THE RECKONING PROJECT AND CODA STORY PRESENT

Russian officials and propagandists built cover stories for war crimes before those crimes were committed. Lawyers call this an information alibi. And they think it's prosecutable.

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“Whenever you're looking at war crimes, crimes against humanity, there's always the excuse that this is a one-off, there's a bad apple, one person did something. When you see it as a pattern, when you see the actors repeating, then you can go, okay, this is part of a consistent behavior, part of a plan, and it becomes like a character trait for a criminal in a court case.“

Peter Pomerantsev

The Reckoning Project Co-Founder

The Syrian civil war morphed out of the pro-democracy Arab Spring protests of 2011, when demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad's authoritarian government were met with violent repression. 

The country fractured into a complex conflict involving government forces, armed opposition groups, and jihadist factions including Al Qaeda and Islamic State.

Russia entered the Syrian civil war at the request of President Assad in late 2015. 

Syrian forces had already used chemical weapons against civilians by the time Russia entered the war. By 2016, their use was ‘widespread and systematic,’ according to Human Rights Watch.

"One of the possible mistakes the Russian info alibi machine could have made was to publish information about a strike on the Kramatorsk railway station before it actually took place.

It's a sort of sloppy mistake that you always want the criminal to make. Without all the other evidence, I don't think we'd be seeing the important patterns that we're looking into, but it's always good for a lawyer if the criminal ends up leaving a shoe at the crime scene.”

Peter Pomerantsev 

The Reckoning Project Co-Founder

Photo Credits: 1.Mohammed Khair/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images. 2.Stringer/AFP via Getty Images. 3. White helmets/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images. 4. Louai Beshara/AFP via Getty Images. 5. Hamza Al-AjwehAFP via Getty Images. 6. Satellite image (c) 2023 Maxar Technologies. 7. Andriy Zhyhaylo/Obozrevatel/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images. 8. Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images. 9. Grzedzinski for The Washington Post via Getty Images.

The post The Alibi Machine: The Pattern appeared first on Coda Story.

“Understanding the system depends in part on knowing who participates in it. So firstly, we have to identify a hierarchical network involved in a particular information operation. This may include senior political leaders, media organizations, and social media influencers… We have to prove that there were some orders or instructions that were given by more senior groups to less senior groups.”

Nadiia Vaskivska,

Legal Advisor at Global Rights Compliance

They distribute the talking points — called “temniki” — directly to editors-in-chief of Russia’s biggest state media outlets: TASS, Channel One, Rossiya, RIA Novosti.

We asked Alexey Kovalev — a Russian journalist in exile who once worked inside one of those outlets — to describe how it functions.

“The presidential administration intervenes with specific instructions. It has a kill switch that can immediately blacklist any coverage in Kremlin-controlled media of any unwanted, undesirable topics, like protests, for example. The presidential administration is like the central nervous system of the beast.” 

Alexey Kovalev

The Kremlin ‘brain’ doesn't only issue orders. It also enforces silence. Russia's official censorship body, Roskomnadzor, can red-flag content and suspend licences. The effect, Kovalev says, is a system that rarely needs to give explicit instructions because everyone already knows the rules.

"You should instinctively know what things to cover, what things not to cover, and from which angle. Do what you think is expected of you." 

Alexey Kovalev

These are the people whose job it is to take Kremlin narratives and project them onto the world stage. As well as Sergei Shoigu, Minister of Defense, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, several names crop up regularly in the information alibis we’ve looked at:

Igor Konashenkov, spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense — the military's public voice, whose briefings provide official cover for Russian military actions.

Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, who amplifies narratives across international media from behind her podium.

Vasily Nebenzia, Russia's Ambassador to the United Nations, who takes the alibi to the Security Council, where it can be delivered with diplomatic immunity and broadcast live to the world.

“The Russian mission to the UN plays a very central role in this ecosystem. It picks up and amplifies disinformation that has been seeded in more esoteric parts of the internet and gives it a global platform.”

Peter Pomerantsev

The words of these officials have the full weight of the state behind them. And that helps achieve one of the key goals of the information alibi.

“The Russian use of info alibis has to be seen in their general kind of strategy of ultimately avoiding responsibility and giving their allies enough “implausible” deniability about what the Russians are up to… It gives allies at the UN, for example, a way to go ‘well, we just don't know what happened, maybe this was an accident, maybe the Ukrainians bombed themselves.’”

Peter Pomerantsev

The Reckoning Project Co-Founder

This includes organizations that look independent, but which are actually funded by and have direct links to the Russian state.

ANO Dialog and the Social Design Agency — both now sanctioned by the U.S., UK and EU — are the engine room of this layer.

ANO Dialog — reportedly directly linked to Sergey Kiriyenko and the Presidential administration — distributes billions of rubles in grants to social media creators. Its network of social media channels started spreading fakes about Ukraine from the start of the invasion. One of the examples — a pseudo fact-checking Telegram channel War on Fakes, with over 400k subscribers.

“It's a way to ensure that every content creator is hooked on the government money… The ‘don't bite the hand that feeds you’ mentality.”

Alexey Kovalev

The Social Design Agency (SDA) operates differently — it focuses on creating and spreading Russian disinformation abroad.

“The Social Design Agency is industrialized disinformation, and it can be terrifyingly effective because explicitly pro-Kremlin narratives created by the SDA were shared by people like Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene. The stuff that they're creating is really bleeding into mainstream Western discourse.”

Alexey Kovalev

Let’s take the Mariupol hospital attack as an example. 

It appears that bloggers and Telegram channels were the first to point to maternity wards being used as firing positions.

A week before the attack, DPR People's Militia channels were claiming that maternity wards were being used as firing positions. Pro-war Telegram channels amplified it within hours. 

It was after that, that official spokespeople reinforced the message:

• Igor Konashenkov, Defense Ministry spokesman, accused the Ukrainian army of turning hospitals into firing positions. 

• Vasily Nebenzia, UN Ambassador told the Security Council that Ukrainian forces had placed a firing position in a Mariupol maternity ward before the attack, and reminded them of his warning two days after the attack.

• Maria Zakharova, Foreign Ministry spokesperson — remember the briefing she gave just four hours before the bombs fell on the maternity ward?

And then, almost before the dust had settled, the bloggers and Telegram channels echoed the narrative the spokespeople had told the world.

So, as far as who’s leading who, Vasily Gatov, former Russian media strategist and disinformation researcher, thinks it’s a two-way street. Some indications come from the Kremlin, other initiatives are launched from the bottom.

“My opinion is that most of these information operations are created in small groups, mostly people with very limited knowledge of psychology and especially media effects. Some are military, maybe military intelligence. Some are journalists, war journalists. And most of them are people who make their living from telling the Kremlin they're doing a great job.”

Vasily Gatov

Alexey Kovalev agrees that, in his experience as a journalist, there are rarely detailed instructions flowing from the top. Each individual is expected to use their own judgment, as long as it’s favorable to the Kremlin.

“It's a way of controlling by omission that you should not say under any circumstances, and that is anything that is not on the Russian defense ministry's website. Steer clear from any Ukrainian perspective. It doesn't matter. Ukrainians don't have agency. Flood the zone with shit, with a million conflicting narratives. It doesn't really matter that they don't make any sense or it falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. Seeds of doubt have been sowed.”

Alexey Kovalev

“We can tell when an info alibi is peaking. We can look at the online patterns and see how it's spiked. We can see so many telltale signs that this is not organic activity, but part of a planned operation. The technology is a double-edged sword and I think this war is going to be a game changer globally for holding propagandists accountable.”

Peter Pomerantsev

The Reckoning Project Co-Founder

The post The Alibi Machine: The Suspects appeared first on Coda Story.

Scott Martin, International Lawyer at Global Rights Compliance

Scott Martin: There's nothing wrong in general with propaganda, disinformation, information operations — they're a common form of any military operation. But when something helps to contribute to the perpetration of a crime, if it helps to conceal crimes or if it obstructs investigations, it shouldn't be seen as background support of propaganda but actually an operational aspect of a kinetic military action. And legally relevant as a consequence.

Free speech is a protected right. Don’t you risk infringing on that right?

SM: This report was done by a group of human rights lawyers with a firm commitment to an expansive understanding of freedom of expression or freedom of speech. However, the right to speak, the right to freely express yourself, ends when speech becomes a tool of a crime. Propaganda is lawful. Information operations are lawful. Participation in a crime is not.

So what exactly is the crime? Which law would you use to bring a case?

SM: It's called Article 25(3)(d) [of the Rome Statute] and it relates to the criminalization of contributions to a crime by a group acting with a common purpose.

Can you break down what exactly a prosecutor would need to show?

SM: - Show that an international crime was perpetrated.

- Show that the perpetrators of the crime were part of a group that acted with a common purpose.

- Then demonstrate that the person disseminating the false narrative made a significant contribution to the commission of that crime.

And what counts as a ‘significant contribution’ to the crime?

SM: If the contribution led to impunity for the crime, because the narrative disseminated in advance was strong enough to conceal the perpetration of a crime or otherwise obstruct accountability investigations, then you should be able to argue that that could be a significant contribution.

How do you prove a group is working with ‘common purpose?’ In the information ecosystem, rumours circulate all the time, they get picked up and passed on, details may change as the story mutates. It doesn’t have to  mean there’s coordination between the people involved.

SM: I wouldn't think you'd need to show that here's this group sitting together saying ‘here's how we're going to attack and Vlado this is your responsibility, and Sergei this is your responsibility.’ And international criminal law is a lot like this because we don't have access to many of the conversations that went into a plan. What you do is you draw inferences. And then from there you hopefully will be able to see: Is it accidental? Do we have a group acting together pursuant to a common purpose?

Is that why you need to show a pattern of behavior?

SM: This pattern is important principally for legal reasons. It helps to show that this attack wasn't isolated. It wasn't a mistake. It wasn't opportunistic. It's taking place repetitively in Ukraine. It [the pattern] shows integration between the information operation and the military operation. The speech wasn't just incidental to the military action. It was functionally connected. And as a consequence, maybe providing a material contribution to the crime that takes place and the obfuscation afterwards.

Wouldn’t you need to show direct links between the security services and the people conducting the information operations?

SM: We need to show a full integration and plan of the information operation within the kinetic military action because that's what connects it to the crime. And if we can show that a high-ranking political or diplomatic official in Russia was participating from the beginning, during and after the attack, it leads you to believe that this was being done. But we still must work to ensure an unassailable direct link between the disinformation and the crime that took place. The way it normally comes, in international crimes work, is through an insider who was present at a particular moment and she or he can testify that this information operation was integrated into the military operation as an information alibi.

What gives you confidence a prosecution of Russian propagandists could ever be brought using this law? It’s never been done before.

SM: Its legal coherence is jumping off the page. There was no stretching of definitions. There was no creating new ideas or practices. This was, ‘here's what the law says and here's how it fits and here is supporting jurisprudence.’

There have been plenty of conversations about whether any Russian interference campaigns that they launch online, or these types of disinformation operations can be elevated to a crime. And while a lot of it remains and ought to remain protected speech, when you're looking at it through a human rights lens, in this case, I think we found a very clear example where it should be investigated as a contribution to a crime and perhaps even prosecuted as such.

The post The Alibi Machine: The Case for the Prosecution appeared first on Coda Story.

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For more information about Information Alibi, see the “Maufacturing Impunity” report

The post The Alibi Machine: The Verdict appeared first on Coda Story.

Over the following weeks senior officials, state-backed TV channels and news agencies, war reporters and bloggers echo a version of the same story. 

The details don’t always match. 

Some reports say the maternity ward was used by Ukrainian soldiers, and was therefore a legitimate target. 

Others say the attack was “staged” — that Ukrainian forces carried it out and made it look as though Russia had done it. 

But the conclusion is always the same: Russia is not to blame for this attack.

“Sometimes things are just chaotic because war is chaotic. At other times, spreading many, many, many different versions of the same event is a very classic Russian tactic to blur the reality of what happened… This is the way you undermine the very idea of truth and belief and just create a sort of a haze around what really happened.”

Peter Pomerantsev 

The Reckoning Project Co-Founder

Independent investigations have determined that the hospital was clearly identifiable and operational.  

There was no evidence of Ukrainian military positions. 

The OSCE calls the attack a "clear violation of international humanitarian law" and a "war crime."

“The narratives were planted well in advance. And I can essentially break them down into:

1 - “We didn’t do it.”

2 - “We warned you that Ukraine was planning to do it.”

3 - “Even if we did it, the maternity ward was a legitimate target.”

They create so many alternative versions of the truth that if you are having at least some doubt you can pick and choose the one that suits you the most and go with it.”

Anastasiia Vorobiova

Legal Advisor at Global Rights Compliance

The post The Alibi Machine: The Crime appeared first on Coda Story.

We handed her tissues and then invited her to join our party. Ten minutes later, she was surrounded by journalists, artists, Nobel laureates, filmmakers, and activists, all raising glasses and toasting her birthday as if she were the guest of honor. By the end of the night, she was laughing, swept up in the improbable magic that happens when you throw open the doors and bring strangers together.

As we organize the fifth edition of our storytelling festival, I keep thinking back to that night last summer. Of all the remarkable moments we've witnessed at ZEG, our annual storytelling festival, of all the celebrities and headliners we've hosted, it's that spontaneous encounter that best embodies the spirit of what we're trying to build: a place where boundaries dissolve, where the unexpected is welcome, and where someone who walked in crying can leave feeling part of a community they never knew existed.

How ZEG came to be

I'll be honest: I never thought I believed in ‘events’ as a way to do journalism. When I was reporting from war zones for the BBC, I believed journalism's impact was measured in stories published and scoops landed and in being on the ground. 

