Attorney General Pam Bondi has announced that the Justice Department is dropping charges against Utah plastic surgeon Dr. Kirk Moore.
Moore was accused of throwing away thousands of government-funded COVID-19 vaccinations and handing out false proof-of-vaccination cards to patients without injecting them.
The trial of the 58-year-old Moore began on July 7 in Salt Lake City, Utah, where supporters gathered to express their support, some holding signs like “Coercion Is Not Consent” and “Dr. Moore is a hero, not a criminal.” Also attending the rally in support of Moore were several Republican lawmakers, including Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, who said the charges were government overreach.
“The way those of us who stood up and pushed back were treated was wrong. We were treated like second-class citizens if we didn’t get the shot, we didn’t get the vaccine,” Schultz told the crowd on July 7, according to the Utah News Dispatch.
“Think about it for just a minute. You had to have a vaccine passport to walk down the streets and go into a shop, to go to a Jazz game, to go to a restaurant. That was unbelievable.”
“This man is a hero, not a criminal,” Greene wrote in a post on social media. “The charges were filed under Biden’s DOJ, not Trump.”
“By allegedly falsifying vaccine cards and administering saline shots to children instead of COVID-19 vaccines, not only did this provider endanger the health and well-being of a vulnerable population, but also undermined public trust and the integrity of federal health care programs,” Curt Muller, Special Agent in Charge with the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General, said in a January 2023 statement.
Moore was accused of running a vaccine scheme out of the Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah, located in Midvale. A 2023 indictment also charged two employees of the institute, Kari Dee Burgoyne and Sandra Flores, along with a woman named Kristen Andersen, identified in court records.
Federal prosecutors alleged that the four accused discarded nearly 2,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, issued fake vaccination cards, and, at some parents’ request, administered saline injections to children to make them believe they had received the vaccine.
According to court documents, Moore and his co-defendants did this in exchange for cash payments or mandatory donations to a private organization with which both Andersen and Moore were affiliated.
“I really appreciate all the support, the two rallies that we had this week, the article written by Died Suddenly, obviously had a huge effect on what happened today, and I just want to thank everybody for that,” Moore said.
The Died Suddenly account on the social media platform X, which advocates against COVID-19 vaccine mandates, expressed gratitude for Bondi’s decision to order the charges dismissed.