As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses , one of the logical fallacies that we can find ourselves falling victim to as we try to navigate what is true in the world is an appeal to authority. Most of the time, this concerns a non-expert essentially masquerading as one in a field that they don’t have as much expertise about as they may suggest.
After all, someone who has the right education and training should be a font of reliable information in an ideal world. However, appeals to authority can still be dangerous even when those qualifications are met because it’s not impossible for perceived authorities to either intentionally or accidentally use their position to lend credence to false information.
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Unfortunately, that’s exactly the situation we face in the case of one doctor who has been elevated to prominence by President Donald Trump despite her habit of baseless claims.
Recent events will likely make the name Dr. Stella Immanuel sound familiar to you.
As the BBC reported , she was born in Cameroon in 1965 and attained a medical degree at the University of Calabar in Nigeria before finally finding herself at the Rehoboth Medical Center in Houston, Texas.
Recently, she appeared alongside a group of physicians calling themselves America’s Frontline Doctors and claimed that face masks are not a necessary measure against the COVID-19 pandemic because she believed that hydroxychloroquine can cure the virus.
A recording of these claims has been repeatedly removed from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
The video in which she said this was retweeted by President Donald Trump, who claimed that Dr. Immanuel is a “great doctor.”
However, her claims do not reflect the most thorough medical research at this time. As the BBC reported , encouraging early studies have since been tempered by a larger scale trial that has found that hydroxychloroquine does not reduce death rates in COVID-19 patients and is not an effective treatment for the virus.
This information was cited by CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins when she pressed Trump about Immanuel’s claims that masks didn’t work and that a cure for COVID-19 exists, as well as more curious claims that alien DNA is used in medication manufacturing and that an anti-religion vaccine is under development.
This line of questioning prompted Trump to walk away from his podium and end the press conference early, but not before he made the following statement.
As he stated in CNN’s recording of the conference, “I thought she was very impressive in the sense that from where she came, and I don’t know which country she comes from, but she said that she’s had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients. And I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her.”
It’s worth noting that in addition to her work at Rehoboth Medical Center, Immanuel is also the founder of Houston’s Fire Power Ministries church.
As the BBC reported , it is in this capacity that she has claimed that medical treatments are underway that supposedly use DNA from extraterrestrials and that scientists are developing a vaccine that somehow prevents people from holding religious beliefs.
There is no evidence suggesting these claims have any basis in reality whatsoever.
In another of these sermons, Immanuel has claimed that not only do incubi and succubi exist but that they’re responsible for gynecological disease, miscarriage, and impotence.
As the BBC reported , she apparently believes they accomplish this by having sex with people via either their dreams or an astral dream world.
As Immanuel put it, “They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm… then they turn into the man and they sleep with a man and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves.”
Although her most recent statements would suggest she believes face masks are unnecessary, she has nonetheless made official recordings from the Rehoboth Medical Center wearing an N95 respirator.
In a video on the clinic’s Facebook page, she has also outlined that visitors are expected to wear a mask when they arrive.
