other websites or on social media where they are presented as real.
It bills itself as “humor, parody and satire” on its “about” page (archived here):
Disclaimer:
Information on this website is for informational and educational and entertainment purposes. This website contains humor, parody, and satire. We have included this disclaimer for our protection, on the advice on legal counsel.
The same “about” page claims the main author is a man named Michael Baxter. In 2021 a PolitiFact article (archived here) identified the writer as a “Michael Tuffin” in Texas based on records found in a GoFundMe campaign set up to support the site.
NewsGuard, a tool that provides credibility ratings for websites, published a five-page PDF report (archived here) in 2021 describing realrawnews.com as, “An anonymously run website that has published baseless and debunked conspiracies about COVID-19 and U.S. politics.” It cautioned that the website severely violates basic journalistic standards.”
Lead Stories has covered claims published by Real Raw News in the past. Previous Lead Stories debunks of Real Raw News items are collected here.
This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Lead Stories can be found here.
