EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was initially printed by ProPublica. It was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get tales like this one as quickly as they’re printed.
Dr. Kirk Moore had been on trial for 5 days, accused of falsifying COVID-19 vaccination playing cards and throwing away the government-supplied doses.
The Utah plastic surgeon confronted as much as 35 years in jail if the jury discovered him responsible on charges that included conspiracy to defraud the United States. Testimony had paused for the weekend when Moore’s lawyer known as him early one Saturday this July with what felt to him like unbelievable information.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had ordered Utah prosecutors to drop all charges, abruptly ending his two-and-a-half yr court docket battle.
“I just literally collapsed to the floor, and tears rolling down my face,” Moore recalled in a latest interview.
Bondi’s announcement marked a placing reversal of how the federal authorities dealt with the prosecution of COVID-19-related fraud beneath President Joe Biden. It has since emboldened different medical professionals who have been equally charged to contemplate in search of reexaminations of their circumstances. And it signaled the growing clout of medical doctors and politicians who champion what they name “medical freedom,” which rejects fashionable public well being interventions similar to vaccine necessities in favor of particular person alternative.
Dismissed by the medical institution, this motion has nonetheless constructed momentum as mistrust in authorities and medical programs grew after the coronavirus pandemic. It has additionally gained new influence in Washington, the place longtime vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversees the nation’s well being companies. As President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has replaced members of a federal vaccine advisory panel with his personal picks and pushed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to restrict access to some vaccines, together with the coronavirus shot. The Trump administration’s evisceration of long-standing federal vaccine tips and rejection of scientific proof have alarmed the American Medical Association and other professional medical groups.
Just days earlier than Bondi’s resolution, a federal prosecutor from her division had stood earlier than the jury in Moore’s case and accused him of enrolling within the federal authorities’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution program with the intention to “sabotage” it, in response to a court docket transcript. She had requested jurors to convict him and to “find that no one is above the law, not even a plastic surgeon.”
Moore mentioned he’d signed up for this system in May 2021 to obtain greater than 2,000 free vaccine doses and accompanying proof-of-vaccination playing cards after some companies, nursing properties and the navy started requiring such proof for guests and staff. He mentioned his plan was all the time to provide vaccine playing cards with out offering the photographs as a result of he wished to supply sufferers a alternative to avoid vaccine mandates.
Bondi explained her decision to dismiss the charges on X later that morning, writing that “Dr. Moore gave his patients a choice when the federal government refused to do so. He did not deserve the years in prison he was facing. It ends today.”
A spokesperson for Bondi declined to remark past what the lawyer normal posted on social media. The Utah federal lawyer’s workplace didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Moore was one in every of at the least 12 well being care professionals charged after giving or promoting fraudulent COVID-19 vaccine playing cards since 2021, in response to circumstances recognized by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica via authorities information releases and media clips. Those charged embody midwives, nurses, pharmacists and one other surgeon. Eight have been charged in federal court docket by the Biden administration; prosecutors from California, New York and New Jersey introduced state charges against 4 others.
Other than Moore, solely one in every of these well being care staff went to trial: a Chicago pharmacist whom a jury discovered responsible of promoting on eBay clean vaccine playing cards that he had stolen from the Walgreens the place he labored. The relaxation pleaded responsible and have been sentenced to a mixture of probation, house arrest and, in a few circumstances, jail. Many additionally have been professionally disciplined with fines or suspension of their medical licenses.
Of these 11, the Chicago pharmacist appealed his conviction however the U.S. Supreme Court in November declined to listen to his petition; his lawyer instructed The Tribune and ProPublica that they’re exploring a presidential pardon. One different well being care employee mentioned she, too, wish to be pardoned by Trump.
Some of those well being care staff, alongside with these in different professions who have been additionally convicted of vaccine card fraud, began a group known as Covicted Patriot following the dismissal of Moore’s case.
“There are more of us than Dr. Moore,” they declared in July via an X account that payments itself as representing “Justified Felons & Persecuted Patriots who were victimized by a politically weaponized justice system for providing covid cards.”
“We celebrate his vindication as we pray for our own,” they wrote.
Moore mentioned he helps their efforts: “I think anybody who took the same stance that I did, in large measures, should be pardoned.”
