Fake Physician Allison Neitzel Caught Running Real Medical Misinformation Site
Fake Physician Allison Neitzel Caught Running Real Medical Misinformation Site
Medical clown for “disinformation reporters” Brandzy Zadrozny at NBC and Kiera Butler at Mother Jones crashes her own disinformation circus.
Promoted to national prominence by a coterie of reporters tackling pandemic misinformation, physician Allison Neitzel took a hard fall last week when she was forced to atone for promoting misinformation and defaming medical experts—by posting an apology on her website, and pinning the same to the top of her social media X account. But unless you hang on every word of Democratic Party aligned reporters with a knack for labeling everyone they don’t like a “conspiracy theorist,” you likely don’t know physician Allison Neitzel.
If you haven’t heard of her, you should know her name and story.
Allison Neitzel’s story encapsulates everything that went wrong during COVID when self-defined “disinformation reporters” glommed onto anyone they tripped over on social media as an “expert” they could deploy to castigate those refusing to bend the knee to Big Pharma.
“I know of Allison because of the way she has targeted me,” says Tracey Beth Høeg, a physician researcher and associate professor of clinical research at the university of Southern Denmark. Neitzel has deleted many of her social media posts denigrating Hoeg, including one in which she labeled her “Hoeg hag.”
“The fact she has not nearly completed her training but has appointed herself as an expert physician in pointing out misinformation strikes me as both odd and ironic,” Hoeg continued. “For example, as you can see, she is really attacking me rather than anything substantive about what I have done or said.”
Allison Neitzel rocketed to national fame on CNN after graduating from the Medical College of Wisconsin and posting a letter on social media that accused Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers of spreading COVID misinformation. Rodgers said he was allergic to one of the vaccine ingredients and didn’t need to be vaccinated because he had already been sick with COVID, however, this was almost a year before the CDC stated that prior infection was no different than being vaccinated.
Despite spreading false information about Rodgers, Neitzel’s letter and purported medical bona fides proved catnip to reporters at MedPage Today, Mother Jones, and NBC, who quoted her as a physician exposing medical misinformation. Columns Neitzel has written for websites WhoWhatWhy and Science-Based Medicine also claim she is a physician focusing on disinformation.
And this is where the circus fun begins, because famed medical misinformation expert Allison Neitzel is not now, nor has she ever been, a physician.
Allison Neitzel did not respond to multiple requests for comment to explain.
COVID clown show
I began unraveling Allson Neitzel’s COVID circus act shortly after she posted the apology to her website with the ironic name “MisinformationKills” and pinned it to the top of her @AliNeitzelMD X account.
Neitzel’s apology details a long list of false statements she made against multiple physicians accusing them of a fraud and grift, along with weasel words that make clear this is a non-apology apology, in the vein of “I am sorry if you feel bad.”
“I regret if anyone understood the statements as accusations that any of them had engaged in fraudulent professional or business practices,” Neitzel writes.
You can read her apology below, but the depth and particulars of Neitzel’s defamation of real medical experts is impossible to know because she has deleted many of her posts on social media and on MisinformationKills.
But particulars don’t matter.
Neitzel is one in a legion of medical clowns the media launched into prominence during the pandemic because they served as useful idiots for “disinformation journalists” needing a quotable “expert” to bash people who dared question conventional COVID wisdom, or who charged that the government made phony claims about a lab accident in Wuhan, overstated the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, or lied about the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines.
What makes Allison Neitzel unique from the COVID clown posse is that she was forced to retract and apologize for her lies and fake claims.
Interested, I dug into her background and discovered that all the outlets claiming Neitzel was a physician hadn’t bothered to do a modicum of due diligence before platforming her, because guess what? Allison Neitzel isn’t a physician.
Donning clown costume
The first social media trace I could find for Allison Neitzel is a 2019 Facebook post by the Medical College of Wisconsin. “Third-year med student Allison Neitzel helped teach young students how to use blood pressure cuffs, listen to heart and lung sounds through the use of a stethoscope, how to perform CPR and more.”
But when Neitzel jumped into the national conscience in 2021, she began claiming she was a “physician.” A group called the National Association of Medical Doctors (NAMD) posted Neitzel’s letter criticizing Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers in their Journal of Medicine, where she signed as “Allison Neitzel is a physician.” (Stay tuned: While researching the NAMD, I learned even more about COVID grift, which I will report in a future investigation.)
But when you look into Wisconsin law, you find the state defines a physician as “an individual possessing the degree of doctor of medicine or doctor of osteopathy or an equivalent degree as determined by the medical examining board, and holding a license granted by the medical examining board.”
So I looked up Neitzel in the National Provider Identifier Standard (NPI) which lists everyone licensed as a physician in the U.S. And guess what?
Allison Neitzel isn’t a physician.
