Another Member of WND's Fringe-Right Medical Corps

Marilyn Singleton is one more member of the fringe-right Association of American Physicians and Surgeons whom WorldNetDaily has given a platform to peddle dubious medical advice about coronavirus.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 4/26/2021

Marilyn Singleton

Singleton was a early pusher of hydroxychloroquine; in a March 2020 column, she touted small anecdotal studies claiming effectiveness and demanded that the FDA "do [its] job" and "approve hydroxychloroquine now for COVID-19." In her April 9 column, she downplayed the threat of coronavirus and insisted the lockdown to slow the virus' spread is worse:

Every day 7,400 people die in the United States from many causes, including infectious diseases, but running totals are not broadcast on every medium. The unceasing barrage of news programs about the coronavirus/COVID-19 have become a means to whip us into submission.

[...]

Ending the lockdown is not about Wall Street or disregard for people's lives; it about saving lives. Advanced stages of non-COVID diseases, suicides, domestic violence, increase in substance abuse and mental health disorders, permanent poverty and dissolution of the middle class are unacceptable. Our society must not be fractured into those who live in gated communities and those who live in the streets, trailer parks and decaying homes they can no longer afford to keep up.

Singleton proved her AAPS and WND bona fides with taking the conspiracy route in her April 27 column:

It seems like some folks have used the ghost of Ernesto "Ché" Guevara as their guide through the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States. Said Ché: "To send men to the firing squad [job loss, suicide, substance abuse], judicial [scientific] proof is unnecessary. … This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate [of President Trump]."

Apparently, Ché was on to something. Forty-three percent of U.S. adults and 52 percent of low-income adults say they or someone in their household has lost a job or taken a pay cut due to the outbreak. How can any American stuck at home not be disgusted by politicians who are still collecting their full paychecks while the middle class and working poor descend into an abyss?

[...]

COVID-19's angel of death spares most people: 80 percent of COVID-19 deaths occurred among persons aged 60 years and over; about 25 percent of all deaths were sick and elderly residents of long-term care facilities; nearly 90 percent of persons hospitalized have one or more underlying medical conditions. Oddly, the CDC is boosting the official death toll by including not only people who died due to COVID-19 but those who died of other causes and had the virus that causes COVID-19 in their system.

[...]

This epidemic has become the opportunity to change the U.S. from a free, energetic, resourceful individualistic society to an authoritarian, collectivist society of broken souls addicted to government largesse. To wit, a Los Angeles version of wealth redistribution: People can't work so they can't pay their rent. The mom and pop landlords can't pay their property taxes. The city then buys the "distressed" properties from desperate landlords at cut-rate prices and turns them over to the homeless.

Ché would be proud.

Singleton kept up that conspiratorial attitude in her June 2 column:

COVID-19 is a handy justification for Congress to promote a political ideology rather than propose targeted measures to assist those struggling with the consequences of the virus.

[...]

The government has been known to abuse its power – whether through cultivating fear, regulatory force, or by individual miscreants. Frederick Douglass= warned, "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

We cannot let a declaration of a public health emergency become the new gauge of what it takes to break our spirit of liberty.

Singleton stayed in conspiracy mode for her July 16 column, moving from the Ché card to playing the Lenin card:

Vladimir Lenin recognized that the media are propagandists and their information presented should be "easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive." With COVID-19, the media create irrational fear with daily charts of deaths and case numbers without corresponding recoveries. They fail to mention that many deaths were of patients with serious underlying conditions or who were already in hospice, had weeks to live and coincidentally tested positive. The raw numbers are unaccompanied by the CDC's instruction to classify a death as COVID-19 even if merely suspected or, in some cases, with a negative test. There is no corresponding warning with blinking lights that the tests have false positives or that the daily report of "increases" includes old tests that were not previously reported.

As Lenin noted, "ideas are much more fatal than guns." Thus, where propaganda and media bias do not succeed, censorship will. Currently, a vocal physician is being silenced and investigated for questioning the motives and possible over-reporting of COVID-19 as the cause of death. Censorship is our polite version of "disappearing" dissidents.

That "vocal physician" is actually a Minnesota state senator -- who is also an anti-vaxxer -- who spread the Singleton-endorsed conspiracy theory that a state’s allocation of federal funds depended on the number of COVID-19 deaths in the state.

Singleton stayed in conspiracy mode, stating that "Censorship, corrupt scientific inquiry and media bias have no place in medicine," then asserting that "lockdowns in Western Europe had no effect on COVID-19 deaths" and that "Most reviews conclude that masks do not slow down the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus." Actually, most masks are effective at blocking the virus.