Brian Dean Abramson, an immunization regulation skilled in Virginia who serves on the board of administrators for the National Vaccine Law Conference, mentioned that medical staff falsifying vaccination playing cards is “absolutely horrifying” from a public well being perspective. Their actions, he mentioned, gas mistrust of the medical occupation and create blind spots in illness surveillance and response, growing the probability and severity of outbreaks. (A simulation model published in JAMA in April predicts a reemergence of diseases that had been eradicated within the United States, similar to measles, and accompanying deaths as a results of declining childhood vaccination.)
“This undermines every layer of the system that protects us from infectious disease,” Abramson mentioned. “Vaccination policy relies on accurate records and honest medical participation.”
‘Everybody Got What They Wanted’
Moore met with The Tribune and ProPublica in his clinic within the Salt Lake City suburb of Midvale. A neat row of clogs, his most well-liked footwear, lined one wall of his cluttered workplace. The 60-year-old doctor wore black scrubs and a “Trump 2024” rubber bracelet stacked atop a gold chain.
Moore, a licensed doctor in Utah since 2005, doesn’t deny the federal government’s claims: that he gave falsified vaccine playing cards to sufferers, that his workers threw away doses, and that, in some circumstances, he gave kids saline photographs as a substitute of the COVID-19 vaccine at their mother and father’ request.
“All of that stuff is true,” he mentioned.
In an interview that lasted almost two hours, Moore mentioned selecting whether or not to get vaccinated is deeply private and the choice needs to be made between sufferers and their medical doctors — not mandated by authorities or companies. The Trump administration has equally framed vaccination as a private alternative in its dismissal of established public well being steerage.
Moore referred to COVID-19 vaccines as “bioweapons” a dozen occasions and mentioned he distrusts how rapidly the federal government facilitated the vaccines’ speedy growth and distribution. He mentioned he concluded the vaccines have been unsafe after conducting his personal on-line analysis that he mentioned forged doubt on the medical expertise used of their growth and the quantity of testing earlier than the primary doses grew to become accessible beneath emergency use authorization in December 2020.
The COVID-19 vaccine was developed in report time throughout Trump’s first time period, lower than a yr after federal authorities declared a public well being emergency — a feat Trump touted on the time as a “monumental national achievement.” This was made attainable by a federal effort referred to as Operation Warp Speed that diminished paperwork and invested in scientific trials and manufacturing, in response to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office — not resulting from any shortcuts in testing. The technological spine of the vaccines, referred to as mRNA, has been in growth for many years by scientists who gained the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Moore mentioned that the vaccines “failed in every animal test.” “All the animals died, and now all of a sudden, we’re going to use the human population as our guinea pigs,” he mentioned. The Food and Drug Administration has beforehand instructed reporters that such claims, extensively promoted amongst vaccine skeptics throughout the pandemic, are false.
The plastic surgeon mentioned that he believes all vaccines are “poison” and that they haven’t been adequately examined — a view he says he has held for greater than twenty years.
Vaccines permitted by the FDA and really useful by the CDC have been proven to protect public health by stopping illness, severe sickness or demise. Major well being authorities just like the World Health Organization have affirmed the protection and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which researchers estimate prevented more than 14 million deaths worldwide of their first yr.
Prior to signing up for the CDC’s vaccine distribution program, Moore didn’t present vaccines in his enterprise, the Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah. The “bread and butter” of his observe, he mentioned, is a methodology of “rapid recovery” breast augmentations that he says he developed, which permits sufferers to return to their routines with little downtime.
“They were looking for anybody and everybody to get these bioweapons out,” he mentioned about becoming a member of the federal government program, which was open to all well being care suppliers who agreed to conform with the CDC processes, similar to storing the vaccines at a sure temperature and recording who had been vaccinated. “And so, it was a pretty simple process.”
In December 2021, a husband-and-wife couple who Moore had met via a mutual acquaintance got here to his house for dinner, in response to a prosecution trial brief. “While they were there, Dr. Moore personally handed them both pre-completed CDC COVID-19 vaccination record cards with their names and birth dates on them, falsely purporting to show that the couple had received COVID-19 vaccines from the Plastic Surgery Institute,” the transient mentioned. “Dr. Moore did so knowing that neither of them had been vaccinated for COVID-19, and without administering a COVID-19 vaccine to either of them.”
Within weeks, prosecutors mentioned, Moore had began handing out pretend vaccine playing cards in his medical workplace to anybody who was referred to his enterprise by folks who had already obtained a falsified card.