Of course, her false claims of being a physician didn’t stop multiple media outlets from promoting Neitzel as a “physician” and misinformation expert. Let’s take a look.
COVID clown circus
Neitzel made two appearances as a “physician” in 2023 stories written by Kiera Butler at Mother Jones. Butler specializes in “COVID disinformation” stories that uncover “anti-vaxxers” and “right-wing” forces peeking out from every corner of America to harm the public with “misinformation.”
In one of her more amusing reporting incidents, Butler penned an article that claimed natural immunity from prior COVID infection was a “dangerous theory” spread by anti-vaxxers.
After California passed a law to discipline doctors for sharing “false COVID information” with patients that differs from the “scientific consensus” (whatever that is), Butler began attacking physicians who sued to stop the censorship, claiming that they were spreading medical lies. Linking to a tweet by Neitzel, who she labeled a “physician and disinformation researcher” Butler reported that “far-right rhetoric” and Nazi propaganda were supporting the lawsuits.
In fact, a California judge blocked the law for violating physicians’ First Amendment rights. Having first signed a bill that created the law, Governor Newsom then repealed it.
Neitzel was also featured in a story by NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny, another “disinformation reporter” who specializes in “extremism”—code in the disinformation world for “conservative” as people like Zadrozny never seem to find extremism among liberals.
In a story looking into anti-vaxxers—a favored topic for disinformation types—Zadrozny reported on aggressive online harassment against physicians and quoted Neitzel as an expert.
Online harassment has become increasingly common for doctors during the pandemic, according to Dr. Ali Neitzel, a physician researcher who studies misinformation.
“The targeting of individual physicians is a well-worn tactic,” Neitzel said. “But this cheaply done fake — trying to frame a doctor who is doing unpaid advocacy work — that’s a new low.”
Forget that Neitzel is not even a physician. The absurdity is that Zadrozny quoted Neitzel—forced to post an apology last week for fomenting years of misinformation, and years of harassing physicians—as an expert commentator on misinformation and harassment of physicians.
It’s that ludicrous.
Trying to understand Zadrozny’s reporting, I emailed her questions pointing out that Neitzel was never a physician, and asking if she had bothered to check into Neitzel’s credentials.
“Do you plan to correct your article?” I asked.
True to the disinformation journalism game, in which reporting errors are never admitted nor corrected, Zadrozny never responded.
Neitzel’s online persona as a misinformation expert also gained her entrée into three different articles at MedPage Today.
Young Doc to Aaron Rodgers: Be a 'Team' Player on COVID Vaccine
Should Doctors Worry About 'Nuremberg 2.0?' (MedPage Today labels this article an “exclusive special report”)
“Can you explain why MedPage Today ran so many stories featuring Allison Neitzel who falsely claimed to be a physician and has been forced to post an apology for defaming physicians?” I emailed MedPage Today’s editor-in chief Jeremy Faust, an instructor at Harvard Medical School.
“I'm trying to understand if such reporting meets the standards at MedPage Today and if you plan to run any corrections or clarifications.”
Faust refused to respond to questions sent to his Harvard email.
Neitzel’s claims of being a physician also garnered her a column at the nonprofit news organization WhoWhatWhy. “Allison Neitzel, MD, is physician-researcher and founder of the independent research group MisinformationKills, which has investigated the dark money and politics behind public health disinformation with a focus on the pandemic,” reads her author bio page.
“Why have you claimed Allison Neitzel is a physician?” I emailed WhoWhatWhy’s editor-in-chief, Russ Baker. “And do you plan to continue claiming Neitzel is a physician?”
Baker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Neitzel also wrote a column for the site “Science-Based Medicine” where her bio states she is a physician. Science-Based Medicine is a marketing site for the biopharmaceutical industry run by David Gorski, a Wayne State University surgeon, self-described “misinformation debunker,” and ardent vaccine cheerleader.
After the European Medicines Agency concluded in April 2021 that unusual blood clots should be listed as a very rare side effect for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, Gorski called foul on the regulator. The UK government eventually stopped offering the AstraZeneca vaccine, and The BMJ reported last year that dozens of patients had launched legal action against AstraZeneca after suffering the same vaccine side effects that Gorski claimed were nonexistent.
In an email to Gorski, I asked why he lists Neitzel as a physician when she doesn’t meet the legal requirements for a physician in Wisconsin where both he and Neitzel reside.
Gorski called the question “pedantic” and said he will ignore Wisconsin law in favor of a definition for “physician” that he found on the website for the American Medical Association.
“In general, ‘misinformation’ reporting seems to have certain ideas they are told are true/false and it's about finding evidence to support what they have been told,” says Hoeg. “Also the ‘misinformation’ reporters often seem less qualified in terms of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the scientific studies and domains than the people/scientists they are accusing of spreading ‘misinformation.’”
Source: The Disinformation Chronicle