And it wouldn't be an AAPS column without an obsession over hydroxychloroquine, which Singleton declared that "had been favorably studied during the 2003 SARS epidemic." (Earth to Singleton: COVID-19 is not the 2003 SARS virus.)She touted how "Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital's large three-month observational study that showed a significant reduction in mortality in hospitalized patients with HCQ and validated HCQ's more-than-60-year record of safety garnered little media attention"; in fact, experts have pointed out that the Henry Ford study is flawed because it was an observational study that lacked a randomized control group.

Singleton concluded with another conspiracy theory:

These (purposefully) chaotic times are an opportunity for a movement toward government control and the suppression of individuality. Lockdowns keep us apart and stifle the free exchange of ideas and social communion. As Eric Hoffer explained in "True Believer," a mass movement deliberately makes the present "mean and miserable. … People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident." Becoming a psychological cripple is not an option.

Is this chaos a new form of plastic surgery? When the bandages (masks) are removed will you be a changed person?

In her Aug. 3 column, Singleton stayed in hydroxychloroquine conspiracy mode:

Concurrently, physicians trying to save their patients' lives are being "canceled." YouTube removed as "misinformation" videos of the physicians who advocated for the use of hydroxychloroquine for early treatment of COVID-19, based on their extensive personal as well as treatment successes. Hydroxychloroquine is an FDA-approved medication with a 65 year history of safety.

With all the garbage on Twitter, the removal of the physicians' video based on the justification that it did not comport with World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations seems extreme. Recall that WHO also did not recommend wearing masks, the new Holy Grail of COVID-19 prevention. And are we to believe the same crowd who excoriated President Trump as racist for blocking travel from China at the end of January while they were encouraging people to frolic in crowded Chinatown in late February?

The physicians she's referring to here are the ones representing a right-wing who appeared in front of the Supreme Court to make a video -- the lead person of which believes that gynecological problems are caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches and has pushed conspiracy theories that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious and that the government is run by aliens and "reptilians."

(Also: Just because hydroxychloroquine has a "65 year history of safety" doesn't mean it's safe and effective against COVID-19.)

Singleton also invoked Attorney General William Barr's grilling before a congressional committee, which caused her into again going into the Soviet version of the Godwin rule by claiming that questioning from "unfriendly lawmakers" she doesn't like "officially crosses into Stalin's henchman's 'show me the man and I'll show you his crime' territory." She then ranted:

The vitriol and disregard for fact-finding on the part of members of Congress and the dissembling on the part of the social media giants leaves one wondering: Do the people who savaged Attorney General Barr and gave Big Tech a pass want people to live in fear of living life? Do they want people to be unemployed and dependent of the government for survival? Do they want children to stay home from school and regress from normal childhood development? Do they want the country's economic boom to remain in the rear view mirror? Would they allow people to needlessly die in order to gain political power?

The "allow people to needlessly die" claim was linked to a July 27 WND column by fellow AAPSer and HCQ conspiracy-monger Elizabeth Lee Vliet, who cited the dubious Henry Ford study to assert that "we can reasonably consider that 16,000 lives could have been saved since July 1" if HCQ had been approved by the FDA.

The italics-happy Vliet echoed Singleton by ranting that "It is appalling that so many more Americans have died, while the physician who is head of the FDA has dawdled on approving HCQ for an urgent new use in this pandemic. Dr. Hahn knows full well the 65-year track record of safety worldwide in patients of all ages, all ethnic groups, and even pregnant women and nursing mothers."

Imaginary "censorship"

Singleton's Dec. 24 column is headlined "The names of early COVID treatments had to be censored from this column." Which is strange, since WND is not known for censoring its writers -- heck, it can't even be bothered to fact-check them (which is likely to earn it a lawsuit in the very near future).

Much of Singleton's column is filled with the usual blather about unproven coronavirus treatments. So what's different that purportedly got her "censored" this time? Well, in one paragraph she wrote, "Billions of doses of [censored] and [censored] have been safely used for over 50 years. Repurposing anti-parasitics as antivirals certainly is not out of the realm of medical innovation."

The link to the first "censored" goes to a study touting hydroxychloroquine -- a drug Singleton has long promoted. The second is a link to a study about another drug touted as a coronavirus treatment, ivermectin. That drug has been promoted by name in other WND columns -- including a Jan. 15 column by Singleton herself.

Singleton later wrote:

The COVID horse is out of the barn. We need to tame it. Let's start by educating patients, influencers and policymakers about early treatment with [censored] and preventive measures such as [censored] and the proven uselessness, arbitrariness and social and economic costs of [censored] that serve to make "poor people poorer" and erode trust in public health officials.

The final "censored" link goes to a study from last August claiming that lockdowns and mask mandates don't reduce coronavirus transmission rates or deaths. Given that rates and deaths have skyrocketed since then after initial lockdowns and mask mandates were lifted, it's likely no longer valid. Further, Singleton's claim that lockdowns and mandates "erode trust in public health officials" is disingenuous, since she's trying to foment that erosion of trust.