Of course, that remains true. But with social media platforms shaping how stories are distributed and consumed, I saw that journalism's survival hinged on our ability to create spaces for meaningful engagement and collective understanding. For our team at Coda, events like ZEG are not a side project—they’re central to how we create meaning and context in a noisy world. They let us go beyond the article, beyond the headline, and to wrestle as a community with the “how” and “why” and, sometimes, to change the story altogether, or at least our understanding of it.

That's the philosophy behind ZEG. But in practice, with colleagues scattered from San Francisco to Tbilisi, London, New York, Milan, and Delhi, the festival is put together in a whirlwind of Slack threads, late-night WhatsApps, and video calls that span time zones. Sometimes I look at the Zoom screen and can't help but chuckle: one of us is in a taxi after covering a protest, another is dialing in from an airport, someone else is squeezing in the call between deadlines or giving a bath to one of the kids. Though we never planned it this way, everyone on the screen is a woman, each of us juggling her own corner of chaos as we plan our biggest event of the year.

A laboratory for journalism

The word “zeg" means "the day after tomorrow” in Georgian. And that encapsulates Coda's mission to look beyond the headlines, connect the dots between crises, identify emerging patterns, and to stay on the story by building sustained narratives in a world that is fragmented, distracted and quick to forget. We know that keeping a critical eye on the present provides insights into the future. It’s why we aim to pioneer new ways to tell stories about the world, to show how local realities are part of wider global conversations that resonate across borders and generations.

ZEG began as a collaboration, a leap of faith between journalists and entrepreneurs in my hometown Tbilisi. We were brought together by the belief that stories can change not just what we know, but how we see and what we do. We wondered, in that first year, if anyone would really fly across the world to Georgia for a festival about telling stories, and how to tell them better. But people did, and—with the exception of the COVID years—they've kept coming ever since.

What started as an experiment has become an international event. In 2025, we’ll host 800 people, including 120 speakers, over three packed days.

Every year, friends ask me: “Who’s your big star at ZEG this time?” I’m never quite sure how to answer. The real magic is in the mix: in the way hundreds of people from all over the world come together, crossing borders both physical and mental, for three days of conversations that bend minds and spark connections that last a lifetime.

If you’re looking for a festival that’s the opposite of formulaic, you’ll find it at ZEG. We don’t have themes; we want space for surprises, to see where the questions we ask take us, and to try to arrive at ideas and perspectives that are fresh.

Beyond the festival

What happens at ZEG doesn't stay at ZEG. We carry on its spirit of inquiry in Coda’s journalism. Our mission is to stay on the story, so that the conversations and connections that begin at the festival invigorate and inform our reporting and coverage long after the festival lights go down.

While we know that for most of you, Tbilisi is a long way to come, we believe there's something essential about having global conversations far from the center. ZEG was born on the periphery, and—as we've seen again and again—it’s from the margins that the most original ideas and most urgent questions often emerge.

These are ideas and questions we want as many people as possible to hear and to interrogate. So we’re also working to make ZEG a year-round series of events both in person and online. This year, we're piloting "mini ZEGs" beyond the shores of Georgia for the first time, with events already being planned in Amsterdam, London, and on the East Coast of the United States.

If you value our work and want to help shape the future of storytelling, become a Coda member today. Membership gives you exclusive access to behind-the-scenes insights, early invitations to events, and the chance to be part of a global community committed to making sense of chaos and finding hope in uncertainty. Your support helps us keep these conversations going, both at ZEG and all year round.

This piece was first published as a members-only newsletter. If you want to go deeper and help us build the future of journalism, join Coda as a member.

The post The Laboratory for the Day After Tomorrow appeared first on Coda Story.

This interview, as told to Nadia Beard, reflects what's at stake in Georgia from the perspective of the young people whose future now hangs in the balance.

What’s happening now is the go-to conversation starter here. People are always asking: what do you think is going to happen? I’ve been taking photos for nearly a year, since the foreign agent law protests this spring. So far, I haven’t missed much school, except for the times when we weren’t able to get there because of masked cops blocking the streets. Though now my school has announced that, in solidarity with protests, they'll close, so no school for a week. 

When Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that Georgia will stop pursuing European integration until 2028, it triggered young people into action and now there’s a huge wave of them  out on the streets. 

First, for a week in the spring, I was protesting with my friends, but I wanted to do more. I also grew up in a household of journalists, and I felt that just protesting — just being there — wasn’t enough. When you’re young, people your age are easier to photograph. They look at you differently. It’s more comfortable. I think that comes out in my images.  And feel I help protesters more by photographing who they are and showing the world what’s going on beyond the fireworks and gas.

I want to become a professional but I also know that I'm young and just starting. In general that’s OK because I think a lot of my images were better because I can go behind the scenes and people are less afraid of me because I don't put on this big serious, media face.

I love photographing the protests. It’s so tiring but also so fulfilling, to watch people and see how they are united. I was at a protest and I got tear-gassed and some people, wrapped in flags, came and helped us immediately. They were walking on the upper streets, talking on the phone, and they had milk for you, saline solution. They just pass by and ask if you need saline and put it in your eyes and then go on to the next person. I remember saying “I need water”, and before I knew it there were like five people at the ready with bottles of water for me.. It really showed me how many heroes there are.  People aren’t afraid. Even yesterday, when people got gassed, they ran away, and another wave came to replace them in the crowd. It’s almost as if they’re on shifts. It’s really cool to see how people are helping each other in any way possible. 

The other day I was taking a taxi to the protests and the taxi driver asked me “are you going to the protest?” and I said yes, and I was thinking, I wonder what he’ll say. And he asked “how much do I owe you to pay you back?” I asked him what he meant, and he said “you’re going to do such a good deed, how can I ever accept money for you doing that?” And I said no, please, and he started crying. He said how cruel it is, what these cops are doing to people and how it’s so emotional for him and that the future of the country is hanging by a thread right now. It was just so moving to see this grown man cry about his country. 

Young people are very angry and they are not thinking about anything else apart from the protests. There are no other priorities. The priority is to save our country. Protesters say we are protecting you and your kids’ future so you don’t wake up in Russia tomorrow.

The post I’m 14, photographing the violent protests in Georgia. The EU dream is slipping away appeared first on Coda Story.

I was in the crowd, reporting for the BBC at the time, as hundreds of thousands of people came out to greet George W. Bush in the main square of the capital Tbilisi. It must have felt refreshing to Bush, by then already hated by so much of the world for the disasters caused by the “war on terror”, to arrive in Georgia to a genuine hero's welcome. Georgians embraced Bush, because they needed him to fight their own existential battle against constant, ongoing threats from Russia.

Tens of thousands turned up and stood for hours in the heat as they waited for George W Bush to come out into the main square to give public support to Georgia and send a message to Moscow that the country was not alone in the face of Russian aggression. 

Among those in the square was 27 year old Vladimir Arutunian. According to this FBI report, which is full of rather brilliant detail, he “stood for hours in the hot sun, wearing a heavy leather coat and muttering and cursing to himself, part of a huge crowd waiting for President Bush to speak …He was clutching to his chest a hand grenade hidden in a red handkerchief. He was planning to kill the President.”

As soon as Bush started speaking, Arutunian “pulled the pin and hurled the grenade in the direction of the podium. It landed just 61 feet from where the  President, First Lady Laura Bush, the President and First Lady of  Georgia, and other officials sat”

Compared to the unforgettable scenes that unfolded in Pennsylvania, the assassination attempt against Bush was pretty anticlimactic. The grenade failed to detonate, no one on stage even realized it had been thrown, President Bush’s speech went uninterrupted, and afterwards, Arutunian went home to the apartment he shared with his mother in a sleepy Tbilisi suburb. 

His miscalculation, FBI would explain later, was that he tied his red handkerchief a bit too tight around the grenade, preventing the firing pin from deploying fast enough.

It didn’t take long for the FBI and the Georgian security services to track down Arutunian. A few months later, Arutunian who was unemployed and spent most of his days  experimenting with chemicals and explosives in his makeshift home laboratory, appeared in a small stuffy courtroom overflowing with reporters. He had already confessed to throwing the grenade and said he didn’t regret a thing because he hated the Georgian government for “being a puppet of the US.”

What I remember most vividly from the trial is Arutunian, thin with a black beard, pacing back and forth in his two by two meter metal cage in the corner of the courtroom. I counted his laps to keep myself awake in the airless room, as the judge began to read the verdict. A couple of my colleagues in the back tried to stay awake by chatting to each other, which got the rest of us in trouble. The judge forced everyone to stand up as he very slowly and very monotonously read the entire verdict. It took him four hours. I lost count of the laps, because Arutunian never stopped pacing. 

I reported at the time that as he was led out of the courtroom, he was asked by one journalist if he considered himself a terrorist or an anti-globalist. "I don't consider myself a terrorist, I'm just a human being," he replied.

Today, the man who could have changed global history, is in the 20th year of his lifetime sentence. He spends his days making crafts: tiny soldiers and tanks and occasional portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Che Guevara, according to his mother who spoke to our reporter, Masho Lomashvili, the day after Trump’s assassination attempt. 

Masho called the 83 year old Anjela Arutunian to ask whether she had spoken to her son and whether he had heard about the Trump assassination attempt. “Someone tried to kill Trump? I hadn’t heard, I have mostly been watching football,” said Angela Arutunian “Is he okay?” she asked.

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

The post Almost an assassin  appeared first on Coda Story.

For the autocrats, 2023 was a pretty good year. For the rest of us, not so much. 

New wars emerged, old ones persisted, and a global rift over reality and truth deepened further. Divisions over how to interpret the world around us have, of course, existed since time immemorial, but we often forget that the yawning gulf between societies today is driven by algorithms engineered in my unlikely new home in Silicon Valley.

A few months ago, just as generative artificial intelligence took the global spotlight and we all buckled up for another tech shake-up, I landed in Silicon Valley. Every year, the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University brings together a small but mighty cohort of journalists and tasks them with figuring out the future of our embattled profession.  

We couldn’t be in a better place. The technology that this valley has birthed has played a key role in creating the very problems we are here to solve: the demise of journalism’s old business models, proliferation of viral disinformation and the global rise of authoritarian populists, for whom journalists are public enemies number one. 

Living here, I often wonder if this is what ancient Rome felt like: a place of incredible financial and intellectual abundance, limitless possibilities and terrifying detachment from the rest of the world. 

Most conversations I have here don’t dwell on the troubles of people affected by technology. Instead they focus on the exciting frontiers of generative AI. “Collateral damage,” one ex-Googler told me when I challenged him. 

Meanwhile, Coda’s intrepid journalists spent 2023 on the ground, reporting on the “collateral damage”: real men and women whose lives are maimed by algorithms they can’t control.   

We produced a multi-part podcast called “Tech, Tyrants and Us,” together with our partners at Audible. We investigated how a EU-funded agency uses surveillance tech to keep migrants from reaching Europe’s shores, how flashy but misleading posts on TikTok emptied a town in Albania and how AI-generated deepfakes are changing the nature of military intelligence. We reported extensively on the efforts of those in power to manipulate collective memory, we traveled all the way to the Swedish Arctic to tell the story of “green colonialism,” and we even tried our hand at a new genre: a true crime podcast called “Infamous International.” I am happy to report that it’s blazing a trail, ranking among Spotify’s top 5 true crime podcasts. 

I couldn’t be more proud of the journalism we’ve done in 2023, but being in Silicon Valley has given me a front-row seat to the advances in generative AI as well as an insight: Our information ecosystem is about to change beyond recognition and producing great stories is no longer enough. 

NOISE IS THE NEW CENSORSHIP 

My project here at Stanford focuses on figuring out how high-quality journalism like Coda’s can punch through the deafening noise of the modern-day information ecosystem. Years on the disinformation beat convinced me that when it comes to disinformation, the real problem isn’t the fake news but the noise. Social media moved most of our conversations online and turned them into a shouting match, in which the loudest, most obnoxious voices are always poised to win and it is easy to manipulate and override reason.

Noise is the new censorship. It rips our communities apart from the inside and builds walls that run through the middle of them, polarizing us and rendering us unable to have a conversation about any subject — be it climate change or the war in Gaza. 

With the rise of AI, this cacophony is poised to grow. Just to be clear: I am not worried about killer robots. But I do think that we will have to reimagine what it means to be a journalist in the age of AI. It is time to accept that we will never again be the gatekeepers of information and focus instead on providing the important service of helping people navigate the cacophony and access the information they need. We have to find a way to punch through the noise and get the attention of our audiences.

As the world heads into 2024, a key election year in the U.S. and around the world, our team will continue to put a spotlight on stories that are shaping our lives: from memory wars and the war on science to disinformation and — of course — tech, which is emerging as the linchpin connecting all of these crises. But we will also be bringing you new formats and new collaborations that focus on creating, curating and connecting conversations that matter. 

And so, buckle up. 2024 is going to be quite a ride. Make sure you are strapped in next to people you like and join us! Subscribe, share or — even better — tell a friend about Coda. And please consider supporting us. Every dollar makes a huge difference.

Happy New Year!   

Natalia Antelava

Editor in Chief, Coda Story

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At the start of 2023, Germany’s far right descended on Dresden for its annual “March of Mourning.” Their show of force was a fist meant to punch a hole in Germany’s traditionally subdued “silent commemoration” of the anniversary of the firebombing of the city by the Allied forces in February 1945. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims,” Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University, explained to Alexander Wells, who wrote a piece on the subject for us.

In May, Coda Story teamed with the investigative outfit Lighthouse Reports to mine a year’s worth of Instagram and other social media posts of Russian oligarchs and their families. Their accounts, once monuments to unashamed excess, reflected the desperate tactics they used to resist the sledgehammer of Western sanctions, which cost oligarchs a combined $67 billion in the first year of the war alone.

