Dr. Stella Immanuel has stirred up controversy this week with a Facebook video making unscientific claims about covid-19, the corona virus causing the pandemic which has been wreaking havoc on the world since late 2019, and which has to date caused at least 4 million cases of the illness in the United States. The video, shared by the Clown Prince of Darkness and his autonymic son, was pulled by Facebook (after being shared millions of times, not a good look for them) and caused Junior to get a 12-hour account suspension on Twitter. In it, she claimed that hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug which has proved both ineffective and dangerous as a treatment for the virus, was actually a cure and that Dr. Anthony Fauci, US lead infectious disease doctor, and the entire Senate were taking the drug and that masks were unnecessary, although she is requiring their use for people wishing to visit her clinic.
Dr. Immanuel has a long history of bizarre claims about health and spiritual matters (alternate link). Raised in Cameroon and medically trained in Nigeria, she’s only had her Texas medical license since last November. It’s unclear how long she’s lived in the US, but the busy doctor has a second job as pastor of an evangelical church next to her clinic, called Fire Power Ministries. Immanuel has a number of sermons on YouTube and her website in which she makes bizarre claims about health conditions, pop culture phenomena, and spiritual matters which would cause most people to think twice before accepting anything she says right down to “have a nice day.”
For example, Immanuel claims that 7 out of 10 “born again” Christians have regular sex in their sleep with either Satanists who astrally project to them or “spirit wives” or “spirit husbands” (succubi and incubi) which are evil spirit beings, and that the results of this sleep sex manifest as the following:
1. Marital distress 2. Sexual relationships in dreams 3. Hatred of marriage 4. Being jilted 5. Unpardonable sexual error 6. Wrong decisions 7. Neglect abandonment by the opposite sex 8. Demonic dream assistance 9. Swimming or seeing a river in the dream 10. Missing one’s menstrual period in the dream 11. Pregnancy in the dream 12. Breast- feeding a baby in the dream 13. Backing a baby in the dream 14. Having a family in the dream 15. Shopping with a man/ woman in the dream 16. Seeing a man sleeping by one’s side in the dream 17. Hatred by earthly spouse 18. Serious gynecological problems 19. Having a miscarriage after sexual dreams 20. Dream marriages
“They are responsible for serious gynecological problems,” Immanuel said. “We call them all kinds of names—endometriosis, we call them molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we call them cysts, but most of them are evil deposits from the spirit husband,” Immanuel said of the medical issues in a 2013 sermon. “They are responsible for miscarriages, impotence—men that can’t get it up.”
Other bizarre claims from Immanuel (from link above, edited):
- “They found the gene in somebody’s mind that makes you religious, so they can vaccinate against it,” Immanuel said.
- Immanuel argues that a wide variety of toys, books, and TV shows, from Pokémon—which she declares “Eastern demons”—to Harry Potter and the Disney Channel shows Wizards of Waverly Place and That’s So Raven were all part of a scheme to introduce children to spirits and witches.
- Immanuel warned that the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana was a gateway to evil, because its character had an “alter ego.” She has claimed that schools teach children to meditate so they can “meet with demons.”
- “There are people that are ruling this nation that are not even human,” Immanuel said in her 2015 Illuminati sermon, before launching into a conversation she had with a “reptilian spirit” she described as “half-human, half-ET.”
- Immanuel warned her flock that same sex marriage meant that “very soon people are going to be seeking to marry children” and accused LGBTQ Americans of practicing “homosexual terrorism.” In the same sermon, she praised a father’s decision to not love his transgender son after a gender transition.
- “Children need to be whipped,” she declared in a 2015 sermon, before adding that she didn’t think children should be “abused.”
The saddest part is not that Dr. Immanuel believes all these things, but that some people are so desperate to validate their fears of the unknown and unfamiliar that they believe what she preaches and they and their children may suffer trauma and other harms as a result, possibly even death if they follow her medical advice. Please, everyone, take your medical advice from peer-reviewed evidence-based sources such as the NHS or the CDCs of countries not currently run by pathological narcissists requiring obseiance from their public health services (so, not the US, Russia, North Korea, or Brazil, for starters). With millions of cases and many hundreds of thousands of deaths so far, we cannot afford to indulge in foolishness and magical thinking around the pandemic. Save that for low-risk personal situations. The life you save could be your own.