At no point did Singleton tell readers who, exactly, was "censoring" her.

It's highly unlikely that anyone actually "censored" Singleton -- that's not how WND rolls. Her claim was nothing more than a lie and a gimmick to get people to read her column and try to overlook the fact that she was simply peddling the same right-wing conspiratorial hooey she's been dishing out for months.

Speaking of trust: Such a stunt is a textbook example of how one erodes public trust in oneself.

Yep, she's a true AAPS member and WND columnist.

Still ranting

Singleton ranted further in her Feb. 11 column:

Enter pandemic, stage left. Politicians have used COVID not as an enemy, but an ally. After driving us to be preoccupied with our fear of COVID, the government is working its magic. Mask up and lock down! Why? Where's the data? Don't ask. Just comply. Now instead of the ancient emperors installing local overlords, the powerful have frightened people into spying on neighbors to root out maskless faces and those who dare cultivate their friendships.

[...]

The triple-masked Dr. Anthony "there's no reason to be walking around with a mask" Fauci continues to recommend that we do nothing for early symptoms of COVID-19, even though by now we understand the process of how COVID-19 makes people sick. For months, physicians have been speaking out about their success with early treatment of COVID with inexpensive, readily accessible existing medications based on science. Their recommendations have been largely ignored in favor of big pharma's expensive drugs and vaccines. Waiting months for completion of mass vaccination does not help those who are currently ill. Worse yet, some have accused these doctors of experimenting on patients. However, our Hippocratic Oath compels us to treat patients with available, safe medicines rather than sit idly by and watch them die. (I would argue it is safer to repurpose drugs that have been around for 50 years than use a vaccine that has only been tested for several months.)

Vigorous open debate – not reeducation camps – is the answer to dealing with difficult issues. A difference of opinion does not merit name-calling or having scientific Senate testimony removed from public view by YouTube as "misinformation."

Yes, Marilyn, if you are giving an unapproved drug to people -- and hydroxychloroquine has still not been shown to be an effective treatment for coronavirus in genuine medical research -- you are, in fact, experimenting on them.

Singleton then huffed: "Fomenting societal conflict as a means of control used to be done in secret. With complicit media, in plain sight the power brokers have used COVID their advantage. Physicians are added to the list of divided tribes: Fauci's good soldiers versus the medical-political exiles (aka resourceful thinkers without conflicts of interest or financial ties to big pharma)." Singleton's name-calling and baseless attacks show she's the one who's afraid of vigorous open debate.

In her March 29 column, Singleton lashed out at the "federal medical bureaucracy" for its response to the pandemic, claiming that it "has resulted in a wasteland of lost economic and educational opportunities, psychologically damaged children, terminally lonely nursing home residents and lives lost to suicide, illicit drug overdoses and missed diagnoses." In fact, suicide rates in the U.S. declined over the past year.

Singleton then asserted: "So why were children barred from attending school? To protect Grandma. Even if children were found to be transmitters of disease – they haven't been – a sensible alternative to depriving all students of a proper education and social life would have been to ask children whether elders lived in their homes. If so, that group could have been provided with educational accommodations. But the way of bureaucracy is all or none with no room for individual considerations." Actually, children are much more likely than older adults to infect other family members.

Singleton went on to serve up another attack on Fauci -- and, of course, invoked her favorite dubious coronavirus treatments in the process:

With the media's help, the public health gurus waged a campaign of fear to keep us in line while we waited for Dr. Fauci's solution: vaccines. One of the medical bureaucracy's biggest (intentional) missteps was the failure to support early treatment of COVID. They told us to stay home until we couldn't breathe. Of course, at that point the virus has overwhelmed the body. The scientific elite maligned study after study and thousands of clinical successes with early treatment with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in favor of unproven high-priced drugs. Despite the CDC and FDA previously acknowledging the 60-year safety record of hydroxychloroquine, it miraculously became harmful in 2020.

It is as if the medical bureaucrats are making up the ever-changing rules as they go along. They claimed they were "following the science." Why haven't we heard from these politically driven experts as hundreds of illegal migrants are released into the United States without COVID tests while U.S. citizens are being fined for not wearing useless masks?

Shameless non-clinician bureaucrats have stolen our lives, stolen the smiles from children's faces and bullied a segment of the population into paralyzing fear. Those hiding behind masks (including our precious children) no longer see people as people, but as 170-pound nests of germs and certain death.

Dr. Fauci remains the highest paid federal government employee, and Dr. Birx has moved on to her private air purifier consulting job. Meanwhile, we are left in the wasteland with their legacy: boarded up shops, needless lost lives, and the death of common sense, scientific discourse and medical freedom that we may never regain. And why?

Well, in no small part because of right-wing, AAPS-affiliated agitators like Singleton who have no problem politicizing a pandemic to push a political agenda that casts doubt on legitimate medicine. Not that she'll ever admit that, of course.