In October, Coda Story took a close look at dissent in Russia. Katia Patin, Coda’s multimedia editor, reported on Memorial, the decentralized human rights organization that had been ordered “liquidated” by Russia’s judges but is still operating out in the open, giving sold-out walking tours of the country’s history of repression in Moscow.

And in December, Coda staff reporter Isobel Cockerel returned from Sweden’s Arctic wilderness to unfurl a wrenching story that explores the fault line between the existential defense of an Indigenous people and a vision of carbon-free mining, a technofix that could help save our warming planet.

These are four of Coda Story’s best stories of 2023. They all began life by asking the same urgent questions that all of our journalism asks: In what places are abuses of power manifesting? How are new forms of authoritarianism impacting people’s lived experiences? What is at stake and why does it matter?

1. Dresden doesn’t know how to mourn its past: A symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general is transformed into a rallying cry for Germany’s far right.

2. Putin’s Oligarchs: A year in the sanctioned lives of Russia’s richest men: In partnership with Lighthouse Reports, an analysis of 69 publicly accessible accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms of Russia’s wealthiest families under sanctions gleaned unique insights into their lives before and after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

3. Surviving Russia’s control: The downfall of Russia’s most important human rights group has been greatly exaggerated.

4. In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages: In Sweden, everyone is aware the climate is in crisis. And everyone has very different ideas on how to fix it.

By contesting historical understanding, undermining empirical science, subverting known facts, deploying technologies to roll back liberties, and operating with impunity across sovereign borders, authoritarians are rapidly adding all manner of cudgels to their toolkit. In 2023, these four stories and others listed below pried open people’s lives in more than a dozen countries to reveal how the unrelenting intrusion of the continuous present (to use Gertrude Stein’s observation about "Mrs. Dalloway") makes impossible the enjoyment of going about their days.

• Around the world, an estimated 100,000 people work for third-party contractors that supply content moderation services for the likes of Meta, Google and TikTok. In Kenya, content moderators are fighting back against their disturbing conditions.
• A secretive network of wealthy wildlife preservationists are returning species back into Europe — without asking permission first. 
• The contested region between China and India is a fulcrum for the national aspirations and self-identity of both countries, as well as emblematic of the new ways strongmen governments are redefining international borders.
• A little known agency enables European Union member states to carry out operations along EU borders with much less transparency, accountability or regulation than what would be required of any EU government.
• Australia searches for national identity in the trenches of World War I and finds a warning for the United States.
• The surveillance cameras of Colombia’s police are no match for the hundreds of “eyes” employed by street gangs.
• An investigation into New Mexico’s child welfare agency finds an overreliance on software meant to safeguard children from harm.
• The medical establishment has a long history of ignoring patients with “unexplained” symptoms. Then came long Covid.
• How American-made surveillance tech helped protect power — and the drug trade — in Honduras.
• A movement to empty Hindu pilgrimage sites of their Muslim residents gains momentum with help from the Indian government.

The post Year in review: Coda’s best stories of 2023 appeared first on Coda Story.

1. Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa's digital sweatshops

Nairobi-based photographer Natalia Jidovanu shadowed social media content moderators who are fighting back against Big Tech companies like Meta Kenyan courts. Rulings in these cases could jeopardize the outsourcing model upon which tech giants have built their global empire.

2. Russian performance art in the time of Putin

What does exile mean for artists who have fled Russia? Reporter Nadia Beard met a new generation of Russian painters, performers and musicians now working outside the country, and learned about how their work is different from previous generations of exiled Russian artists. The story features photography from Elene Shengelia in Tbilisi and Lorenzo Meloni of Magnum Photos in Paris.

3. In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages

Frankie Mills captured the vast, mountainous landscape of the Swedish Arctic, where Coda’s Isobel Cockerell reported on the clash of ideologies and motivations underlying Europe’s bid to transition to green energy.

4. Watching the streets of Medellín

"I’ve never been to a place where I felt so constantly under observation," said Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael after he travelled to Medellín to investigate the city’s complex ecosystem of police and drug trade surveillance. “I watched them all watching each other, and became a part of this circle of surveillance.”

5. The Albanian town that TikTok emptied

Louiza Vradi’s photos transported readers to Kukes, Albania, a city that has lost about half of its population since the fall of communism in 1991. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork, only to find themselves indebted to smugglers and criminal gangs. Together with Coda reporter Isobel Cockerell, Vradi examined the driving forces behind recent waves of migration from Albania to western Europe.

6. In Africa’s first ‘safe city,’ surveillance reigns

Magnum photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa took readers to downtown Nairobi, where 2,000 Chinese-made Huawei surveillance cameras send real-time data to police. The cameras are there to prevent terrorism and crime, but is Nairobi’s surveillance net actually making people safer? As writer and poet Njeri Wangari found, so far the answer is no. 

7. India and China draw a line in the snow

What is it like to live on the front lines of a decades-old border dispute between China and India, as the two countries vie for the spotlight on the geopolitical stage? Working alongside Coda’s senior editor Shougat Dasgupta, photographer Ishan Tankha captured cultural and economic contrasts across India’s jagged Himalayan borderlands.

8. As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked a widespread embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. But Ukraine is home to more than one culture and language. Romanian photographer Andreea Campeanu accompanied reporter Amanda Coakley to western Ukraine where Romanian ethnic communities say their language and culture are suffering collateral damage in wartime.

9. How surveillance tech helped protect power — and the drug trade — in Honduras

Photographer Seth Berry gave us a window into the world of Hery Flores, one of an untold number of Hondurans caught up in the state’s complex surveillance web. Originally deployed as a weapon in the region’s ongoing drug war, police surveillance technology has been turned against opposition figures like Flores, all while the drug trade continues to thrive. The story by Anna-Catherine Brigida was shortlisted for the 2023 Fetisov Journalism Awards in the category of contribution to civil rights.

10. How 19th-century silver mines could supercharge the US green energy economy

Rachel Woolf brought readers to southern Colorado’s historic mining heartland where the U.S. is hoping it can find the silver reserves that will be essential for the green transition. The resurgence of U.S. mining is happening in the shadows of decaying infrastructure of the past.

The post Year in review: From Nairobi to Medellín, our best photography appeared first on Coda Story.

The “unhelpful invocation” of the term “sunburn,” she argues, makes “an unconscious mind feel vulnerable and fearful of the sun.” She welcomes this color, insinuating that you should too.

Decades of research have shown that sunburns are strong predictors of melanoma. Roughly 8,000 Americans are expected to die this year from the most serious type of skin cancer, melanoma, according to the American Cancer Society. Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States, and melanoma rates doubled between 1982 and 2011.

Still, Sell is not alone in the anti-sunscreen camp. Even Stanford University neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, host of the wildly successful podcast “Huberman Lab,” claims that some sunscreens have molecules that can be found in neurons 10 years after application. No evidence is offered. Elsewhere, he has said he’s “as scared of sunscreen as I am of melanoma.” Huberman’s podcasts are frequently ranked among the most popular in the U.S.; he has millions of followers on YouTube and Instagram and has been the subject of admiring magazine profiles.

Spreading misinformation and even conspiracy theories has become commonplace in wellness spaces across social media. In a politically charged atmosphere addicted to brokering in binaries, good science is too often sacrificed at the altar of partisan opinion.

Pushing back against medical advancements from as far back as the 19th century has become a rallying cry for a growing number of today’s conspiritualist contrarians. Fear mongering about vaccinations is not the only entry point to this strange world of conspiracy and misinformation, in which predominantly white, middle- or upper-middle-class wellness influencers propagate and sell ideas and products with little to no oversight. In this world, humans are godlike creatures immune to viruses and cancers, while those who fall victim to illness and therefore the twisted machinations of society are but collateral damage.

In May 2020, I launched the “Conspirituality” podcast with Matthew Remski and Julian Walker. Veteran yoga instructors deeply embedded in the wellness industry, we’ve long been skeptical about many health claims proffered by wellness influencers and the cult-like behaviors that appear in so-called spiritual communities. And we’ve always been attuned to the monetization of health misinformation. 

Conspirituality is a portmanteau of “conspiracy” and “spirituality,” coined in 2011 by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in an academic paper. They observed a strange synthesis between “the female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics).” The pandemic provided fertile ground for conspirituality, moving it from the fringe to the mainstream.

Specifically, we launched the podcast after the release of the 2020 pseudo-documentary “Plandemic.” Filmmaker Mikki Willis, who had moderate success in the Los Angeles wellness and yoga scene a decade or so ago, found a much larger audience with right-leaning conspiracy theorists — so much so that he was joined by Alex Jones at the red carpet premiere in June this year of the third installment of the “Plandemic” series. Many other former liberals in the wellness space have taken a hard right turn, including comedian and aspiring yogi Russell Brand. Brand now regularly hosts conspiracy theorists in part of what these days appears to be a gambit to deflect against numerous sexual abuse allegations against him made public earlier this month. 

Not all conspiritualists are hard right, though their rhetoric predominantly leans that way. One of America’s most infamous anti-vaxxers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, is attempting to combat President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party presidential primaries from the left. Predictably, Kennedy’s health policy roundtable, held on June 27, featured other leading health misinformation spreaders. 

While the anti-vaccination movement began the moment Edward Jenner codified vaccine science, the modern upswell of anti-vax fervor dates back to disbarred physician Andrew Wakefield’s falsified research that purported to link vaccinations to autism in 1998. Hysteria around COVID-19 vaccines began months before a single one hit the market, in large part thanks to misinformation spread by “Plandemic.” And that trend shows no sign of slowing.

Health misinformation is likely as old as consciousness. The learning curve in understanding which plants heal and which kill took millennia without the benefit of controlled environments. While no science is perfect, to deny or disavow the progress we’ve made is absurd. The 19th century was an especially fruitful time, with vaccinations, antibiotics, germ theory and handwashing greatly advancing our biological knowledge.

Germ theory is a foundational tenet of modern science. For centuries, miasma theory was the favored explanation for the Black Plague, cholera and even chlamydia. These diseases were supposedly the result of “bad air,” which the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates claimed originated from rotting organic material and standing water. 

In 1857, English physician John Snow submitted a paper tracing a cholera outbreak to contaminated water from a pump in London’s Broad Street. Adoption of sanitary measures was slow and grudging. Civic authorities weren’t interested in the expense of rerouting pipelines.

A few years later, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered a pathology of puerperal fever, though it wasn’t until Robert Koch photographed the anthrax bacterium in 1877 that disease was undeniably linked to bacteria. Medicine was changed.

Contemporary contrarian wellness influencers also trace their antecedents back to the 19th century. While Pasteur won fame — pasteurization remains an important practice for killing microbes — some of his colleagues resisted his findings. French scientist Antoine Béchamp devised the pleomorphic theory of disease: It’s not that bacteria or viruses cause diseases; it’s just that they’re attracted to people already susceptible to those diseases. 

As Pasteur and Koch continued their research on microorganisms, Béchamp faded into obscurity. But his “terrain theory” lingered. It was the harbinger of the infamous “law of attraction,” the belief in the power of manifestation, of effectively imagining wealth, health and success into being. It’s the school of thought that, repackaged, made books like Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret” (2006) a global bestseller. 

Extended to physical wellbeing, it means that if your mindset is “correct,” disease has no pathway into your body. This ideology is behind the many products and courses sold by wellness influencers. In 2017, pseudoscience clearing house GreenMedInfo published an article in which the writer described Pasteur as the “original scammer” who enabled “the pharmaceutical industry to dominate and tyrannically rule modern Western medicine.” If you can sell the public on a pathology of disease, the writer argued, you can sell a cure. 

He championed a return to nature as the real way to protect against disease: “Detoxing and seeking fresh whole foods and adding the proper supplements offer more disease protection from germs than all the vaccines in the world.”

Terrain theory has no greater proponent than Zach Bush, a physician who rightfully argues that the environment plays a role in health outcomes. But then he goes on to say that since there are billions of viruses, it must really be unhealthy tissues making the victim susceptible to disease — Antoine Béchamp’s exact argument. Bush claims that viruses are nature’s way of upgrading our genes, and any ailment must be due to a bodily imbalance.

This form of magical thinking is spread across his many web pages. Instead of conducting actual research on COVID-19 as an internist, Bush offered statements like this to his million-plus followers: “May this respiratory virus that now shares space and time with us teach us of the grave mistakes we have made in disconnecting from our nature and warring against the foundation of the microbiome. If we choose to learn from, rather than fear, this virus, it can reveal the source of our chronic disease epidemics that are the real threat to our species.”

In April, Bush told an Irish podcast that if he were to take a single course of antibiotics, his chances of “major depression over the next 12 months goes up by 24 percent.” Two courses, and he claimed that he would be 45% more likely to contract anxiety disorders and 52% more likely to suffer depression. The podcast’s hosts made a public apology, though Bush continues to be able to spread his misinformation. Inevitably, Bush sells a range of supplements “key to our overall health and wellbeing.” 

Watch what they say, then watch what they sell. If an influencer tells you Western medicine has failed you, be sure a product pitch is coming. Supplements are the main vehicle to monetization for wellness influencers since they don’t have to be clinically tested and little regulated, existing in a medical gray zone. Consumers mostly ignore the fine print on the back label because the promises on the front are so much more appealing.

Like Bush, influencers such as Jessica Peatross sell supplements and protocols to her well over 300,000 Instagram followers while consistently invoking Béchamp. “Terrain theory matters,” Peatross wrote in a March 2023 post. “When your body’s symphony isn’t in tune, or you are out of homeostasis, you are much more vulnerable to pathogenic invasion, cancer or autoimmunity.”

Last year, Peatross surrendered her medical license in California due to vaccine requirements. Now she sells subscription health plans. When signing up for her email list, you get a link to download her “Vaccine Protection & Detox Protocol.” 

