(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) — who has previously pushed for mouthwash as a COVID-19 treatment, touted Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as desirable therapies for the virus and got himself suspended from YouTube over the summer for violating the website’s COVID-19 policy — hosted a roundtable with some of the nation’s top medical misinformers Monday.

Dr. Peter McCullough received top billing for Johnson’s event. McCullough’s former employer, Baylor Scott & White Health, sued the doctor last July because his attempts to continue affiliating himself with the Dallas-based health care system was likely to cause “”irreparable reputational and business harm,” MedPage Today reported.

He left the group last February in a confidential separation agreement, but he continued to use his former titles, including vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center, in “dozens, if not hundreds” of interviews.

During those interviews, McCullough routinely spread COVID-19 misinformation. During a July Fox News segment with Laura Ingraham, McCullough claimed vaccines didn’t work against the delta variant and there was “no clinical reason to go get vaccinated,” The Dallas Morning News reported.

McCullough appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast last December and falsely claimed that the pandemic was planned, infection provides permanent immunity and the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System showed thousands had been killed by vaccines — a favorite claim by Johnson.

Medical fact checkers Health Feedback pointed out that McCullough never offered any evidence the pandemic was planned, and that claim appears often in other baseless conspiracy commentary about COVID-19. Researchers from Imperial College London found a higher risk of reinfection from the omicron variant than from delta, indicating reinfection was possible from both variants. And the claim that VAERS shows thousands of deaths due to vaccines a common misuse of the system. According to the VAERS website, “VAERS is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem.”

Under Johnson’s “pillar” to responding to the pandemic titled “Limit the spread” is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. A health researcher and professor of medicine at Stanford University, Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the economics of health care, according to his staff profile on Stanford’s website.

Bhattacharya was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published in October 2020 calling for the world’s governments to allow COVID-19 to essentially run its course with healthy people while focusing protection on those at higher risk. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said at the time, “Allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical. It’s not an option.”

But Bhattacharya was not swayed. In a column for the Daily Mail late last year, he renewed his calls for “focused protection” while allowing young adults and children to live their lives as normal. In many U.S. states that “have eschewed lockdowns, the pandemic is effectively over,” he wrote. As of Jan. 24, the Center for Disease Control’s COVID-19 tracker shows the vast majority of U.S. states, many of whom have eschewed new lockdowns, have at least one county with at least 30% of their staffed hospital beds being used for COVID patients. And 99.78% of counties in the country rank at a bright-red “high” for their level of community transmission on the tracker.

Speaking to the pillar of “Early at home treatment” was Dr. Ryan Cole. The pathologist is the sole physician on Idaho’s Central District Health Board, the largest regional public health board in the state, the Idaho Capitol Sun reported.

Cole’s predecessor was let go from the position after endorsing COVID mitigation measures, the Washington Post reported. Cole has come under fire over the course of the pandemic for prescribing ivermectin, referring to the vaccine as “a fake vaccine,” “the clot shot” and “needle rape.”

More recently, multiple doctors filed formal complaints and asked that Cole’s license be revoked due to his spreading of misinformation about both the pandemic and vaccines. They allege his rhetoric has contributed to the “dangerous storm of misinformation and even contributed to patient deaths,” KTVB 7 reported.

Cole’s lab-based practice, Cole Diagnostics, says he does not see patients directly. Even so, one doctor claims a patient with COVID-19 was prescribed Ivermectin by Cole. The patient later died.

At least three other doctors claimed in signed affidavits that they had patients taking ivermectin prescribed by Cole, according to the article.

“Cole is a health menace, abusing his status as a physician to mislead the public,” a doctor at the Boise Veterans’ Affairs office told KTVB.

Follow Zach Cunning on Twitter @zcheartlandsig