One of the nation’s leading freedom fighters, Stanford-trained dermatologist Dr. Peterson Pierre, lives in Newbury Park and has become a well-known spokesman for data-driven understanding of current medical issues.
“I’ve always had a strong moral compass,” Pierre told the Guardian. “Some of that has to do with my upbringing, and some has to do with [the fact that] God has given that to me as a gift. I’m always about truth, and I hate injustice.”
Pierre began practicing dermatology in Thousand Oaks in 2002, and patients soon dubbed him “the gentle injector.” But it’s his bold stand for basic liberties, shared through his twice-weekly Daily Dose videos, that launched him to a larger stage.
“I’m trying to give people the freedom to make decisions rather than blindly follow what so-and-so expert is saying.”
“I’ve had people from all over the world call the office and thank me for what I’m doing,” Pierre says. “I don’t have an agenda to push. To the best of my ability, I’m just about the truth. This is why I always end my videos with ‘The truth will set you free.’”
Pierre’s journey to the Conejo Valley — and to prominence as a Frontline Doctor — began in New York, where he was born, and continued in his family’s home country of Haiti, where they lived for 10 years until Pierre was 16.
“It was quite a culture shock and had its challenges,” Pierre remembers of the move from New York City to Port-au-Prince. “In addition to the poverty and injustice, the language barrier was certainly an issue. I remember my first few days in class where I had no idea what was going on because I didn’t speak the language. The only thing I could do was math because numbers are numbers.”
He graduated high school and moved back to New York with ambitions of becoming a surgeon, but while doing rotations at Stanford Medical School, he saw that many seasoned surgeons had given up everything in life — including their families — to pursue their practices.
“I decided the sacrifice was too great. That’s not what I wanted,” he says. “For me, it was always life first, career second. Family first, career second.”
He discovered dermatology and, on his first rotation, noticed that “everybody was genuinely happy. That struck me. People enjoyed being at work and doing what they do.”
Dermatology also offered a wider variety of treatments and patients.
“There’s no age restriction, no gender restriction, and you can still do surgery,” Pierre says. “It was the perfect marriage of everything I was looking for in medicine. I get to form relationships with families that span generations. I’ve seen kids in middle school who are now married, and I’m seeing their kids. That part is really fulfilling.”
He and his wife, a Stanford-trained pediatrician, moved to Newbury Park in 2002 to be near her family and raise their children. But during the COVID outbreak and its aftermath, Pierre was “thoroughly disappointed by the way the medical community simply went along with the narrative and refused — there are some exceptions — to do anything about it,” he says.
“Even people I knew personally were gung ho fanatical about the narrative,” he told the Guardian, “and when I would challenge them, they really had nothing to say because I’m not about propaganda. I’m about let’s look at the facts. A lot of the things they were saying about ‘flattening the curve’ and blah blah blah, I’m like, these are just marketing terms. ‘Flattening the curve’ does not exist. That’s not possible. The only way you can flatten the curve is if God flattens it. There’s [no] human intervention that can flatten the curve unless you come up with a cure — and we’re not very good at curing viruses.”
The use of fear as a public health tool reminded him of what had been done in Nazi Germany.
“As the gospel was presented to me, it just made perfect sense. I’m like, that’s a win-win deal.”
“Whenever someone is emphasizing fear, usually two things will follow: one, they will tell you things that are not true; and two, they do that to manipulate your behavior, which is exactly what the governments of the world did,” he says. “One of the things that’s necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing, and I refuse to be the good man that does nothing. I want to be able to look my kids in the eye when they say, ‘Dad, you knew about this. Why didn’t you do something?’ They can never say that to me because I did everything I could.”
Pierre met America’s Frontline Doctor co-founder Simone Gold in 2020 and was invited to speak at freedom rallies, helping people understand that decisions made by governments and agencies like the Food and Drug Administration were not always in their best interests.
“This whole thing about masking up, shot mandates and closing down businesses is a power move,” he says. “It’s fear, control and greed. This had nothing to do with people.”
He points to mask mandates as just one example.
“The reason masks don’t work is not because it’s a matter of opinion,” he says. “Masks were never designed to prevent infectious disease, period. That’s not what they’re for, so of course, they don’t work. It’s the same type of thing with the shots. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute. You want me to put mRNA in my body, which is a blueprint for a viral spike protein, to teach my body to make a foreign material? That’s one hundred percent against God’s design. Absolutely no way am I doing that.’”
Pierre’s commitment to truth goes deeper than his medical training and is rooted in a decision he made at age 10 in a non-denominational church in Port-au-Prince.
“As the gospel was presented to me, it just made perfect sense,” he says. “Jesus paid the penalty that I could never pay and is offering me a relationship with him while I’m here, and then I get to go to heaven to be with him forever? I’m like, that’s a win-win deal. I can’t say no to that.”
Which is why faith — and medical integrity — fuel his desire to speak truth in every situation.
“When I see stuff like [the government overreaction to COVID] happening, I have to say something,” he says. “When my kids were growing up, I always told them, ‘Doing the right thing is always going to be hard. Don’t expect it to be easy.’”
When he became a Frontline Doctor and began making his 2-minute “Daily Dose” videos, each designed to illuminate important medical debates using facts and hard data, he received his share of “emails with vitriol” and angry calls to the office.
“The stuff people were saying didn’t make sense,” he says. “They were afraid.”
His goal with the Daily Dose videos, of which he makes 10 per month, is to acquaint people with current research so they can come to their own conclusions.
“I don’t want people to believe me because I’m providing an opinion,” he says. “That’s nice, but they need something more concrete. I want them to go verify that what I’m saying is true.”
For that reason, each installment provides links to the articles and studies upon which Pierre bases his observations “so they can go verify for themselves because that’s the thing the government doesn’t do. They spew things and have no references whatsoever because what they’re saying is not truthful, and people fall for that. I want to say, ‘This is what’s going on. Here are the references. You go check it out for yourself and make up your own mind.’ I’m trying to give people the freedom to make decisions rather than blindly follow what so-and-so expert is saying.”
Daily Dose videos are posted on the America’s Frontline Doctors website, but most people see them as re-posts on social media.
“People want to spread the word,” Pierre says.
In the midst of it all, the Pierre Skin Care Institute continues to thrive, and Pierre has become a leading voice in the dermatology field as well, recently appearing on a lively episode of Dr. Drew’s syndicated program. Pierre aims for natural results and patient comfort when treating sun damage, wrinkles, acne, rosacea and other skin ailments.
“I get to make a tangible difference in people’s lives,” Pierre says. “I’ve seen patients’ personalities transform when I’ve taken care of their skin condition that they were very self-conscious about. It’s been really remarkable.”
He loves the Conejo Valley’s natural setting — and its Saturday morning pickup basketball games around town — and looks forward to many more years serving the local and extended populations as a dermatologist, as well as speaking out to preserve people’s God-given rights and freedoms.