All proponents of terrain theory put the onus of disease on the individual. They demand we each fend off the toxic effects of Big Pharma, Big Ag and all the other Bigs in existence through supplementation, meditation, breathwork, psychedelic rituals in Bali, or simply by thinking positively, thinking the “right way,” a learned skill for which they always have a course. 

Among the more notorious pushers of terrain theory doctrine was German physician Ryke Geerd Hamer, the inventor of Germanic New Medicine. In 1995, already discredited and stopped from practicing medicine in Germany, he diagnosed a 6-year-old girl as having “conflicts.” As a result, her parents refused to treat the 9-pound cancerous tumor in her abdomen. An Austrian court stripped them of custody, so that she could receive the chemotherapy that saved her life. 

Hamer, who died in 2017, believed medicine was controlled by Jewish doctors who used treatments like chemotherapy on non-Jewish patients. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many pseudoscience claims and conspiracies are rooted in antisemitism. Hamer also promoted the idea of microchips in swine flu vaccines and denied the existence of AIDS.

Germanic New Medicine is based on the “five biological laws,” which claim that all severe disease is due to a shock event. If the victim doesn’t immediately solve their conflict, the disease progresses in the brain. Microbes actually enter the body to heal it, provided the victim addresses the psychological conflict that led to the proliferation of the disease state. The victim heals after confronting the conflict, which Hamer thought nature had intentionally placed there to teach some sort of lesson. Death only occurs when you don’t face the trauma of the shock event. So that’s on you.

Disease exists to teach a lesson. A sunburn is light nutrition. It’s no wonder that Melissa Sell is one of the most vocal revivalists of Hamer’s theories, which she has renamed “Germanic Healing Knowledge.” She uses social media to share thoughts like: “You are not ‘sick’. Your body is adapting to help you through a difficult situation. When you resolve that situation your body will go through a period of restoration and then return to homeostasis.” 

Sadly, this is par for the course. With my podcast colleagues, Matthew and Julian, our review of conspiritualists found that the notion of an “ideal” body or way of being is widespread. As we document in our book, modern yoga was in part influenced by the famed 19th- and early 20th-century German strongman Eugen Sandow, whose adopted first name is a truncation of “eugenics.” 

Yoga originated in India, yet Sandow's techniques found an audience among Indians in the late 19th century. Feeling emasculated and humiliated by British colonialists, many Indians appreciated Sandow’s overt masculinity and mimicked his strength techniques in a set of yoga postures that are now widely used. Indians craved bodily strength as a metaphor for overcoming colonial rule. Sandow came at it from the other side. He used his physique to further an explicitly racist world view. There was a reason why the strong white race dominated the world, he seemed to be saying — just watch me flex my biceps.

Wellness influencers similarly obsess over a strong and purified body. They assign similar causes to all ailments, which usually include poor diet, a lack of exercise, modern medicine and an inability to escape toxic stress. Sometimes, however, the influencer assigns physical attributes to the perfected body, which is why anti-trans bigotry and fat-shaming run rampant in wellness spaces. The ideal body, which can only be accomplished by resisting the evil mechanisms of allopathic (Western) medicine, is the true goal of nature’s design. Strangely, a number of these same influencers take no issue with cosmetic surgeries, botox or steroids, yet scream at followers for using deodorant or applying sunscreen. 

So what is the “right” sort of existence that lets the victim recover and achieve homeostasis, a state of internal balance consistent with Hamer’s five biological laws? According to Sell, as she explained on X, formerly known as Twitter, “The way to feel better is to think better thoughts.” Naturally, she has a number of online courses available to help you think better thoughts, ranging in price from $111 to $2,700.

In 1810, German physician Samuel Hahnemann came up with the term “allopathy” as a strawman to his concept of homeopathy. Whereas homeopathy means “like cures like,” allopathy initially meant “opposite cures like.” In the allopathic system, for instance, you take an antidiarrheal to treat diarrhea; in homeopathy, you take a laxative. Well, the “essence” of a laxative. 

Allopathy has come to mean anything involving Western medicine, while homeopathy is considered a natural system for healing (even though ground-up pieces of the Berlin Wall are used in one homeopathic remedy, and I don’t recall concrete ever forming without human intervention).

Hahnemann left his role as a physician in 1784 due to barbaric practices like bloodletting. He supported his family by translating medical textbooks. Inspired by Scottish physician William Cullen’s book on malaria, he slathered cinchona — a quinine-containing bark — all over his body to induce malaria-like symptoms. Hahnemann likely developed an inflammatory reaction, though he credited them as “malaria-like symptoms.” He then believed himself to be inoculated against malaria. This experience became the basis of homeopathy.

Instead of ingesting (or slathering on) small quantities of an offending agent, Hahnemann removed the active ingredient altogether from his distillations. He believed that less substance equals higher potency, and kept following that trail: Most homeopathic products contain no active ingredient.

Take Oscillococcinum, one of France’s top-selling medicines, which rakes in $20 million in America every year. The process of potentization — homeopathy’s dilution protocol — begins with the heart and liver of the Muscovy duck. Technicians mix 1 part duck heart and liver with 100 parts sugar in water. Then the process is repeated 200 times, which means any trace of the duck is long gone. The late family physician Harriet Hall pointed out that you’d need a container 30 times the size of the earth just to find one duck molecule. Yet it’s marketed to reduce flu symptoms. 

When a spokesperson for Boiron, the manufacturer of Oscillococcinum, was asked if their product was safe, she replied: “Of course it is safe. There’s nothing in it.”

Despite an absence of active ingredients, homeopathic products are often mistaken for herbal remedies, according to Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator with the Office for Science and Society at McGill University. In his article, Jarry cites a Health Canada survey that shows only 5% of Canadians understand what homeopathy entails. Pharmacies and grocery stores confuse customers by shelving these products next to herbal remedies and other medicines.

When I asked Jarry about the danger of consumer confusion, he said, “Homeopathic products are based on sympathetic magic principles and are not supported by our understanding of biology, chemistry and physics. So when they’re sold alongside actual pharmaceutical drugs, it creates a false equivalence in the mind of the shopper. It bumps homeopathy up to the level of medicine and turns its products into pharmaceutical chameleons.”

Homeopathy suppliers want it both ways: They claim their products are superior to pharmaceuticals while pushing to have them shelved next to actual drugs to obscure their difference. The name of their 100-year-old trade group? The American Association of Homeopathic Pharmacists.

Jarry has helped lead the charge for proper labeling of homeopathic products in Canada. Over the border, in the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission began regulating homeopathic products in 2016, though these efforts seem to have had little impact. The global homeopathic market is expected to reach nearly $20 billion by 2030.

Jarry thinks regulatory agencies must work harder to make clear that homeopathy is not based on science. But everyone passes the buck. “The pharmacists who own drug stores in which homeopathy is sold,” Jarry told me, “say that it’s up to the chain they work for to tell them to stop selling these products.” Meanwhile, “the chains say the products are approved by Health Canada, whose representatives say it’s up to pharmacists to use clinical judgment when recommending them or not.”

While the risk of injury is low given that most homeopathic products contain no active ingredient, there’s another danger lurking beneath the surface — people choosing to use these products instead of seeking out interventions that can actually help them. 

Avoidance of “allopathic” medicine is common in wellness spaces, the belief being that natural cures are better than anything concocted in a laboratory. The stakes are particularly high when it comes to mental health.

We’ve included a chapter called “Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong” in our book to acknowledge the fact that many people turn to natural remedies and wellness practices with good intentions. The American for-profit healthcare system can be a nightmare. We likely all have anecdotes of when the system failed us. Just as we all have likely benefited from Western medicine. It often depends on where your attention is most drawn. 

Like many wellness professionals, I lost a lot of income when the pandemic struck. All of the group fitness and yoga classes that I ran were gone overnight. My wife, who worked in hospitality at the time, lost her job. We were fortunate to have enough savings to get by, along with whatever income I pulled together as a freelance writer and by livestreaming donation yoga classes on YouTube. Our story isn’t unique, and it makes sense that wellness professionals turned to whatever revenue they could find. 

I wasn’t surprised to see so many supplements and online courses being marketed in the first months of the pandemic. But the sheer number of mental health interventions sold by wellness influencers was astounding — and concerning. Everyone seemed to have a hot take on mental health, and many leaned on the appeal to nature fallacy: You can heal depression with a supplement or a meditation practice or by cultivating the right mindset. 

“Holistic psychiatrist” Kelly Brogan, who is clinically trained but took a right turn even before the pandemic began, offers tapering protocols from antidepressants — even though none exist — to paying clients. True, pharmaceutical companies that know how to get patients onto their medications have never bothered to figure out how to get them off. But beware the influencer who writes, as Brogan does, “Tapering off psychiatric medication is a soul calling. It is a choice that you feel magnetized toward and will stop at nothing to pursue.”

Jonathan N. Stea is a clinical psychologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Calgary. A prolific science communicator, he doesn’t mince words when I ask him about wellness influencers who claim that natural remedies are better than antidepressants. 

“I’m tired of wellness influencers unethically opining on topics they’re unqualified to understand,” he said. “Notwithstanding the appeal to nature fallacy with respect to the idea that there are ‘better natural remedies’ than evidence-based psychiatric medications, it’s irresponsible to make such claims in the absence of scientific evidence.”

The paradox of the wellness industry is that you supposedly thrive when you connect with nature, yet you also need endless products and services. Self-professed metaphysics teacher Luke Storey, for example, sells over 200 products that offer the “most cutting-edge natural healing” that jive with his love for “consciousness expanding technologies.” How much healing does one really need? How contracted is consciousness that it requires so much expansion? 

It’s one thing to enjoy spiritual tchotchkes, but telling people these accouterments are necessary for salvation is disingenuous.

The problem is that people don’t necessarily feel better with these protocols or products. The way the wellness grift is framed — the notion that your thoughts dictate your reality — results in the adherent feeling worse if the therapeutic doesn’t work. They believe it’s a moral failing because charismatic influencers place the burden on them: “You didn’t do x or y hard enough.” So back on the treadmill they go.

Tragically, Stea said some people suspend antidepressant usage to chase magical-sounding cures. “Abrupt cessation of these medications can result in awful withdrawal symptoms,” he told me. “The other risk is that forgoing medications for unsupported or pseudoscientific treatments carry their own potential for harm, either directly due to the treatment, or indirectly by possibly worsening an untreated mental disorder.”

People in pain are vulnerable. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet for depression, anxiety or suicidal ideation. At least accountability exists in regulated spaces. Pseudoscientific sermons on TikTok have no such oversight.

Ideally, science tests claims with the best available means at the time. If better tools emerge, findings are updated. Conspiritualists are regressing in this regard. Their romanticization of 19th-century pseudoscience is a ruse that helps them sell products and services. 

In many ways, we’re victims of our own success. The advancements of the 19th century in public health, hygiene and drugs are part of the reason most of us are here today. Like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it’s swimming in water, we’re all afloat in the hard-won progress of centuries of trial and error. 

We’re also not the same animals that gave birth to our line 100,000 years ago or even 1,000 years ago. For better and worse, we’ve drastically changed our relationship to our environment, just as we have drastically changed the environment. Glamorizing who we were neglects what we’ve become and how we got here. 

Michelle Wong, a science educator and cosmetic chemist based in Australia, told me that when the likes of Melissa Sell make their anti-sunscreen pitches, they rely on the appeal to nature fallacy. “There's the idea that humans evolved with sun exposure,” she said, “so our skin should be able to handle it. But skin cancers usually develop after reproductive age (which is all that evolution helps us with). On top of that, migration and leisure, like beach holidays, means we get very different sun exposure compared to how we evolved.” As the 16th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus once observed, what heals in small doses kills in large.

The sun, in other words, isn’t to be feared, but we would do well to respect its power. And to not overestimate our own.

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The post The dangerous myths sold by the conspiritualists appeared first on Coda Story.

“Something that happened to me and was beyond my control has left me like a machine that’s been switched off – disabled – unable to do anything that a 21-year-old of my intelligence and interests might want or need to do,” she wrote.

That young correspondent, Maeve Boothby O’Neill, spoke Russian, listened to jazz and read constantly. She loved musical theater, especially the shows “Wicked,” “Billy Eliot” and “Into the Woods.” She was plotting out a series of 1920s mystery novels set in the villages of Dartmoor, an upland expanse of bogs and rivers and rocky hills in southwest England where Maeve and her mother had once lived.

Maeve died on October 3, 2021. She was 27. On the death certificate, her physician noted “myalgic encephalomyelitis” — an alternate name for the illness known as chronic fatigue syndrome — as the cause. It is rare for a death to be attributed to either ME or CFS. 

An inquest into the circumstances, including the actions (and inactions) of clinicians and administrators at the local arm of the National Health Service, or NHS, is expected to be held later this year. Maeve was diagnosed with the illness in 2012, after several years of poor health. She fought hard to access appropriate medical care and social service support from institutions and bureaucracies that did not seem to understand the disease.

“She did everything she could to survive,” wrote Sarah Boothby, Maeve’s mother, in a statement she prepared for the upcoming inquest. The NHS “did not respond to the severity of Maeve’s presentation, and failed in its duty of care,” wrote Boothby, adding that her death was “premature and wholly preventable.”

Maeve’s father and Boothby’s ex-husband, Sean O’Neill, a journalist at The Times, brought widespread attention to ME in a series of articles, including one last year about Maeve. His “creative, courageous” daughter, wrote O’Neill, “struggled not just with the debilitating, disabling effects of ME but also with the disbelief, apathy and stigma of the medical profession, the NHS and wider society.”

