Bogus fearmongering about George Soros isn’t the only conspiracy theory about the migrant caravans that WorldNetDaily is promoting. WND serves up another one in a Nov. 1 article:
There’s a new warning about the three caravans of migrants coming from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico toward the southern U.S. border: They could be carrying contagious diseases that would create havoc for America’s health system.
“Of course it could happen here,” said Dr. Jane Orient, the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Her comments came in a report by government watchdog Judicial Watch.
“It’s insane to bring in migrants from any country without proper health screening,” she said.
The caravans pose “a serious public health threat and could bring dangerous diseases into the country,” the report said.
Orient explained there are extremely drug-resistant strands of tuberculosis among the infectious diseases the Central American migrants are likely to bring in.
Others include mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, both widespread in the region.
The problem here is that Orient has no credibility on this issue. As we’ve previously documented, Orient has since 2003 been managing editor of the AAPS’ Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, which means it was under her watch that a notorious 2005 journal article appeared ranting against illegal immigrants as filthy foreigners and falsely claiming that cases of leprosy in the U.S. have exploded. Even though the claim was discredited years ago, we’re not aware that the journal has issued a correction, and the PDF of the article on the journal’s website remains uncorrected.
Orient is a veritable font of medical misinformation. In 2016, she tried to blame cases of microcephaly on vaccines and not the Zika virus — a claim that has been discredited.
Orient has spread misinformation about immigrants and diseases before, and to our knowledge, she has never apologized for doing so. There’s no reason to trust her on the subject now.