As phrase unfold, Moore’s staff advised sufferers who wished a card may donate $50 by way of Venmo to a native well being freedom advocacy group known as the Health Independence Alliance, in response to Moore. The husband of the couple to whom Moore first gave the pretend vaccine playing cards testified on the Utah Legislature in January on behalf of the Health Independence Alliance on a vaccine-related invoice. Moore says that he helps the group however doesn’t run it; the Health Independence Alliance declined to remark in response to a request despatched to the e-mail listed on its web site. The couple, who weren’t charged, declined to remark.
When sending their donation, sufferers have been instructed to incorporate an emoji of an orange within the Venmo topic line, in response to federal prosecutors, they usually have been additionally instructed to convey an orange with them to the ready room of the clinic. “At one point, there was a large basket full of oranges” at Moore’s clinic, prosecutors mentioned of their trial transient.
Moore confirmed this technique in his interview with The Tribune and ProPublica, saying the piece of fruit was a quiet sign to his busy workers that the affected person was there for a falsified vaccine card.
He mentioned throughout this time he maintained his cosmetic surgery observe whereas distributing pretend vaccine playing cards and treating COVID-19 sufferers with ivermectin and different strategies. Ivermectin has not been licensed by the FDA or really useful by the CDC to deal with COVID-19.
An undercover state licensor known as Moore’s workplace in March 2022 and requested to make a vaccine appointment throughout the prison investigation after somebody complained to the state well being division, in response to the prosecutors. At his clinic, the licensor, posing as a affected person, obtained a vaccine card testifying to her vaccination with out ever being supplied a shot, prosecutors mentioned.
Federal prosecutors alleged of their trial transient that a portion of the donations for the advocacy group paid a part-time employee on the cosmetic surgery clinic $18 an hour to provide out falsified vaccine playing cards and administer saline photographs to kids. The employee, who couldn’t be reached for remark, testified against Moore as a part of an settlement with prosecutors to dismiss her charges after the trial, in response to prosecutors’ trial transient.
Moore mentioned throughout an interview that he didn’t make any cash himself and by no means immediately charged sufferers for these playing cards. He added that each grownup affected person who acquired a pretend card had wished one.
“Nobody in my practice was ever tricked. Nobody came to me expecting a vaccine and didn’t get it,” he mentioned. “Everybody got what they wanted.”
But some kids who obtained saline photographs at their mother and father’ request falsely believed they have been being vaccinated against COVID-19, in response to court docket filings and Moore. This was a breach of medical ethics as a result of medical doctors have a obligation to construct belief between their group and the well being care system, mentioned Wendy Parmet, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Law.
Moore mentioned he gave youngsters the saline photographs in order that they wouldn’t be bullied if their friends discovered they acquired a vaccine card with out getting a shot. “I did have some parents that didn’t want their kid to know that they were getting something fake,” he mentioned.
He didn’t query the mother and father’ deception, Moore mentioned, as a result of he didn’t wish to “intervene in their family dynamic.”
“You have to stand up for what you feel is right,” he mentioned. “That’s the reason why I did what I did. I had no intention of defrauding the federal government.”
On the primary day of Moore’s trial in July, about 60 supporters — together with state lawmakers like House Speaker Mike Schultz — gathered on the stairs outdoors the federal courthouse in Salt Lake City. They waved American flags and held indicators protesting Moore’s charges at a busy intersection. The physician tearfully thanked the gang earlier than strolling into the courthouse the place a jury would quickly be chosen.
The rally elevated public and social media consideration on Moore’s case, finally reaching Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She despatched a letter to Bondi, urging the U.S. lawyer normal to drop Moore’s charges.
“Dr. Michael Kirk Moore deserves to be celebrated, not prosecuted, for his bravery in standing up to a system that prioritized control over public health,” Greene wrote in her July 12 letter. Her workplace didn’t reply to requests for remark. (Greene, an early supporter of Trump’s, just lately announced her resignation from Congress after falling out of the president’s favor.)
That similar day, Bondi ordered the charges be dropped and thanked Greene and Utah Sen. Mike Lee in posts on X for bringing the case to her consideration. Lee’s workplace didn’t reply to questions on his function within the dismissal of Moore’s case.
Utah prosecutors then dismissed the charges against Moore, his enterprise and a neighbor who prosecutors alleged had organized the donations to the well being freedom advocacy group. Prosecutors additionally dropped charges against his workplace supervisor — who had pleaded responsible — and the part-time employee. Both of those staff testified against Moore and his neighbor the day earlier than Bondi’s announcement. Neither the neighbor nor the workplace supervisor responded to requests for remark.