Myalgic encephalomyelitis is frequently triggered by an acute viral or other infectious illness, although it has also been associated with exposure to environmental toxins, including mold. Patients have been found to suffer from a range of immunological, metabolic, neurological and other dysfunctions. Core symptoms include profound exhaustion, a pattern of relapses after minimal exertion known as post-exertional malaise, brain fog, poor sleep and heart rate irregularities that lead to dizziness or nausea when in a standing position. Standard therapies have focused on symptomatic relief since the underlying causes remain unknown and there are no diagnostic medical tests.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 836,000 and 2.5 million people in the country have what it refers to as ME/CFS, and most remain undiagnosed. In the U.K., the estimates range from 125,000 to 250,000. Many patients are unable to work, climb stairs or even perform basic daily functions without assistance. 

As a journalist and public health academic, I have been investigating and writing about ME for several years. I have learned how it can devastate the lives of patients and their families, not least because mainstream medicine has framed it as largely psychosomatic — a modern version of what would once have been diagnosed as hysteria or conversion disorder. 

From the start of my project in 2015, I found it to be enormously intellectually and emotionally rewarding. But no one besides desperately ill patients took much notice. Editors at major news organizations couldn’t be bothered. Academic colleagues were polite but perplexed at my dedication to this obscure domain. At gatherings with friends, I could tell they’d had enough after the fifth or eighth time I’d mention the latest developments in the field. 

Viral epidemics always leave in their wake a small percentage of people experiencing chronic complications that have no identified cause. And the prolonged medical complaints being reported by millions of people around the world after acute coronavirus infection include some of the key symptoms that define ME. 

Patients, clinicians, scientists and journalists are debating and investigating the overlaps between the two conditions. While long Covid is a grab-bag term for an extremely diverse group of patients, some are receiving clinical diagnoses of ME or ME/CFS, as it is often called these days. 

And just as ME patients have long felt dismissed or misunderstood, long Covid patients have had similar experiences. As I reported last year for Coda, for example, doctors unable to continue working because of long Covid have been dismayed that their medical colleagues often tell them their cognitive impairment and repeated relapses are physical expressions of pandemic-related trauma. Conditions like ME and others that lack definitive medical tests — such as irritable bowel syndrome, Gulf War Illness, fibromyalgia and various forms of pain — are often lumped together into a category called “functional” disorders or “medically unexplained symptoms,” known as MUS.

The emergence of long Covid has focused widespread attention on a long-simmering debate that has previously been confined largely to academic and medical circles: Do these functional and medically unexplained ailments arise mainly from ongoing disease processes or from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and related psychiatric conditions?

All around the world, leading scientists and clinicians regard long Covid as a heterogeneous disease. They are seeking to elucidate its many pathophysiological pathways and find drug targets for therapy. In December 2022, the CDC reported that long Covid “played a part” in 3,544 deaths in the U.S. from the start of the pandemic through June 2022.

Another camp is applying the psychosomatic lens to long Covid. The experts in this group also hold impressive academic status, receive significant research funding and publish in respected journals. They witness the same phenomenon and see something completely different: A global tsunami of mass hysteria leading to paralysis, gait disorders, memory loss, inability to remain upright without feeling sick, repeated flu-like relapses and a list of other complaints.

Medicine has a long and sorry history of bias and discrimination on the basis of sex. Given that ME and other functional and medically unexplained disorders are known to be much more prevalent among women, it is not surprising that patients with these conditions routinely report receiving poor treatment and even abuse at the hands of the healthcare system. Physicians frequently prescribe psychotherapy and exercise programs based on their presumption that emotional or mental distress, negative or unhelpful thoughts and/or unhealthy behavior patterns are causing the persistent problems.

It goes without saying that stress, anxiety and related factors can have negative health impacts and exacerbate underlying ailments and that psychological support and lifestyle adaptations can help alleviate distress, including among people with chronic conditions. But when it comes to medically unexplained illnesses, mistakes in interpreting symptoms can visit trauma and despair upon patients and families. 

Last May, an Irish court ordered a hospital to pay a young man 6 million euros for having failed to diagnose a brain tumor, an error that delayed necessary surgery by months. Doctors had misdiagnosed his headaches, concentration problems and hand numbness as “psychological and functional” and referred him to “the mental health services and physiotherapy,” according to the Irish Independent.

Physicians can be quick to default to psychological explanations when they don’t understand what is causing a patient’s problems, noted Brian Hughes, a psychology professor at the University of Galway, in a blog post about the case. (Professor Hughes is a friend and colleague.) 

“It would be nice if the doctors concerned could perhaps try to be a little less hasty, and a bit more humble,” he wrote in the post. “The phrase ‘Medically Unexplained’ does not mean ‘Medically Unexplainable.’ Just because you don’t know what’s wrong with a patient doesn’t mean that nothing is wrong with them.”

Maeve Boothby O’Neill was born in 1994 in London. Her parents divorced when she was five, and from then on she lived with her mom in southwest England — first in Dartmoor, and then in Exeter, a major university town.

In pulling together the following account, I spoke multiple times with Maeve’s mother, Sarah Boothby, via social media as well as in her cozy flat on a quiet road a few blocks from Exeter’s High Street — the same flat where Maeve had struggled with her declining health and where she’d died the previous fall. While there, I reviewed three fat clip binders stuffed with copies of Maeve’s medical and social service records, voluminous correspondence, reams of handwritten notes and journal-type entries, applications for social benefits and related documents and writings.

The Royal Devon University Health NHS Trust, which oversees the hospital where Maeve sought care during the last months of her life, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

From an early age, Boothby told me, Maeve adored “storytelling” in all its forms and loved being surrounded by books. She wrote her first play — or rather, she dictated it — when she was seven. “She played happily in her imagination for days on end,” said Boothby.

Maeve expressed her opinions early. During a family vacation to southern Spain, Boothby recalled, Maeve, then four years old, declared: “What’s the point of Spain? It’s too hot!” At 10, she became a vegetarian out of both principle and gustatory preference.

In the summer of 2007, when Maeve was 12, both she and Boothby came down with what felt like a mild viral illness. Boothby recovered completely after four weeks. But according to Maeve’s diary from that time, she still felt exhausted weeks after the acute sickness.

(Boothby read the diary after Maeve’s death. It opened with this advisory: “The writing beyond this page is strictly private and is only to be viewed with the express permission of Maeve.” Boothby posted the following snippets and others from the diary on Twitter. )

“God I am TIRED,” Maeve wrote on August 7. On August 11: “Oooohh . . . tired . . .” August 12: “I am still vair [very] tired! Why?! Mum has said she wants me to stay in bed all day and rest :¿ (got a tiredness headache too. Ow ow ow ow).”  August 17: “in bed - still tired :(”

Besides the references to exhaustion that pepper the diary, Maeve also expressed delight about compelling personal matters — celebrating her birthday, getting a new dollhouse, visiting her dad in London.

Just after 11 p.m. on August 25, the night before her birthday, she wrote:

“It is 53 minutes until I'm 13! OMG! We (me & dad) went shopping today…the plan tomorrow is to have a nice breakfast then a picnic with PINK CHAMP [champagne].” And at midnight: “I am officially 13 years old and have made it to TEENAGERDOM!” 12:01 p.m.: “Wow! I’m 13!”

Over the next few years, Maeve’s exhaustion increased, sometimes accompanied by punishing headaches. She began fainting while engaged in gym class, school sports, dancing and even walking. Her social life dropped off significantly and she reduced her school attendance to essential classes only, although she managed to keep up her grades.

Two general practitioners examined Maeve, found nothing wrong and dismissed her symptoms as “normal for a girl of her age,” said Boothby. A pediatrician referred Maeve to psychological services while telling her “the symptoms were all in her mind,” wrote Boothby in her inquest statement.

“She was only 15 and doubted herself for years afterwards,” Boothby told me.

Spontaneous remission from ME is relatively rare, although the disease is known to fluctuate. Many patients remain more or less stable for years, and some improve slowly. Others, like Maeve, experience a gradual decline, for reasons that remain unclear. It is estimated that about a quarter of patients are home-bound or even bed-bound. 

In 2012, despite her reduced class attendance, Maeve graduated from high school in Bristol, where she and her mother were living for a year. She earned top grades in Russian, biology and English literature. She’d long imagined a career involving travel, foreign languages and international relations.

In a photo of Maeve on her 18th birthday, she glows with good humor. Her bright face is graced by a half-moon smile and framed by a tangled mane of brown hair. Her eyes are focused on some point to the left of the camera. She seems, like many her age, to be brimming with ideas and secrets and vital insights. Unlike her peers, she was too sick to attend university and explore her future.

That year, Maeve was finally referred for assessment to a clinic specializing in CFS/ME, as the illness was then often called, at a hospital in Bristol. Although the intake and diagnostic process dragged on for nine months, a specialist at last confirmed that she had the illness. In a subsequent email to the specialist, Maeve expressed relief at getting the news.

“It feels very empowering to finally have a diagnosis and some external recognition of my symptoms, to know that it’s not all in my head!” she wrote.

Shortly afterwards, Maeve and her mother returned to Exeter, where she contacted the local CFS/ME clinical service and reviewed their guidelines for treatment and care. These guidelines recommended a behavioral and psychological approach to recovery based on the hypothesis that patients like Maeve were extremely out of shape from remaining sedentary and harbored dysfunctional beliefs about having an organic disease that caused them to relapse when they did too much.

For decades, two related interventions were viewed as the standard-of-care for ME. A specialized form of cognitive behavioral therapy was designed to alter patients’ faulty beliefs so they would do more. An approach to increasing activity called graded exercise therapy (GET) was designed to reverse their physical deconditioning so they would do more. A major British study called the PACE trial, with the first results published in 2011 in the Lancet, appeared to demonstrate that these treatments led to significant improvement and even recovery.

The information Maeve received in 2012 conformed to this approach. Leaflets advised her that “many people with CFS/ME have unhelpful thoughts,” which include “catastrophizing,” “eliminating the positive” and “all-or-nothing-thinking.” Instead of adopting these patterns, the leaflets advised, patients should ask themselves questions like: “What alternative views are there?” and “How would someone else view this situation?” and “Am I focusing on the negative?”

Maeve found this approach useless but did see a specialist in Mickel therapy, a cognitive approach popular in the U.K.. In a journal entry, Maeve wrote that, according to the therapist, “I should have more fun and be more childlike” and “my body’s ‘message’ is: my symptoms are here to tell me to stop containing my emotions and start expressing them honestly now.” 

She dropped the therapy after a couple of sessions. “It isn’t working for me,” she wrote. “If anything it’s making me worse, because I’m worrying about not having fun.”

As advised by the CFS/ME service, Maeve kept a meticulous activity diary in an effort to determine her “baseline” — the amount she could do without triggering the relapses that characterize post-exertional malaise. The goal was to increase the amount over time in order to nudge her body to improve. Maeve regularly struggled to stay within her limits.

In an email to the doctor who diagnosed her, she expressed concern that her legs ached after any physical activity. “Don’t worry about the aching of the legs,” the doctor replied. “That will not go until you enter a phase of sustained improvement — then it will, I promise you!”

“I’m looking forward to entering a period of sustained improvement so I can have my legs back!” Maeve responded in a follow-up email.

The doctor’s promise proved to be illusory. Maeve never entered a period of “sustained improvement.” Eventually, she realized her baseline was around 30 minutes of activity a day. If she exceeded it, she suffered a relapse — or a “crash,” as patients called it. And as she struggled to accept this restriction, she crashed again and again.

In the years since the Lancet and other journals published findings from the PACE trial, medical and public health experts — including me — have documented that the study includes egregious methodological and ethical missteps. Related research has also been shown to be poorly designed and fraught with bias. In 2015, I wrote a 15,000-word exposé of the PACE trial that garnered significant media and scientific attention, and I have continued to criticize research in the field. 

In 2017, the CDC rescinded its recommendations for CBT and GET as treatments for the condition. The CDC website now flatly declares: “ME/CFS is a biological illness, not a psychologic [sic] disorder...These patients have multiple pathophysiological changes that affect multiple systems.”

On October 31, 2021 — less than a month after Maeve’s death — the U.K.’s National institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, issued new clinical guidelines for ME/CFS that reversed the agency’s own prior recommendations for the two treatments. In a review of studies, NICE assessed the quality of evidence in favor of GET and CBT, including from the PACE trial, as either “very low” or merely “low.”

The new guidelines highlighted the symptom of post-exertional malaise, which it called post-exertional symptom exacerbation, and warned of possible harms from graded exercise. The guidelines approved of psychotherapy for supportive care only — not as a curative treatment.

Maeve read everything she could discover about her illness and sought out whatever she thought might help. She found yoga and meditation helpful. She explored the possibility that she suffered from a deficiency of carnitine, an amino acid essential to energy metabolism. At various times, turmeric, B12, aspirin, the gastrointestinal drug famotidine and the gout drug colchicine seemed to provide some symptomatic relief.

She had to fill out exhaustive applications in order to obtain funds for basic expenses like buying a wheelchair and hiring care personnel. In her London Review of Books essay, she protested at the indignity of having to prove to a “mean and punitive government” that she was not malingering or faking it but was actually very sick and reliant upon benefits to survive.

“To access my right to this welfare payment,” she wrote, “I am required to prove my life has been devastated, presenting it as a collection of medico-historical facts about all the things I can’t do, which reminds me of all the things I might have wanted to do and makes my existence sound abject and pitiful.”

Records of correspondence with medical and social service agencies show multiple occasions of missed calls and misunderstandings about appointments. In a journal entry, Maeve expressed irritation at the inefficiencies and delays involved in dealing with the public institutions responsible for ensuring that everyone could access care and assistance. “It makes me angry that I’m supposed to get free treatment at the point of need, AND I FUCKING NEED IT NOW AND IT TAKES A MONTH FOR ANYONE TO LIFT A FINGER TO EVEN THINK ABOUT HELPING ME,” she wrote at one point.

