As Missouri representative Cori Bush prepares for a primary election on August 6, old claims of her faith healing abilities have resurfaced to offer fresh fodder for her critics. In her autobiography The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America, which was published in 2022, Bush described the time she worked as a faith healer, allegedly healing a disabled toddler so that she could walk and removing a woman’s tumors. “As I learned how to apply God’s Word to my life in new ways, I better understood the power that was already residing in me. It was there, waiting for me to acknowledge it, to use it. I had the confidence to heal others with God’s power,” wrote Bush. Regarding the healing of the disabled toddler, Bush wrote, “The child had had a bleed in her brain, shortly after she was born, and so couldn’t walk. She had never taken a step in her life. I carried the child from the prayer room in the back of the church out into the sanctuary . . . ‘Walk,’ I said gently to the three-year-old girl, ‘you will walk.’ And this girl took her first step. Then another, and another. She walked.” She also described how she met a woman with “visible tumors on her torso.” “I laid hands on her and prayed, and I felt that my hand was no longer touching a tumor. It shrank along with the others on her body.” Bush also made similar claims during a PBS interview.

Bush is a registered nurse but has often paired her religious beliefs with medical science, calling them a “similar thing.” Bush’s pastor, Charles Ndifon, claimed he healed Bush of coronavirus by praying for her over the phone. “Cori, she had COVID, and she called me from the hospital. And 30 minutes later, she was breathing. Healed. It was that simple,” he told The Washington Free Beacon. Medical professionals, however, have cast doubt on Bush’s claims. “I don’t think what she’s claiming happened. Definitely as a physician I would encourage people to seek treatment for cancer and other ailments,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, told The New York Post, which was covering the story.

Bush faced similar criticism from conservatives. “Cori Bush, a sitting US congresswoman, claimed to have supernatural powers to heal cancer with the touch of her hand. This is easily one of the most outlandish claims ever made by an American politician in the entire history of this country and yet the journalist expresses no skepticism whatsoever,” wrote The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh. Jimmy Dore, an independent, also chimed in. “Democrat Cori Bush has revealed she has the power to cure Tumors just by laying her hands on them… she tells the story of curing a homeless woman of her tumors & then saying she doesn’t know where that woman is so there is no way for anyone to fact check her.”