Less than a week after his charges have been dropped, Moore and his fiancée flew to Washington, D.C., at Bondi’s invitation to satisfy with her and Greene; Moore mentioned he requested if Lee may be part of them. Moore mentioned the America First Policy Institute, a conservative assume tank based by former Trump administration officers, paid for his journey. (The group didn’t reply to a request for remark.)
Moore described the assembly as low-key and real: “It was a handshake and a hug to both M.T.G. and Attorney General Bondi.”
Moore estimates that he misplaced about two-thirds of his cosmetic surgery enterprise after his 2023 indictment as a result of he had used his advertising funds to cowl his authorized bills. As he’s tried rebuilding his observe in latest months, he rebranded as Freedom Surgical & Aesthetics. He mentioned he began serious about a new title throughout the 22 days he spent in jail in November 2024 after a choose decided he had violated pretrial guidelines by speaking with different co-defendants.
The new title “stands for freedom and for people’s ability to choose,” he mentioned. Images of the American flag and bald eagles seem on his clinic’s new web site amongst pictures of svelte ladies.
Moore’s medical license is in good standing. A state licensing division spokesperson wouldn’t say whether or not the company is contemplating taking motion against his license.
The lack of penalties for medical staff who falsify information may encourage others to undermine public well being steerage, mentioned Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine skilled on the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit, who served on the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel from 1998 to 2003 and has clashed with Kennedy over vaccine coverage, was kicked off a vaccine advisory committee for the FDA in August.
“The first two years of the pandemic turbocharged the medical freedom movement, which is a euphemism for basically saying that I don’t need experts. I will do my own Google searches and decide what’s right and what’s not,” Offit mentioned. “Even if it goes against what is standard medical practice or medical wisdom, I’m going to decide for myself — and my neighbor be damned, in the case of vaccines.”
As Moore vows to “do everything I can to get COVID shots off the market,” others who confronted similar authorized battles say his flip of fortune has impressed them to combat their convictions.
Julie DeVuono, a former nurse in Long Island who additionally distributed pretend vaccine playing cards to her sufferers, mentioned she and two others created the CovictedPatriot X account after others who gave out pretend playing cards reached out to her in response to her social media publish celebrating Moore’s vindication.
New York state prosecutors had charged DeVuono with forgery and cash laundering for utilizing the proceeds from the pretend vaccine playing cards to pay her mortgage. She pleaded responsible in 2023 and was sentenced to group service and probation. Her house was additionally seized as a part of a $1.2 million forfeiture, and she or he misplaced her nursing license.
“Is there any chance for us to get some kind of restored justice?” she mentioned in an interview.
DeVuono, 53, mentioned she feels she and others who have been convicted of similar crimes have been handled unfairly, however she will be able to’t ask for a presidential pardon as a result of her charges have been filed in state court docket. Instead, she’s advocating on behalf of others who can beseech Trump, similar to Kathleen Breault, a just lately retired midwife and nurse in New York.
Breault confronted a attainable five-year jail sentence after she and a co-defendant have been indicted in federal court docket in 2023 for destroying hundreds of vaccines and issuing falsified vaccine playing cards.
“I was terrified,” Breault, 68, instructed The Tribune and ProPublica. “But I also felt defiant, because I felt like what I did was right.”
She mentioned if she had gone to trial, her protection would have been civil disobedience. But Breault has well being points and cares for her grandchildren. She mentioned her kids urged her to do no matter she wanted to with the intention to keep away from a jail sentence.
So she pleaded responsible to conspiring to defraud the United States — a felony — and was sentenced final December to a few years probation. (Her co-defendant, who died in March, had additionally pleaded responsible.)
Breault mentioned she was buoyed by information over the summer season that similar charges against Moore have been dropped on the behest of the Trump administration. The consequence of Moore’s case has motivated her to start the method of asking for a presidential pardon.
A White House spokesperson didn’t reply to a request for remark about whether or not Trump has obtained any pardon requests from well being care staff indicted in connection with the pandemic or if he would pardon them. He has not pardoned anybody in that scenario, in response to a evaluation of the clemency grants in his second time period listed on the Department of Justice’s website.
Breault mentioned she’d prefer to have her conviction erased so she’s not restricted by her felon standing. She’d prefer to personal a gun once more, however these with felony convictions are prohibited from possessing firearms in New York. She’d additionally like extra freedom, together with not having to report back to her probation officer when she travels or how a lot is in her checking account.
“After seeing what happened with Kirk,” she mentioned about Moore, “maybe if I didn’t take the plea, I wouldn’t have a felony conviction now.”