At other times, her comments conveyed a sense of hope, however fragile. “I am still young and will get better,” she wrote in one application for benefits. “But no one can tell me how long it will take.”

Such hope notwithstanding, the scope of activities Maeve could perform gradually dwindled. “Over time, she became unable to cook, wash up, change her bedlinen, clean her room, apply for and renew her welfare benefit entitlements, make or attend appointments or go outdoors without assistance,” wrote Boothby in her inquest statement.

Maeve also experienced challenges with food intake. “Sometimes I have to wait for enough energy to eat — lifting a fork to my mouth requires energy I don’t have,” she wrote in one social service questionnaire.

ME or CFS has only rarely been cited as a cause of death. In England and Wales, the illness was cited as the underlying cause or as a “contributory factor” in only 88 deaths from 2001 to 2016, according to the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. Malnutrition is among the most serious possible life-threatening complications. In very severe cases, patients can become unable to ingest sufficient nutrition because they have difficulty chewing and swallowing. 

At that point, tube-feeding — via a tube inserted down the throat or directly into the stomach through the abdomen — can be necessary to prevent death from malnutrition. William Weir, an infectious disease and ME specialist in London, has treated several patients who have been tube-fed for extended periods before improving enough to be able to eat on their own. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Weir told me, doctors who don’t understand ME often view malnutrition in severe patients as if it were a psychiatric issue like anorexia. “Patients with this illness are frequently regarded as having a psychological disorder that causes them to be deliberately and perversely inactive without any regard for the possibility that their inactivity actually has a physical basis,” he said.

By early 2021, Maeve’s condition had deteriorated to the point where she was unable to consume enough food, even with her mother preparing liquified meals. Boothby and Maeve’s GP at the time advocated for her to be hospitalized so she could have a feeding tube inserted. In mid-March, Maeve was admitted to the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. Noting that her tests appeared to be normal, the staff physician refused the tube-feeding request. 

“They kept treating her as if she was making it up,” said Boothby.

Maeve was discharged without a plan for providing her with sufficient nutrition at home, Boothby noted in a chronology of events of the last months of Maeve’s life that she prepared for the inquest. She was “unable to sit up, hold a cup to her lips, or chew,” wrote Boothby, and “all her symptoms were now highly exacerbated.”

Further deterioration in Maeve’s condition led to a second hospitalization in May. By then, Dr. Weir had examined her and found her to be extremely debilitated. In a phone call and a follow-up letter, he recalled, he urged the hospital physician overseeing Maeve’s care to insert a feeding tube.

The hospital did not follow Dr. Weir’s advice. The doctor, Boothby wrote, was “adamant she would not tube feed Maeve and told Maeve she would ‘feel much better if you gave your hair a wash.’” 

Again, Maeve was discharged without a plan for home care, according to Boothby. “She was completely immobilized except for being able to turn her head from side to side,” she wrote. “Her voice could not rise above a whisper. She was unable to reposition in bed or to lie on her side.”

During a third hospital admission that summer, a naso-gastric tube was finally inserted. But by that point Maeve’s body was unable to tolerate the hospital’s tube-feeding regimen. She responded with bouts of pain and constipation, which caused crashes and further exacerbated her condition. The tube was removed, and she was again discharged. 

On August 27, 2021, Maeve turned 27.

When tube-feeding fails, another possible option is total parenteral nutrition, in which the digestive system is bypassed and patients are infused through a vein. In a letter dated September 9, 2021, Dr. Weir warned the chief executive of the Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, that Maeve’s situation looked dire if this approach was not adopted.

“I have experience of similar cases leading to death and Maeve’s current clinical status shows all the initial hallmarks of this,” he wrote. “I am not exaggerating the issue when I say that this [total parenteral nutrition] may well save Maeve’s life.” 

Maeve ultimately refused to be readmitted because the hospital would not guarantee that she would receive total parenteral nutrition, according to Boothby’s written chronology. Maeve knew that without nutritional support she was going to die, Boothby told me, and she wanted to die at home — not in the hospital while being denied care. 

“She said, ‘At least we tried, mum,’” said Boothby.

Maeve continued to deteriorate throughout September and received morphine for pain. On October 1, according to Boothby’s written chronology, Maeve “said she was experiencing mild hallucinations.” On October 2, she exhibited “rapid shallow breathing, racing heart, eyes rolling.” 

At 1:45 a.m. on October 3, “Maeve was awake but incapable of utterance or focusing.” At 3 a.m., she was found dead. Doctors confirmed her death at 11 a.m., and her body was removed to a funeral home in the early afternoon. 

That evening, Maeve’s GP visited Boothby. “She said she had never had a patient so poorly treated by the NHS,” wrote Boothby. 

The inquest, which is not yet scheduled, will presumably shed light on the events that led to Maeve’s death and on the hospital’s actions in the matter. Philip Spinney, the senior coroner for Exeter and Greater Devon, declined to be interviewed but noted in an email that the process is at the “evidence gathering stage” and that the inquest itself could last at least two days. 

Given the prominence of Maeve’s case, the inquest and its findings could receive significant publicity. Boothby told me she would like the investigation to “expose as many facts as possible to public scrutiny.” 

Beyond that, she hopes it will demonstrate “how socially, morally and ethically unjust it is to deny a biomedical cause to ME” and will lead to recommendations for preventing more deaths like Maeve’s. “She died by the incomprehension and disbelief of an acute hospital,” said Boothby.

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The post When the doctor doesn’t listen appeared first on Coda Story.

It also hosts Kansas State University, where Hensley — who has studied some of the world’s scariest diseases — was going to speak. At the time, Hensley was part of the leadership at the National Institutes of Health. While she was visiting campus, she heard about a new, gigantic high-security lab called the National Bio and Agro-defense Facility, or NBAF for short, that was going to be built adjacent to K-State. There, scientists working for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) would study very contagious, and often fatal, diseases that affect animals and humans.

Around that time, construction on the 48-acre, 1.25-billion-dollar campus was just beginning. “I saw the pictures of the facilities and I was like, ‘Oh, that would be a really cool place to work,’” Hensley said.

Years later, a colleague called her with what sounded like a perfect opportunity: NBAF, whose construction finished earlier this year, was looking for someone to head up its Zoonotic and Emerging Disease Research Unit. That group would study existing high-consequence (read: dangerous) diseases that spread between humans and animals and those that are just beginning to rear their germy heads into existence or prominence on this planet. Scientists across NBAF would study foot-and-mouth disease, classical and African swine fevers, Rift Valley fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Japanese encephalitis and Nipah virus. These diseases affect animals like cattle, pigs, birds, bats, snakes and frogs, and also Homo sapiens.

The gig did sound perfect. Hensley’s son even thought it was a good idea, although he’d have to leave his friends in Maryland for this version of Manhattan.

NBAF officials apparently thought Hensley sounded pretty good, too: They hired her to lead the new team. “I think we could use a little adventure,” Hensley’s son told her.

The pair arrived in Kansas in August 2022, not long after the facility’s commissioning started. It had been under construction since 2015, and Manhattan had been chosen as the site in 2009 (the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has managed the construction, but the USDA will run the facility). That’s a long time to have a mere paper-and-scaffolding lab, but the timeline makes sense because NBAF is a fundamentally new kind of project for the U.S. It’s subject to the highest safety protocols, a set of standards for “biosafety level 4,” or BSL-4, labs. These labs have to decontaminate everything before it goes out. They have dedicated air supply and exhaust systems and maintain negative air pressure, meaning physics dictates that air (and the pathogens wafting within it) only flows in, not out. People working inside, meanwhile, wear full-body, positive-pressure suits, so that air and particles from the lab can’t get in. Doing their work, they resemble badly-outfitted astronauts.

The BSL-4 designation and its attendant restrictions are reserved for places where scientists work with life-threatening, highly transmissible diseases for which there are usually no treatments or cures. And NBAF will be the first BSL-4 facility in the country that can handle large livestock. If you’ve ever tried to deal with a cow, you know that’s not easy even in a BSL-0 situation.

But it’s necessary if NBAF is to fulfill its mission of studying diseases that affect both humans and animals (zoonotic illnesses), deadly and currently untreatable diseases that affect animals abroad but haven’t yet crossed U.S. borders and related illnesses that are just popping up in nature. The average person is perhaps more familiar with the last category, nearly three years into a pandemic caused by a shiny new virus. 

Scientists like those on Hensley’s team will work to understand germs’ fundamentals and determine how to develop vaccines, treatments and diagnostics. NBAF is replacing an aging facility in New York, called the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which couldn’t host large animals or diseases as dire as those NBAF will. Plum Island was only a BSL-3 lab.

Officials picked Manhattan as Plum Island’s successor in part because of the density of animal health companies in the area, as well as the scientific expertise found at K-State and its Biosecurity Research Institute. All of that exists, of course, because lots of livestock live nearby, and agriculture is a big part of the state’s economy.

But those are precisely some of the reasons critics, and conspiracists, have historically opposed the facility. Should there be a leak or an accident, a pathogen could find many unwitting animal hosts. University campuses like the one on which NBAF sits host academics flitting in and out (as Hensley did on her lecture visit), potentially taking pathogens with them. Those are grounded concerns, but more conspiratorially, some have called NBAF a bioweapons lab.

In high-containment biology labs like NBAF, though, the line between antagonistic misinformation and grounded concern is thin. And that means NBAF has to balance (at least) three things: the value of its research, the real risks of keeping big-time germs around and public concerns, both real and imagined.

The value of the work that Hensley and others will do within NBAF’s 574,000 square feet is clear: The World Health Organization estimates that around three-quarters of new diseases are zoonotic. And if a bunch of livestock came down with an exponentially spreading illness, it could devastate food supplies, economies and obviously the lives of the animals themselves.

That last part is important to Hensley. “What became really clear to me over the last few years is there was a lot of attention to, and we're all very good now at understanding, how viruses will jump from animals to people and the impact that that can have,” she said. “But we're not thinking a lot about what happens when that virus jumps back into animals, or when it goes from one animal species to another.” And that does happen: SARS-CoV-2, for instance, seems to have hopped from humans to mink. The virus has flamed through mink farms, killing thousands. Farmers have “culled” millions more in response.

Every time such a species jump happens, Hensley said, the virus gets a fresh chance to change and evolve — to get better at, say, spreading or becoming more virulent. In her unit of the lab, Hensley hopes to spot, and respond to, shifts like that as they happen. In these early stages, before the lab is actually open, she’s been setting up projects with partners abroad, in part to help them watch for new or jumping germs. After all, inevitably, those pathogens won’t stay in their countries of origin. “Ideally, when things do change, or there are new viruses, we will pick them up earlier and earlier,” she said.

That on-the-spot reaction has been Hensley’s catalyst since she became a scientist, which she did in part because of her father, who has the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia and is also a clinician.

One day when Hensley was home on a visit from college, her father took her to a medical conference he was attending. Outside the venue stood a number of protesters: They were fighting back against the lack of treatments available for HIV positive people or those with AIDS.

That struggle was personal for Hensley’s father, and soon became personal for her, too. Hemophilia interventions at the time involved giving patients a soup of concentrated blood “product,” cooked from the fluids of hundreds of different people. Sometimes — a lot of times, actually — that aggregate blood contained HIV. In the early 1980s, contaminated blood gave the fatal virus to about half of the 16,000 American hemophiliacs and 12,000 others who received blood transfusions, according to the 1995 Institute of Medicine (US) Committee to Study HIV Transmission Through Blood and Blood Product.

“On the way home, I asked my dad if he had been tested for HIV,” Hensley said.

He had not, he said. He and her mother had both determined that ignorance was bliss because the only treatment available was a problematic drug with lots of side effects. If a better drug came along, he said, sure, he’d get tested. But for now, he’d rather not know. “It was what I always call a moment of impact,’” she said, in almost startup-founder language. “You're sitting there and this realization becomes personal.”

Hensley’s realization took the form of a question: How many people might still be alive if scientists had been more proactive about the HIV epidemic and acted earlier to, for instance, protect the blood supply?

Maybe, she thought, she could be part of that preemptive action in the future. When she went back to school, she changed her major. “I wanted to study how viruses jumped species and try to get ahead of the next pandemic,” she said.

After Hensley finished her schooling, she went to work for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases — USAMRIID, a place immortalized in “The Hot Zone,” a book by Richard Preston. There, Hensley dealt with all the bloody diseases you never want to get, like Ebola, Marburg virus and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.

For that research, Hensley toiled in the literal hot zone, donning an astronaut-esque BSL-4 getup. Some of her experience there is actually included in a different Richard Preston book: “The Demon in the Freezer.” One chapter focuses on Hensley, describing an accident she had. One day, sick with a cold, she cut herself with scissors, while in the presence of the often-fatal Ebola virus.

She didn’t end up falling ill, but it had been a close, scary call. "I think you need to suck it up and get back in there and finish your experiment,” her father told her when they first spoke after the accident, according to “The Demon in the Freezer.” If she didn’t get right back on that horse, she might not ever saddle up again.

Clearly, she’s stayed in the rodeo ring for a long time. And now she will be working alongside some of the animals you’d actually find in one.

Accidents like Hensley’s nevertheless highlight the kinds of things that worry people near BSL-4 facilities like NBAF (and, as the spread of SARS-CoV-2 shows us, everywhere in the world is effectively “nearby”). If a researcher infects themselves, or pathogenic particles otherwise escape, it’s possible for a disease to spread beyond the confines of the lab. In Kansas, for instance, the Kansas Cattlemen’s Association long opposed NBAF’s construction, in part fearing that an accidental outbreak would infect livestock and spread like prairie fire.

It would be easy to just tell concerned residents they were overreacting. After all, “BSL-4” doesn’t mean “dangerous research level 4.” It’s not itself an indicator of how risky the work is: It’s a measure of how safe the researchers and the facility need to be, and are designed to be.

