Health officials ignored as pandemic raged through Tucson church

As the new coronavirus spread in the summer of 2020, Pastor Isaac Noriega kept his flock of about 500 Tucsonans coming to church three times a week for in-person service.

Noriega asked church elders and deacons for guidance, former members said, and they wanted to keep services going, although most churches were moving online.

Anyway, former members said, Noriega explained that congregants had protection: Their practice of minimizing contact with people outside their church, and their faith.

But the protection broke down in summer 2020, when the virus entered the sanctuary of Golden Dawn Tabernacle at 301 E. Los Reales Road near South Nogales Highway. During hours-long services, members coughed and gasped as the virus ran wild. Some sick attendees kept coming.

Then, members began to die. Over a 23-day period, from Aug. 14 to Sept. 5, eight Golden Dawn members died of COVID-19, former members said.

“Everybody was so sick,” said Zoe Cordova, a former member who was hospitalized with COVID-19 at the time. “Our family was dying. People were in the hospital. There were people around us, old people around us, they were bent over in their seats. They couldn’t breathe.”

One of the victims was her husband’s grandmother, Frances Samorano. Zoe’s husband, Gabriel Cordova, blames Noriega the pastor.

“He’s the cause of it,” he said in an interview at their southwest-side home. “Yes, COVID killed a lot of people, but if he would have closed the church down and streamed, like a lot of other churches were — and I’m not just saying that because of my grandma.”

“There were a lot of innocent people that died that shouldn’t have died.”

'No requirement to close'

Noriega, in an interview and emails, said members were free to make their own choices about attending and taking precautions.

“There was no requirement to close, and the congregation decided to continue to attend,” he said via email. In the same email, he said, “I encouraged masking.”

But in a sermon on Aug. 12, 2020, recorded by a member who has since left the church, Noriega gave a mixed message: “If you want to wear a mask, you're welcome to do that. I won't come against you, if that's all the faith you have. Let me reword that. If you feel in your heart to wear a mask, go ahead and wear a mask.”

Gabriel Cordova and others reported the church to Pima County health officials for not following pandemic recommendations, but the officials could find no way to intervene. Church leaders wouldn’t even take their calls, officials said. In a last-ditch effort, public-health workers threw literature over the gate of the church’s fenced compound.

It’s unclear exactly how many members of Golden Dawn Tabernacle died of COVID-19, but former members who have researched the pandemic’s effect at the church estimate that at least 10 did.

If so, this would give the congregation more than 10 times the COVID-19 fatality rate of Pima County as a whole in 2020. At 10 deaths, the rate would be around 2,000 per 100,000 people, versus 161 per 100,000 in the county.

The way the church handled the virus reflected the powerful pastor’s longstanding ambivalence toward health care. In a sort-of biography called “Time-tested Memorials,” which tells the story of Noriega and his wife Lucy, a theme emerges of using medical professionals but mistrusting them, blaming doctors for medical failures and crediting God for successes.

The book, self-published in 2023 says of the COVID-19 outbreak: “In this test that God allowed His Bride to go through, He was also plainly showing Her that She cannot trust in medical science or man; Her trust must only be in the Lord and His Word.”

Ambivalence to medicine

This ambivalence toward medicine has been a tension in Christianity ever since the advent of scientific medicine centuries ago, said Amanda Porterfield, a professor emerita of religion at Florida State University who wrote “Healing in the History of Christianity.”

Before that, she said, “There wasn’t much difference between what a doctor and a faith healer could produce.”

This ambivalence was passed down to Noriega, to the members of Golden Dawn and to an estimated millions of global members of the sect known as The Message by the man they consider God's prophet, William Branham. A Message organization called Voice of God Recordings puts the number of followers in the sect at roughly 3 million based on how many people receive the group's religious materials. 

Branham emerged as a preacher during the post-World War II healing revival, part of the Pentecostal flowering in that era. He became famous for healing attendees at revivals around North America, and later the world.

Newspaper reporters in Canada exposed some of Branham’s claimed healings as false. Later, the governments of South Africa and Norway banned his healing revivals.

While Branham gradually shifted from healing, his sermons show he never put his full faith in medicine.

“No medicine, no doctor, no nothing ever did heal anybody, but God,” Branham said in a 1963 sermon. He went on, “Now, you say, ‘Do you condemn doctors?’ Certainly not. If you break your arm, the doctor has studied how to set that arm, but he can’t heal it. God has to heal it.”

The suspicion of medicine is common, but not universal, in Message churches. Naomi Wright, who grew up near Buffalo, New York, as part of a polygamous Message “cult,” as she describes it, said medical help was discouraged. Both of her parents died without receiving medical treatment.

