It didn’t take long before some truly horrible people decided to take advantage of the fears over coronavirus, and one of those is supremely terrible human Jim Bakker, a convicted felon and fraudster, who has been ordered by the New York Attorney General to cease and desist from selling a fake cure for Coronavirus.
The Jim Bakker Show has ten days to comply with the cease and desist order, which cites a February 12th episode in combination with Bakker’s website for selling their “Silver Solution” as a means of preventing the coronavirus. The Jim Bakker Show website sells a number of products that contain colloidal silver, which they claim will support the immune system and has other non-verified health benefits. As of this writing, the products are still on sale.
Jim Bakker is no stranger to scandal and fraud. The 80-year old evangelist rose to fame in the seventies, along with other Christian “personalities” like Pat Robertson, as the host of Praise the Lord alongside his then-wife, Tammy Faye. After a life of excess funded by evangelism, Bakker seemed to be brought down by a scandal in the late ’80s: he was revealed to be having an affair with a church secretary and Bakker was convicted of fraud for misuse of Church funds and scamming church member.
Bakker went to prison for bilking Praise the Lord viewers out of their money via fundraising and also manipulating the church’s tax exempt status. Bakker went to prison, but that wasn’t the end. After five years in prison for fraud, and with the help of Alan Dershowitz, Bakker was out. He returned to ministry with a new show in 2003, The Jim Bakker Show.
It’s amazing that Bakker is still on the air, still making heinous statements about God’s judgment. He claimed Hurricane Harvey was a punishment from God and used it to, shocker, sell crap. Now he’s using the coronavirus panic to sell his silver supplements.
The New York AG letter, from Chief of the Health Care Bureau Lisa Landau, demands that Bakker get in touch with reality and stop marketing the silver solution as a real cure for anything, including coronavirus. “The World Heath Organization (‘WHO’) has noted that there is no specific medicine to prevent or treat this disease,” says the letter to Bakker. “Therefore, any representation on the Jim Bakker Show that its Silver Solution products are effective at combating and/or treating the 2019 novel coronavirus violates New York law.”
The AG also demands that the product be labeled with a disclaimer: “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”
Further than that, wouldn’t it be great if Bakker’s website and show were forced to run with a message that this is a man who has spent his entire life conning and manipulating gullible Christians and went to prison for fraud—not unlike the scam he’s perpetrating now! Thoughts and prayers for all of this, I guess.
(via Deadline)
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