Perhaps the biggest way labs like NBAF mitigate against risk is redundancy. “They actually think through how the initial containment might fail and then have containment for containment,” said Scott Hanton, editorial director at Lab Manager, which provides resources to researchers to run their facilities more effectively and safely. The idea is to account for the fact that systems sometimes fail and sometimes multiple things can go wrong at once. “In the lab environment, we're pretty good at dealing with a single failure,” Hanton said, “but in my experience, injuries come from two or more failures happening at the same time.”

As such, BSL-4 facilities like NBAF think about risk like a bunch of Swiss cheese, Jonathan Klane, Hanton’s coworker and senior safety editor at the publication, said. If you stack a bunch of Swiss slices, their holes often don’t line up. The stacked cheese is functionally solid. But if you stack the cheese enough times…“Probability, right?” Klane said. “Eventually, those holes — and those holes are gaps in our protective measures — do line up.” High-containment labs have to account for those gappy situations, even if they’re statistically unlikely.

And that’s to benefit everyone. “This BSL-4 facility isn't just designed to protect the scientists who work in it,” Hanton said. “It's also designed to protect the community in which it is placed.”

In this case, that means Manhattan and its residents, animal and human. The people of that community are right to have concerns and ask questions: Paranoid-sounding fears aren’t as far away from the actual risks as experts might like. In the U.K., for example, foot-and-mouth disease escaped a Surrey lab and infected cows at four nearby farms in 2007. NBAF’s own environmental impact statement has a whole appendix of "biocontainment lapses and laboratory-acquired infections." It details a significant one from the 1970s, when its predecessor facility, Plum Island, allowed foot-and-mouth disease to sneak out. “Cattle outside of the laboratory facility were found to be infected,” the document reads. “...All animals on the island were euthanized and incinerated. The virus outbreak was limited to the island.”

NBAF officials don’t want anything like that to happen and are aiming to make the facility a “high-reliability organization” — a kind of formalism that UC Berkeley researchers began to come up with in the late 1980s to describe companies that have managed to do their thing without big accidents, despite operating in environments where accidents could be expected, like nuclear aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants. “We're building a culture from the ground up,” Katherine Pawlosky, a USDA public affairs specialist, said. “This is a brand-new facility, so we have the opportunity to start with the best culture possible, rather than try to have to fix it.”

Still, the “what ifs” aren’t hype-y: They’re reasonable, and over the years of NBAF’s development, USDA and Department of Homeland Security officials had heard many of them and considered many of them themselves — for example, “What if a big tornado blows through?”

But they hadn’t seen anything quite like the April 2021 livestream of a Manhattan city commission meeting. NBAF wasn’t even on the meeting’s agenda, but as officials spoke, nearly 2,000 comments appeared beside the Facebook Live video (compared to a normal 10 or so), almost all about the BSL-4 facility. A sample:

“Who thought putting such a dangerous lab in the middle of our food supply was a great idea! 'Mistakes' happen all the time! Get this out of here! Put it on a remote island!”

“WHY would a Level 4 Lab be located in the middle of our BEEF supply in the heartland of our FOOD PRODUCTION?!!! This sounds intentionally criminal.”

“It’s all about the $$$. So sick of you all sacrificing the people, our food supply, our land and our health...for YOUR greed!”

“Tax $$$ should NOT be used against us to experiment on our food supply. Don’t play with fire.”

“Wuhan mutant cold viruses coming to central USA....Who wants another muti-year lockdown? Only this time with no food.....”

“They are planning the next great pandemic that can grow their pockets further”

According to a report in the Mercury, the town newspaper, these commenters — who came from all over the country and the internet — may have been spurred partly by a conservative podcaster who’d recently released an episode and written an article about NBAF. The episode’s description read: “A chilling show on bio weapons, level 4 labs, and using famine as a weapon. A history of forced industrialization and shortages. Population safety concerns are mostly a PR effort. …Why Kansas? America's beef belt is vulnerable. Attacking food resources is an ancient evil.”

The difference between “I don’t want my cattle to get sick because of an accident” and “they are planning the next great pandemic” illustrates the difference between a worry grounded in reality and conspiracy, misinformation and disinformation. In this realm, you tend to step into dubious territory when you start accusing people of lying or hiding things, particularly if you’re taking one small data point and extrapolating it into a broader coverup. “There is this kernel of truth, you know?” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King's College London, said. “There is something to build on, which is how disinformation works anyway. You pick on this kernel of truth, and then you just build elaborate lies around that.”

To combat that construction, Lentzos said, the best thing BSL-4 facilities can do is to be transparent about the goings-on among their secluded HVAC systems. “You have to engage with your local community and talk about what it is that you're doing,” she said.

“If there's a void of information people make up their own, for sure,” Pawlosky admitted.

NBAF officials are trying to fill that void. “From our knowledge, we are the first USDA laboratory facility to have its own communications unit on the ground floor,” Pawlosky said. Representatives from the lab talk into microphones monthly for a local radio show and occasionally pen articles in the local newspaper. Last fiscal year, the lab did more than 200 outreach activities, like making presentations to community groups. They try, Pawlosky said, “to educate the community, to partner with the community, to make sure that NBAF isn't just this place that sits over by the Kansas State football stadium that nobody knows anything about.”

But, actually, if people want information about BSL-4 labs in general, there is no great place for them to go. That’s something Lentzos noticed as the Covid pandemic was lassoing the world. Then, as now, people voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a BSL-4 facility, could be the source of the pandemic. This provenance got labeled a conspiracy, but the idea that a pathogen might escape, accidentally, from a lab is not in itself outrageous or conspiratorial. As scrutiny bore down on the lab, people started asking Lentzos about other such facilities. “So where's the list of these labs?” she recalled them saying. “How many are there?”

There isn’t a list, she told them. Aside from the one on Wikipedia.

Those questions ringing her ears, she and her colleague Gregory Koblentz, director of George Mason University’s biodefense program, decided to make their own list and began to scour the world virtually for BSL-4 labs.

On some parts of the planet, it’s fairly apparent — in that labs aren’t actively hidden. But it’s rarely easy. “Even in the U.S., you don't have a sense of exactly how many you have,” Lentzos said. There’s no central register, no DMV of BSL-4s.

In the end, though, they found more than 60, with 14 in North America, and set up the website Globalbiolabs.org to display the results. On the site, a Cartesian map of the planet is dotted north, south, east and west with yellow biohazard symbols, their spidery arms reaching toward each other, denoting the locations of known labs.

NBAF is already on there, and if you click on its icon, the map will jump to a satellite view of the K-State campus. An informational box will pop up, showing the Global Health Security Index ranking of the U.S. (“high”) and linking to its Biological Weapons Convention declarations, which contain information about labs, research programs, vaccine production and outbreaks, among other things. A little flower overlaid on the image denotes the Kansas State University Gardens nearby.

In the second phase of Lentzos and Koblentz’s project, they hope to learn more about the regulations and oversight that fence in each facility, which differ from nation to nation. There is no international body that has a mandate to keep track of or oversee pathogen labs or high-consequence biological research. “You can't collate up the information to see bigger trends and patterns in, for example, typical accidents or typical challenges,” Lentzos said. 

What Lentzos would like to see is the life sciences equivalent of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which oversees nuclear goings-on across the world. After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, people could see the potential fallout of unchecked proliferation. They also realized that no matter which country was undertaking atomic development, the consequences wouldn’t heed borders. “Biology has never had that security moment that nuclear physicists had when the bombs went off,” Lentzos said. “So the biological community, life science community, has remained naive in many ways to the potential security implications of their work.”

But both biologists and the general public are likely more acutely aware of how disruptive, disturbing and dangerous an invisibly small pathogen can be now than they were just a few years ago. That awareness also means that more people have likely heard the term “BSL” than ever before. Hensley finds the new public familiarity to be a positive thing.

When she first started donning BSL-4 suits, her family thought her work was interesting. “Almost like it's cute,” she said. Things first started to change after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed: People became aware of the idea of “biodefense.” “I would say it's the first shift,” she said.

More recently, since Covid came along, people know more about viruses’ ability to hop species. They are also painfully knowledgeable about the havoc that hopping can have on society, and, Hensley said, “just how vulnerable we are.”

In this pandemic, then, Hensley has seen a second shift, toward a broader appreciation of public health and the importance of early detection and intervention — the kinds of things that have been shaping her career since she watched the protestors with her father. “It makes my life easier, I'll be honest,” she said, “that people better appreciate what I do, and are more receptive to the laboratories and to the work and in general are just much more supportive of what we're doing.”

Her son hasn’t wavered in his support. And now, when they go about their lives in the Little Apple and pass some sign related to Covid, he likes to remind her of something. “This is why you're here,” he tells her.

Because if it’s not HIV, it’s anthrax. And if it’s not anthrax, it’s SARS-CoV-2. And if it’s not SARS-CoV-2, it’s whatever is coming for us, and our livestock, next.

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The post The future home of the world’s most dangerous pathogens appeared first on Coda Story.

“You do not know the plight of the poor,” the girl told reporters, referring to the high priests and seers who argue that eggs violate the vegetarianism supposedly intrinsic to the practice of Hinduism. “We need eggs… who are you to tell us [what to eat]?”

In July, the howls of indignation from upper caste communities and even legislators notwithstanding, Karnataka’s department of education announced that it would provide eggs in all districts on 46 days of the 2022-23 school year.

Only half of India’s 28 states and eight union territories provide eggs as part of the midday meal scheme. And in those states that do provide eggs, the frequency ranges from daily to once a week to even once a month. These free school lunches feed well over 100 million of the poorest children in the country, ensuring they get at least one balanced, nutritious meal every day. The scheme began as an incentive for poor parents to send their children to school, if only to guarantee lunch, but is now a widely acknowledged bulwark against the persistent malnutrition that afflicts children in India.

Rates of stunting and severe stunting remain stubbornly high in India, despite decades of economic growth. The children most affected are those under five years old, but even among school-going children over 30% are underweight and undernourished.

Covid has exacerbated concerns, with government figures between 2020 and 2021 showing a sharp rise in the number of acutely malnourished children, even in prosperous states such as Maharashtra and Gujarat. According to this year’s Global Hunger Index, India ranks 107 out of 121 countries, faring worse than poorer neighbors such as Bangladesh.

Nutrient-rich eggs, packed with protein, would substantially improve India’s nutritional outcomes. In Karnataka, a study commissioned by the government showed that 13-year-old to 14-year-old girls who had access to eggs as part of a midday meal program gained 71% more weight than girls of the same age and socioeconomic background who did not get eggs.

Still, Karnataka’s apparently sensible decision to make eggs available to schoolchildren who wanted them met with disapproval in influential circles. Tejaswini Ananth Kumar, the vice president of Karnataka’s BJP chapter and widow of a former minister in the Narendra Modi government, tweeted that eggs were “not the only source of nutrition.” She added that the decision to serve eggs in school might be considered “exclusionary to many students who are vegetarians.”

The BJP is the political party in government at state-level in Karnataka and federally, with Modi arguably the most popular and powerful prime minister in decades. Its prevailing ideology is Hindutva, a Hindu supremacist movement that has disdain for India’s constitutional secularism, believing India ought to be a Hindu nation — in the same way that countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan are Islamic nations.

Karnataka is now one of very few BJP-ruled states that are offering eggs to schoolchildren. States such as Gujarat, where Modi comes from and where he was chief minister between 2001 and 2014 before becoming prime minister for the whole country, don’t offer eggs as part of school lunch even though large numbers of children suffer from chronic malnutrition.   

Sylvia Karpagam, a doctor and public health researcher based in Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital city, told me that the “myth about India being vegetarian is strongly pushed by those with an ideological agenda. It is far from the truth. And it is reinforced by the mostly dominant caste, English-speaking, Indian-origin diaspora in the West. It feeds the stereotype that India is a largely mystical, yoga-practicing, peace-loving country.” Karpagam, who has written extensively on India’s nutrition problems and its links to caste and class inequalities, noted that this dominant class influence “manifests itself in the kind of decisions about food that are being made in the country.”

A 2020 paper published by experts whose findings were intended to help shape India’s new national education policy claimed that “animal-based foods interfere with hormonal functions in humans.” Just a few lines before this conclusion, the authors noted that “[g]iven the small body frame of Indians, any extra energy provided through cholesterol by regular consumption of egg and meat leads to lifestyle disorders.”

Widely criticized on social media, the paper was deemed further proof of an unscientific, state-sanctioned effort to portray vegetarianism as somehow more Indian than the meat-eating commonly associated with lower caste Hindus and Muslims. In its ugliest manifestation, this endorsement of vegetarianism spills out of conference rooms and academic position papers and onto the streets in the form of lynchings of mostly Muslim cattle traders.

According to Human Rights Watch, between 2015 and 2018, 44 Indians, including 36 Muslims, have been killed by cow vigilantes. In another analysis, 97% of attacks by self-styled “gau rakshaks,” literally “the providers of protection and security to cows,” between 2010 and 2017 occurred since the ascension of Modi to power in Delhi. As recently as April 2022, there were reports of a man dying after he and two other men were severely beaten by vigilantes who suspected the men of slaughtering cows.

“There is a contempt for meat,” Sylvia Karpagam, the doctor from Bangalore, told me. “And for meat eaters who are viewed and projected as more violent, as sexually aggressive, lustful and criminal.” She stressed that these behavioral associations were linked to casteist notions of “purity and pollution.” Brahmins, she said, flaunted vegetarianism as pure and meat-eating as impure. “This idea is fed early to children,” she explained. “Meat-eaters often experience shame for their food choices and tend to hide what they eat in their homes.”