“We did not believe in medical care,” she said. “We didn’t even know what they for sure died from.”

Noriega, Branham’s disciple at Golden Dawn Tabernacle, has required that church members come to him before seeking medical attention, former members said.

This came up in the Nov. 28 divorce trial of JoAnn Malena and her now-former husband, Chris Baquera. Questioned by Pima County Superior Court Judge Lisa Abrams about health decisions for their children, Malena described strict church policies.

“Everything medical has to go through the pastor,” she testified. “If you want medical attention, it has to be approved by him first. In all our cases, we’re taught to pray and that our faith will heal us.”

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Other former members backed up Malena’s account in interviews, but Noriega said it’s not true.

“Medical decisions are made by each family,” he said. “I have always taught the church (even prior to COVID) to trust the Lord and his Word. I believe our true help comes only from the Lord, but I have never denied that the Lord can use medicine and medical science to help us.”

This control of medical treatment played out in Malena’s life, she recounted in an interview.

After her fourth child, her doctor refused to treat her further unless she got her tubes tied, Malena said. Any additional pregnancy would threaten her life.

So, Malena said, she asked Noriega for permission to get the procedure.

“He said God spoke to him and said it’s OK to tie my tubes because of this medical condition,” Malena said. “The pastor has trained us that God speaks through him directly.”

'Not having enough faith'

Real anguish could afflict those who weren't healed, by their faith or by medicine. John Calvo, a former church member who has been publishing research on it since 2022 online at goldendawntabernacle.org, recalled difficult years when his mother was gravely ill.

“The pastor would essentially denigrate people that were sick, (who) weren't getting better,” Calvo said. “And it was all about them not having enough faith.”

That message spread in the close-knit community, where belief in evil spirits is common.

The accusations made a hard situation worse, recalled Calvo, who left the church in 2006.

“Having people be ostracized like that, both publicly and then privately, it can be psychologically and emotionally scarring," he said.

The alternative sometimes offered is laying on of hands in prayer.

“It’s a running joke in the church,” said former member Gabriel Cordova. “If you want to make it and survive an operation or a sickness, don’t let the elders lay hands on you, 'cause everybody they lay hands on, they end up dying.”

A public-health issue

The tendency to emphasize prayer over medical measures became a public-health issue when the pandemic struck.

Emails obtained through a public-records request by Calvo show Pima County health officials struggling in 2020 to address the outbreak at the church.

The first complaint arrived July 30, 2020 about the church “gathering in a group of 500 people, attendants not wearing masks. People are getting sick with COVID-19.”

By Aug. 5, a public-health official emailed he had had three complaints about Golden Dawn.

“I have been told that the congregants are afraid of the Pastor who is the ultimate authority even deciding if and when someone could go to the hospital,” Manny Mejias, the health department’s liaison to churches, reported to colleagues.

On Aug. 16, 2020, the Pima County Health Department received word of the first apparent death from COVID-19 at Golden Dawn Tabernacle.

“This church has had multiple positive tests and a death,” a tracing supervisor named Stephanie Brown wrote, citing a report from a church attendee. “There are around 600 people in attendance for church services on a regular basis. There is no social distancing and no masks required.”

'They didn't want to talk to us'

The authorities could do little about it. Under then-Gov. Doug Ducey’s executive order, churches were considered essential and could not be ordered to close. Many did voluntarily, though, including the Roman Catholic diocese and some Message churches.

As word came in of more deaths, health officials tried to reach someone at Golden Dawn, but nobody would pick up the phone, they said.

“It was striking that they didn’t want to talk to us,” recalled Mary Derby, the county’s epidemiologist at the time.

Public health officials ran into obstacles at other churches and groups, but generally were able to find a way to give suggestions about masking, ventilation, distancing and the other measures available before vaccines and effective treatments.

Noriega, in an interview and emails, disputed this account. He said his son, associate pastor Matthew Noriega, “responded to them and told them how we were doing it.”

But this is not mentioned in the Health Department correspondence, and neither Director Theresa Cullen nor Derby remembered any successful contact.

“We tried every avenue,” Derby said. “We tried using our food establishment codes. We tried child care codes. We thought about the fire marshal, but they were up to date.”

That’s why they ended up tossing pamphlets over the gate.

As the disease spread, the church lost some key elders, such as John Chacon, a contemporary of Noriega who was the church’s evangelist in Latin America. But that didn’t seem to be top of mind for the pastor, Zoe Cordova said.

“His church was full of martyrs for this Message,” she said. “That was his pride. All these other Message churches closed and did what the worldly world was doing. He didn’t. He stood with the Word.”