State lawmakers in Tennessee were considering a bill to put “natural immunity” on equal footing with vaccinated immunity for COVID-19. Health care workers and anyone else required to have COVID-19 vaccination for work or school could be exempt from vaccines, as long as they’d already been infected with the coronavirus and recovered.
That week in early March, Idaho pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole spoke to members of the Tennessee House and Senate. It was at least his fourth trip to Nashville since August 2021 to make unfounded claims to legislators and the public.
“He speaks so fast, it becomes a blur of lines, blur of lines, and I’m taking notes like, ‘No, this is far out,’” said Tennessee state Rep. Sabi “Doc” Kumar in an interview with the Idaho Capital Sun. Kumar, a Republican from Springfield, is a licensed surgeon and sits on a subcommittee that heard from Cole in March.
Cole testified, based on data he misrepresented, that COVID-19 vaccines killed 1,200 people in a single month. In an interview with the Sun last year, Cole indicated he hadn’t read the reports that are aggregated by the data source he references. The Sun informed him that those individual vaccine adverse event reports did not support — and in most cases disproved — his claims. He has continued to misrepresent the data.
Cole and his attorney did not respond Tuesday to an email from the Sun.
“Some of these people are counting any death that happens if a person (previously received the) vaccine,” Kumar said....
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