Roger Marshall ran for Senate as a doctor. It's the first thing on his resume and the last word in his pitch: an OB-GYN from Great Bend who, by his own count, delivered 5,000 babies.

That's why what he did during the worst public health crisis in a century matters so much. When Kansans were scared and looking for someone with a medical degree to tell them the truth, Marshall used his to push a claim that a fact-checked debunking had already knocked down — and to promote a drug that federal regulators were warning people not to take at home.

Facebook took his post down

On September 2, 2020, the Associated Press reported that Facebook had removed a post from Marshall, then a congressman running for the Senate.

According to a screenshot Marshall's own staff provided, the post claimed that 94% of COVID-19 deaths involved people "of advanced age" with multiple serious illnesses, and that COVID-19 was the "sole cause of death" in only 6% of cases. As the post framed it: "The change in reporting reflects the difference between dying from COVID-19 and dying with COVID-19."

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the post "misstates CDC data about the deadliness" of the virus, and violated the company's rule against "spreading harmful misinformation."

Facebook was right, and this wasn't a close call.

The CDC had published a table showing which health conditions were mentioned alongside COVID-19 on death certificates. For 6% of deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause listed. That is what the number meant. It did not mean that 94% of the people died of something else. As FactCheck.org explained at the time, the other conditions on those certificates were frequently things COVID-19 itself caused — pneumonia, respiratory failure — or underlying conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure that made the virus more lethal.

Dr. Anthony Fauci put it plainly: "That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn't die of Covid-19. They did."

A layperson could be forgiven for misreading a CDC data table. A practicing physician reading comorbidity data should have known better — and Marshall is a practicing physician. That's the whole basis of his political brand.

His response: this is censorship

Marshall didn't correct the post. He attacked the referee.

"Social media companies should not be allowed to censor science that they disagree with. This is corporate censorship, pure and simple. As a physician, I believe in discussing all data, options and research with my patients."

Notice what that answer skips. It never addresses whether the underlying claim was true. It reframes a factual error as a fight about free speech, and it invokes his medical credentials — "as a physician" — to lend authority to a claim that the data did not support.

He also took hydroxychloroquine — and told Kansans over 65 to ask about it

Four months earlier, Marshall had done something similar with a drug.

On May 19, 2020, the Wichita Eagle reported that a Marshall spokesman confirmed the congressman was taking hydroxychloroquine to try to ward off COVID-19, along with members of his family. Marshall's statement:

"I would encourage any person over the age of 65 or with an underlying medical condition to talk to their own physician about taking hydroxychloroquine and I'm relieved President Trump is taking it."

He had said something similar on April 6: "in many cases, patients have a lot to gain and little to lose if they consider taking it."

There was a lot to lose. Twenty-five days before Marshall's statement, on April 24, 2020, the FDA had issued a formal safety communication cautioning against the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 outside a hospital or clinical trial, because of the risk of serious heart rhythm problems. The Eagle noted possible side effects including heart rhythm problems, dangerously low blood pressure, and muscle or nerve damage — and cited one New York hospital where most of 84 COVID-19 patients given hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin developed heart rhythm abnormalities.

The people Marshall was specifically urging to ask about the drug — those over 65 or with underlying medical conditions — are the same people most likely to be harmed by a cardiac side effect.

Less than a month later, on June 15, 2020, the FDA revoked the emergency use authorization entirely. The agency's stated reason: the drugs were "unlikely to be effective in treating COVID-19," and in light of "ongoing serious cardiac adverse events and other potential serious side effects," the benefits no longer outweighed the risks.

A spokeswoman for state Sen. Barbara Bollier, a Democrat then campaigning for the same Senate seat, called it "potentially dangerous for a physician to promote unproven medicine" and said it "goes against medical advice from experts."

He never let the claim go

Here's the part that turns a bad pandemic year into a pattern.

On September 4, 2025 — five years after Facebook pulled his post — Marshall sat on the Senate Finance Committee as it questioned Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about turmoil at the CDC. While senators in both parties pressed Kennedy, Kansas Reflector reported that Marshall used his five minutes to give the secretary room to answer his critics.

At one point, the Reflector reported, "Marshall agreed with Kennedy, articulating the difference between the number of people dying from COVID and the number of those who died with COVID."

That is the same distinction, almost word for word, that Facebook removed his post for in 2020.

By then the numbers were not in dispute. As the Reflector noted, the National Center for Health Statistics — an agency Kennedy oversees — had recorded more than 1.2 million U.S. deaths attributed to COVID-19, with COVID-19 the underlying cause in an estimated 87% of them.

At that same hearing, Marshall held up a sign about childhood immunization. "By the time they're 18 months, they've had 18 jabs," he said. "By the time they get to be old enough to vote, they have 76 jabs." He said he doesn't understand why newborns receive a hepatitis vaccine when the mother has no risk factors — a vaccine given at birth precisely because hepatitis B is most commonly passed from mother to child, and one the World Health Organization ties to an estimated 1.1 million deaths worldwide in 2022. Marshall added, "I guess before the press labels me wrong, I'm not anti-vaccine either."

Marshall had already voted to confirm Kennedy as the nation's top health official.

What it adds up to

Roger Marshall asks Kansans to trust him because he's a doctor. Look at how he has used that trust:

• He posted a claim about COVID-19 deaths that a platform removed as harmful misinformation and that independent fact-checkers had already debunked — then called the removal censorship instead of correcting it.
• He publicly encouraged people over 65 and people with underlying conditions to ask about a drug that federal regulators had warned against taking outside a hospital, and that the FDA pulled a month later over cardiac risks.
• Five years on, with 1.2 million Americans dead, he was still making the "with COVID, not from COVID" argument — this time from a Senate committee seat, to the man now running the CDC.

This is the same senator who once said of people without health coverage that there is a group of people who "just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves." The medical degree comes out when it helps him make a political argument. It goes back in the drawer when the science points the other way.

We deserve better.

Sources

Facebook's removal of Marshall's post and his response were reported by the Associated Press (Sept. 2, 2020). His hydroxychloroquine use and quotes come from the Wichita Eagle (May 19, 2020, archived). The 2025 hearing is from Kansas Reflector. Photo: AP.