Ivermectin Doctors Rebrand and Rally for Kennedy Confirmation

Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance is rebranding for the anti-vaxxer’s Senate confirmation battle.

Written by Walker Bragman Published: 1/29/25

The highly anticipated Senate confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services begin this week. The president’s choice of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr. has been perhaps his most controversial cabinet pick. Doctors and scientists have been organizing to sink his confirmation since the announcement was made back in November.

A group of seventy-five Noble laureates wrote an open letter urging the senate not to confirm his nomination last month. Over 17,000 doctors signed the Committee to Protect Health Care’s letter arguing the same. Defend Public Health, a coalition of healthcare workers and scientists, have sent 3,500 letters to senators ahead of Kennedy’s confirmation hearings.

However, not everyone is alarmed. One fringe medical group is rallying support for Kennedy—and doing so under a new, less recognizable name.

Days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a contrarian group known for promoting ineffective COVID treatments and casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines, announced that it was rebranding as “Independent Medical Alliance” (IMA). The change comes as the organization gears up to fight for Kennedy and expand their scope beyond the pandemic. But it is skin deep. The group’s press release announcing the rebrand maintains that ivermectin is effective against COVID, despite multiple high-quality studies indicating it is not (see here, here, here) and many pro-ivermectin papers having been retracted.

The IMA is currently organizing signatures for a letter from its “action” arm to senators in support of Kennedy’s confirmation.

The group’s origin story, rise to political prominence, and involvement in a concerning international network of misinformation-peddling groups spanning from the UK to Brazil was detailed in WhoWhatWhy reporting early last year. FLCCC co-founder Dr. Pierre Kory co-authored two dubious but influential ivermectin papers in 2022, both dealing with a politically-motivated 2020 city-wide ivermectin experiment in Itajai, Brazil. One paper was corrected to show undisclosed conflicts of interests like payments from a Brazilian ivermectin manufacturer to two of its authors, including the lead on the paper. While Kory was not among the recipients, his affiliation with FLCCC was nevertheless cited as a conflict. The papers were published in a low-tier journal that has since been paused from indexation by the Web of Science owing to concern over the quality of its output.

Key to the group’s rise have been its ties to right-wing politicians and political figures. For example, FLCCC has had a close relationship with MAGA loyalist Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who hosted Kory at a December 2020 Senate hearing discussing ivermectin. At the hearing, the FLCCC co-founder called ivermectin a “miracle drug.” Johnson has continued to promote the group—and its action arm—on social media since its rebrand.

The group has also become increasingly tied in with Kennedy, who has promoted both ivermectin for COVID and its predecessor MAGA miracle cure, hydroxychloroquine, which similarly does not work against the disease. As FLCCC members have dug their heels in on ivermectin, they have taken anti-vaccine positions, not just on the COVID shots but increasingly against other vaccines as well, in line with Kennedy.

FLCCC and Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD) both sponsored the January 2022 “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington, at which Kennedy, Kory, and Marik spoke. Last March, FLCCC was one of the anti-vaccine groups rallying with CHD outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, a case aimed at blocking the government from combating misinformation on social media.

As with CHD, the spread of COVID misinformation has proven lucrative for the FLCCC, Washington Post analysis of tax records revealed. As WaPo reported, the group “went from receiving $1 million combined when they formed in 2020 to collecting more than $21 million combined in 2022.” Important Context has previously revealed that FLCCC and CHD receive money through major donor-advised funds and have also shared donors like the Crary Social Ecology Fund.

The groups both promote the same narratives. Kennedy has claimed that the “early treatment” drugs were “suppressed” and that those promoting them, despite their proven lack of efficacy, were “censored.” In the recent pseudo-documentary Covid Collateral: Where Do We Go For Truth?, Marik made a similar claim, calling ivermectin “a big threat,” wrongly claiming if it “proved to be an effective drug for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2, the vaccination program would have been deemed null-and-void.” The documentary was funded by a company tied to the pro-Trump Epoch Times and the Falun Gong Chinese cult.

While the FLCCC founders have paid a price professionally for their advocacy—the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) finally revoked their board certificationslast summer for the spread of COVID misinformation—the political right has provided a soft landing pad. Today, Kory and Marik, who portray themselves as victims of unjust medical board retaliation, are part of a lawsuit against ABIM brought by the right-wing, anti-vax physician group American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, which was deeply involved in the promotion of hydroxychloroquine for COVID.

Kennedy himself has gone to bat legally to protect his “early treatment” physician allies from accountability. He served as legal counsel in Kory v. Bonta, a case brought by Kory and other misinformation-peddling doctors against the California Attorney General and executives of the state’s medical boards regarding state law AB2098. Signed in 2022 and repealed the following year, AB2098 sought to put pressure on stagnant medical boards to take action against licensees spreading dangerous COVID misinformation.

Kennedy has referred to Kory as “a brave dissident doctor” and CHD has promotedKory’s book, The War on Ivermectin. In turn, Kory supported Kennedy’s presidential run, appearing at a health policy round table Zoom call early on in the campaign. Kory and Marik became increasingly active in MAGA world in the lead up to November’s election once Kennedy had dropped out to support Trump.

Kory shared the stage with Kennedy and Johnson at the pre-election “Rescue the Republic” rally in Washington shortly after Kennedy launched his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement with Trump. The weekend ahead of the election, Marik appeared at the conference and gala for the Brownstone Institute, a dark money anti-public health group that has supported Kennedy and lists the FLCCC as a “friend” on its website. Brownstone has also received Crary money, and the institute’s founder Jeffrey Tucker appeared in Covid Collateral.

The FLCCC has undergone some restructuring over the past year, notably with Kory stepping down as leader of the group for the role of President Emeritus last May and founding member Dr. Joseph Varon stepping up to fill his vacancy. Varon was a co-author on the FLCCC’s first COVID-19 paper in 2020 regarding a hospital protocol which was retracted the following year. Marik’s hospital had alerted the journal that he had massively underreported the mortality rate in the treatment group, making the protocol appear more effective than it actually was. This protocol would later go on to contain ivermectin. The FLCCC still promotes it on its website despite the retraction of the original paper.

Last month, Varon announced the group was launching its own medical journal. Kory and Marik sit on the editorial board for a new Wordpress blog masquerading as a medical journal, “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law,” which has promoted the false claim that vaccines are linked to autism. This debunked claim originated from disgraced former physician and Kennedy ally Andrew Wakefield. The Editor-in-Chief of the new “journal” is James Lyons-Weiler, a long-time colleague of Kennedy’s.

The FLCCC also recently launched an international fellowship program. One of their fellows is Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who has been one the more extreme end of the MAHA movement. Bowden previously sued the Food and Drug Administration with Marik over the agency’s social media posts advising against the use of ivermectin for COVID and launched a super PAC to support political candidates who vowed to pull the COVID vaccines from the market. She recently had a contentious discussion with MAHA insider and wellness influencer Calley Means on a recent podcast appearance, criticizing him and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, for not being sufficiently anti-vax.

While the FLCCC’s leadership is in lockstep with Kennedy, the rebranding as IMA also serves to help the group expand its focus beyond the COVID pandemic from which they emerged prominent on the right but nowhere else.

Having previously promoted ivermectin for RSV and flu, in addition to COVID and long COVID, FLCCC leadership has now been pitching the anti-parasitic as a cancer treatment. Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist, has raised alarms about Marik’s disparaging of established cancer treatments in his promotion of the drug for yet another condition without sufficient scientific evidence.

And they plan to expand further. The FLCCC has claimed the group will be working on treatments for “diabetes, early dementia and Alzheimer’s, Women’s Health, and other pressing healthcare issues.”