Was vaccination opponent and osteopath Dr. Rashid Buttar murdered on May 18, 2023, for revealing a Masonic plan to reduce the global population by spreading the COVID-19 virus worldwide? No, that's not true. Buttar's own book titled, "Poisoned: A Deep Dive Into The Mass Bioweapon & Envenomation Agenda," indicated that he had been seriously ill since at least 2016 -- some seven years before his death in May 2023 -- with symptoms of heart disease, years before the COVID-19 was known to exist and its vaccines were created.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) posted on TikTok on September 23, 2023, under the Arabic title: "The doctor was murdered on May 18, 2023, because he exposed the masonic gang that sought to depopulate the globe through spreading the Coronavirus." (Translation from Arabic to English by Lead Stories staff.)
The 2 minute, 20-second video opens with an emotional introduction by an unidentified woman, who appears to be a friend of Buttar. She cries while praising the doctor in English. She says:
Dr. Buttar was a pioneer for medical freedom, freedom of speech. He told the truth when it wasn't convenient.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Sep 26 13:59:40 2023 UTC)
The Centers for Advanced Medicine, where Buttar practiced in North Carolina, announced his death in a statement. So did Buttar's family and a friend on X, formerly known as Twitter. Both statements did not mention a cause of the death, provoking conspiracy theories on social media, according to Politifact, which debunked claims that Buttar was targeted for his ideas.
Dr. David Gorski, a professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine, wrote on his LinkedIn page that anti-vaxxers wanted to blame Buttar's death on COVID vaccines, but that it turned out that "Dr. Buttar had been quite sick since 2016."
New Zealand's popular Stuff news media said the physician's online fame led to him being named one of the so-called "Disinformation Dozen," a group of influencers said to be producing the majority of false information about the pandemic online. It said Buttar was a permanent resident of New Zealand before moving back in 2020 to his native North Carolina.
Some clips in the TikTok video show Buttar falsely claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine killed more people than the virus itself because the ultimate plan was to reduce the global population. Lead Stories has previously debunked various conspiracy theories on depopulation plans. The activist group Population Matters also dismissed claims of depopulation as conspiracy theories.
The worldwide network of scientists Health Feedback said that Buttar was disciplined by the North Carolina Medical Board twice for unethical conduct, first in 2010 and second in 2019. In 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cautioned Buttar for selling inadequately-tested medication.
