COVID ‘Truther’ Who Claims She’s on the Lam Spoke at a Major Conference

A notorious Irish COVID conspiracist who claims she’s on the run from authorities has resurfaced to give a presentation at a major coronavirus “truther” conference in the UK, boasting of her repeated brushes with the law.

Dolores Cahill, a former professor of immunology at University College Dublin who has emerged as a major player in the global COVID conspiracist movement, was a speaker at the Better Way Conference in the English city of Bath on May 22. She ended her presentation – which laid out her conspiracy theories about the “agenda” behind the pandemic, and her proposed sovereign citizen-style solutions to fight back – by referencing her legal dramas over breaching COVID restrictions while travelling to an anti-lockdown rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in September 2020.

“So now there are seven or eight court cases in Ireland, and allegedly a warrant out for my arrest,” she told the crowd at the COVID truther conference, during a session titled “Law, Justice and Human Rights.” She then described how she was fighting back against the case using pseudo-legal sovereign citizen tactics.

Cahill had previously claimed in a video filmed in February, first reported by the Sunday Independent, that she was in a “remote location travelling around trying not to get arrested,” and that Irish authorities were “censoring me and interfering with my phone and my internet.” 

The 51-year-old – best known for her involvement in encouraging a fellow sovereign citizen who had been hospitalised with COVID to leave hospital, leading to his death in September – also claimed in the video that she faces up to two years in prison if she is caught.

But a review of the cases against her suggests Cahill is seriously exaggerating the threat she faces in Irish courts.

She’s facing charges in relation to at least three separate incidents where she is accused of failing to adhere to COVID restrictions, all of which took place in Dublin Airport in September and December 2020, and again in February 2021. 

In relation to the first two incidents, Cahill was due to appear in court on January the 24th this year but failed to do so. The following day a bench warrant was issued for her arrest that remains active today.

However, a source within the Irish legal system with knowledge of Cahill’s cases told VICE World News that the warrant was issued for such a minor offence that it’s unlikely to be executed and Cahill certainly wouldn’t be extradited back to Ireland from overseas for such a minor offence. The source compared the offence to a speeding ticket with the punishment likely to be a relatively small fine.

Cahill was also due in court on April the 20th to answer charges related to the incident in February 2021, but the case was postponed until next September. The Irish police told VICE World News they do not comment on individual cases.

Cahill was once a well-regarded scientist who worked with the world-renowned Max Planck Institute in Germany and as an advisor on the Irish government’s Advisory Science Council. 

But during the pandemic she emerged as a prominent COVID-conpiracist activist, leveraging her scientific background to attempt to give a veneer of legitimacy to her false claims that there was no pandemic, that COVID is no worse than the flu, or that mRNA vaccines are highly dangerous.

As her star power rose, she began venturing into the sovereign citizen world and joined a group in Donegal called the Common Law Information Centre where she was appointed as a “judge.”

It was through this group that she was put in touch with Una McCarron and convinced her that her husband, who had been hospitalised with COVID-19 days earlier, should be taken out of the hospital, as first reported by VICE World News.

The following day Joe McCarron was taken out of the hospital by a group of people aligned with Cahill, but just days later he was back in the hospital and put in an induced coma. He died several days later.

So far the Irish police have not brought any charges against anyone involved in the incident.

While Cahill has been avoiding Irish authorities, she surfaced in Bath last month at the 3-day Better Way Conference, amid a who’s who of major figures in the global COVID truther and anti-vax scenes. 

The lineup featured Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a son of the American political dynasty who is one of the world’s most high-profile proponents of anti-vax propaganda and COVID misinformation. It also featured Pierre Kory, a member of the conspiracy-minded Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance and one of the biggest boosters of ivermectin as a COVID cure.

Also speaking on stage was Robert Malone, a doctor who falsely claims to have invented the mRNA technology used in COVID vaccines and who was given a platform on Joe Rogan’s hugely popular podcast.

Cahill spoke at a panel alongside other people who have been pushing efforts to try to prosecute world leaders, health officials and scientists for alleged crimes for their role in supposedly orchestrating the pandemic or facilitating coronavirus vaccine rollouts.

These beliefs have mobilised a wave of volatile direct action protests by COVID truthers, many of them influenced by “sovereign citizen” ideology, which hinges on the false notion that followers can essentially declare themselves exempt from laws they don’t like. These “common law constables,” convinced that they have legal justification to forcibly shut down vaccination centres or threaten politicians and officials, are viewed by intelligence officials as a growing security threat.

In her rambling and often incomprehensible presentation, a video of which was viewed by VICE World News, Cahill laid out her conspiracist beliefs that the pandemic was orchestrated, and promoted sovereign citizen theories for fighting back against coronavirus vaccinations.

She claimed to have foreseen the current pandemic when she read conspiracy theory books in the 1990s, and to have chosen her career path in science “in order to prepare for what’s happening now.”

“I actually couldn’t speak in the ‘90s for 2-3 weeks – I mean I was functional but I was in such shock at the detail of what was proposed,” she told the audience.

“They were telling [that] the killing years would be 2020 and the end of 2025.”

She also claimed to have gone to Dachau in her younger years “and studied the concentration camps and the psychology behind dividing people and understanding what was going on – because it was exactly a foretaste of what’s happening now.”

She then delivered a crash course in sovereign citizen beliefs about the clash between “natural law” and the legal system – the latter of which she said was based on conventions established between the Catholic Church and English monarchs that “more or less say that they were going to steal all the living people, steal their souls, and turn them into something that was not alive.”

She said that from her legal perspective, anyone involved in enacting laws that infringe on inalienable rights – such as lockdowns and other COVID-related mandates – was guilty of malfeasance and liable for 10 years in prison. Similarly, anyone “injecting into someone’s arm is liable under the law,” she said.

Since McCarron’s death, Cahill, who bought a 16th-century tower house called White Castle in central Ireland for over $500,000 in 2019, has kept a relatively low profile, although she also emerged in Stockholm in late April to support an anti-vaxxer group there during a protest.

Cahill did not respond to phone calls, emails, or text messages sent by VICE World News.