In recent years, this cultural shaming has been abetted and encouraged by the government. Four years ago, India’s health ministry tweeted an image explicitly associating extra weight and lack of health with the eating of meat and eggs. A backlash led to the ministry deleting the tweet, but the mindset, Karpagam insists, remains.

Vegetarianism and veganism have become increasingly popular in the West, where these dietary choices are seen as not just beneficial for health reasons but also for the environment. But, Karpagam argues, “the vegetarianism that is being pushed here, in our context, is top-down, caste and class-based. It is totally unscientific. For example, if a woman goes to a hospital with anemia, she will be given iron tablets and told to eat vegetables. But it is unlikely she will be told that liver and red meats are good for her. This is vegetarianism by erasure. The government is not endorsing vegetarianism for ethical reasons or scientific ones. In fact, our knowledge of healthy vegetarianism is also poor.”

According to Karpagam, “enforced vegetarianism” harms the poor. “When the poor eat a cereal-heavy and nutrient-deficient diet they are more likely to suffer from malnutrition. Children are more likely to have stunting and to be undernourished,” she said. Yet most national health surveys show that up to 70% of Indians are meat-eating, that for poor people food such as the meat from water buffaloes (classified as beef by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making India ironically one of the world’s largest exporters of beef alongside the likes of Brazil and Australia) are a major part of their diets.

Dipa Sinha, an economics professor at Delhi’s Ambedkar University, said that “if meat and eggs were incorporated into public food programs then obviously supplementary nutrition would be better and that could have an effect on our malnutrition crisis.” But, she conceded, “the resistance to such a move comes largely from the upper castes. Vegetarianism is an upper caste idea and it is the dominant castes that exert the most influence on public programs.” These programs mostly help those whose diets have traditionally included meat and eggs and who are ill-served by the growing distaste with which the government views people who do not follow vegetarian diets.

The Right to Food Campaign describes itself as an “informal network of organizations and individuals” who recognize that “everyone has a fundamental right to be free from hunger and undernutrition.” Swati Narayan, a scholar and activist who works with the Campaign, told me that while India “has achieved scale with the universalization of school meals, we’ve still not achieved nutrition, as is evident in the government data.” Eggs, she pointed out, “are nutrient dense, so why not achieve adequate nutrition by adding eggs to school meals?”

As inflation bites, poor people in India often go without, eating flatbread and pickles as a meal, or going without basic vegetables. In such circumstances, school midday meals are a lifeline.

It seems wholly unreasonable that a simple and inexpensive fix such as adding a single egg to free lunches for poverty-stricken children must meet such virulent cultural opposition that it falls upon straight-talking schoolgirls to show community leaders, priests and government ministers the error of their ways.

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The post Eggs in school lunches can fix India’s malnutrition crisis appeared first on Coda Story.

With Covid-19 cases mounting over the past year, anti-lockdown campaigners have taken to the streets in cities across the globe, in some instances clashing violently with police. Although the motives behind these movements vary from country to country, many are fueled by a standard set of grievances: concerns about the economic impacts of restrictions; fears about government-imposed measures infringing on personal liberties; and unease or outright distrust of vaccinations and skepticism about the virus itself. 

Here’s a look at five international anti-lockdown movements and the players behind them.

Switzerland

Oleksandr Ignatenko

Anti-lockdown movements are making plenty of noise in German-speaking nations — and the loudest voice is that of the Querdenkers. Germany’s most prominent Covid-19 denialist group has staged demonstrations across the country, gathering crowds in their thousands. However, other, lesser-known factions are creating headlines of their own. 

In Austria one anti-lockdown campaigner and several of his supporters were recently arrested with a collection of handguns and revolvers, 34 bottles of LSD, 5kg of cannabis and a sword. Even Liechtenstein, a tiny Alpine principality tucked between Austria and Switzerland, has seen sudden and sizeable demonstrations. But Switzerland is a slightly different story.

It’s not that there is no anti-lockdown movement there — there is, and it has many faces. What distinguishes coronavirus disinformation in Switzerland is the nation’s renowned direct democracy. Swiss citizens can call for referendums against any newly published law by collecting 50,000 signatures on a petition. 

If they really want to, they can even try to use a similar process to change the constitution — for instance, to make mandatory vaccination illegal. And that is precisely what has been happening. Richard Koller, a former politician for the far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) is now attempting to lead the anti-vaccine lobby in this direction with a petition initiated on January 5. Fortunately, it has received just 17,000 signatures so far. 

According to a recent study by the polling agency LeeWas GmbH, supporters of the People’s Party itself are the most vaccine-hesitant political group in the country. While the organization’s godfather, Christoph Blocher is openly pro-immunization, its membership has taken a stance against widespread coronavirus restrictions, including the closure of restaurants and entertainment venues. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that the party has recently entered into an uneasy alliance with a member of the liberal FDP — formerly known as the Free Democratic Party. 

In January, Leroy Bächtold, a media officer for the Zürich city youth wing of the FDP set up his own online petition against Switzerland’s lockdown measures, gathering more than 100,000 signatures in a month. When the SVP and its supporters jumped on board, that number swelled to 150,000. 

Earlier this month, SVP leader Marco Chiesa attempted to hand the petition to Swiss home affairs chief Alain Berset and call for a referendum to overturn the restrictions. As the signatures amount to nothing more than unverified ticks on the internet, Berset ignored it. That didn’t stop Chiesa making a public statement decrying the government response and quoting the Great Barrington Declaration — a now well-known document drafted by a group of international scientists for a U.S.-based libertarian think tank that advocates for “focused protection” of vulnerable individuals during the pandemic and opposes lockdown measures on the grounds of social and economic harm.

In a February podcast, Dr. Mike Osterholm, a leading U.S. epidemiologist warned against such thinking while vaccination campaigns are still underway. In his opinion, the rise in movement and social contact would help new, more contagious virus mutations to spread. Still, groups like Switzerland’s new nationalist-liberal alliance continue to have other ideas. 

The Netherlands

Mariam Kiparoidze

Last fall, daily coronavirus cases began a steady rise in the Netherlands. In response, the nation’s government adopted increasingly strict measures. Those steps culminated on January 23 with the introduction of a 9 p.m. nighttime curfew, which sparked violent protests across the country.

For three days, hundreds of rioters took to the streets in towns and cities, from Amsterdam to Rotterdam and Eindhoven. They threw fireworks and rocks, looted shops and set cars ablaze. In some places, they stoned hospital windows and attempted to break into healthcare facilities. Most were stopped by police, but in the town of Urk a Covid-19 testing station was burned down. 

Dutch police described the riots as the most violent the country has seen in decades and deployed water cannons and tear gas. Hundreds were arrested and fined. According to law enforcement, the protesters were mostly politically unaffiliated young men. Hubert Bruls, chairman of the National Security Council, even called them “corona hooligans” on a TV talk show.  

However, it has been reported that a variety of anti-government, Covid-19-skeptic and far-right groups also had a strong presence. Among them were supporters of Pegida, an anti-Muslim organization with roots in Germany, and Viruswaarheid (Virus Truth), which has been instrumental in the spread of unfounded information about masks, vaccinations and the origins of the pandemic.

The unrest prompted condemnation from both left and right-wing politicians. Prime Minister Mark Rutte described it as “criminal violence,” while Mayor John Jorritsma of Eindhoven said that the nation was “heading for civil war.” 

A little over a week after the riots, the Dutch Court of Justice in The Hague ordered the suspension of the curfew. The government appealed the ruling and quickly drafted a new emergency bill that included maintaining the restrictions until at least March. 

The Hague Appeals Court said last Friday it would announce the verdict on February 26. However, the country’s Senate approved the emergency legislation that same day, meaning the curfew will stay in place, regardless of the verdict.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands has recorded over a million confirmed Covid-19 cases and more than 15,000 deaths to date. 

Argentina

Erica Hellerstein

When Argentina first shut down in mid-March to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the country’s long-suffering economy was already on the brink of economic collapse, battling ballooning inflation and deepening poverty. That bleak outlook didn’t prevent Argentine president Alberto Fernández from imposing one of the earliest and toughest lockdowns in Latin America — a decision that, initially, appeared to draw support from across the country’s usually polarized political landscape. 

It didn’t take long for that consensus to fracture. An anti-lockdown coalition formed within a few months, taking to the streets to denounce the government’s response to the pandemic. On May 25, the country saw its first anti-lockdown rally in Buenos Aires, with a modest 150 participants. By July 9, their ranks had grown to the thousands. 

The protests grew larger the following month, when tens of thousands — about 25,000 in Buenos Aires alone — descended on cities across the country. Demonstrators expressed their unhappiness with a judicial reform bill introduced by Fernández, as well as the economic impacts of the country’s protracted quarantine.

Argentina has been devastated by the pandemic, topping 51,000 Covid-19 deaths in February and two million confirmed cases. That has left the government particularly vulnerable to public pushback. Protestors mostly fall into one of three camps, according to María Esperanza Casullo, a political science professor at Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. They include science skeptics who question public health messaging around Covid-19 or the existence of the virus altogether; people advocating to “reopen the economy”; and political opponents of Fernández, a Peronist who ousted his predecessor, the pro-business conservative Mauricio Macri, in 2019.

The anti-Fernández camp, led by Macri and his political party, PRO, has played a crucial role in positioning the government’s efforts to contain the coronavirus as an attack on personal liberty. In the press and on social media, Macri railed against the lockdown measures, accusing the administration of attempting to diminish “freedom of expression, the functioning of justice, the independence of powers and private property.”

“If you were at any protests, you would see people marching with homemade signs saying, ‘We need to open our businesses.’ You would see people marching with signs saying, ‘Take the state boot off my neck.’ And you would see people with signs saying, ‘Doctors are lying to us,’” Casullo said. 

The anti-science contingent doesn’t appear to have a specific leader or governing ideology. Instead, it seems to comprise an assortment of vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists, with some protestors stating that the pandemic is part of a global scheme to impose a new world order. Vaccine and coronavirus misinformation in Argentina has also spread via several groups disseminating medical falsehoods in Spanish on Facebook, with one alleging that vaccination is part of a plot to control the world.

Casullo said the pandemic has probably helped some of these fringe beliefs gain visibility. “They sort of existed before, but now, a lot more people are looking at them, and their message is resonating.” 

Northern Ireland 

Isobel Cockerell

When Northern Ireland’s First Minister Arlene Foster announced coronavirus restrictions would be extended until April 1, the country’s anti-lockdown Telegram groups blew up. “My blood is boiling,” said one poster on the messaging app. “FASCISM!” wrote another, echoing the sentiments of the Belfast-born singer-songwriter Van Morrison, who released a track titled “No More Lockdown” last autumn. 

Morrison’s lyrics have struck a special chord with conspiracy theorists: “Who's running our country?/ Who's running our world?/ Examine it closely/ And watch it unfurl/ No more lockdown/ No more threats/ No more Imperial College scientists making up crooked facts.”

The singer, who has released four similarly themed songs, is a hero of Northern Ireland’s anti-lockdown campaigners. Followers on Telegram talk of a plan to control and diminish the population, while thousands have come together to discuss a “great reopening” which would end the lockdown by force. Business owners have also been urged to defy restrictions and resume trading.

“The lockdowns have really driven people to the end of their tether,” said Aoife Gallagher, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a U.K.-based think tank. “I do feel sorry for the people that get drawn into these groups, but I've had a lot more empathy for them in the past couple of weeks.” 

But many of them are not simply against the continued lockdown. Numerous posts to relevant online groups are filled with QAnon content and anti-vaccine propaganda. 

Northern Ireland’s health minister Robin Swann has recently stressed the importance of easing the lockdown gradually. The territory is now well past the peak of its second wave, during which 2,000 cases a day were routinely recorded. Its death rate of around 82 per 100,000 people, is lower than the rest of the U.K., but higher than that of the neighboring Republic of Ireland. 

Barbara Whearty, 39, owns a catering business in Belfast and has struggled to stay afloat for the past year. In recent months, she has had leaflets pushed through her door that have been made to look like they are from the government and state that the virus isn’t real. But she has no time for such theories.

“Fantasy doesn't put food on the table. Fantasy won’t keep my business going. It won't get me up and get me dressed in the morning,” she said. 

United States

Katia Patin

Angry, maskless and armed, dozens of protestors were allowed to enter the Michigan’s State Capitol building in Lansing on May 1. Demanding that Governor Gretchen Whitmer roll back her stay-at-home order, those attending the American Patriot Rally tried to push further onto the floor of the chamber. “The virus is here,” one told reporters as hundreds gathered outside. Inside state senators debated pandemic regulations, with some lawmakers wearing bullet proof vests. 

At the time, Michigan was the country’s biggest and most notorious anti-lockdown protest, but as local governments across the country have cycled through restrictions and reopenings in the past year, resentment has often boiled over into violent encounters between law enforcement and anti-lockdown demonstrators.

The scale of the movement is both alarming and dangerous. Maskless Americans have crowded together on city council steps in Democratic and Republican-leaning states — including North Carolina, New Hampshire, Washington, Texas and California — in opposition to pandemic restrictions. Virtually every state last year saw marches demanding an end to stay-at-home orders. 

In some cases, law enforcement officers have joined protesters — in May in Seattle, Washington, a police officer called on others to ignore state lockdown orders. In Hawaii last May, Major General Kenneth Hara warned that the state risked “civil unrest,” unless it sped up its reopening.

The marches have also contributed to the spread of Covid-19, which has so far claimed 505,000 lives across the nation. Cellphone location data analyzed by data scientists working for the campaign group the Committee to Protect Medicare last spring, has shown that protestors were traveling hundreds of miles to anti-lockdown events, leading to further spread of the virus. 

A loose coalition of conservative groups and individuals has also jumped on the opportunity to galvanize Republican voters by financing lawsuits against executive lockdown orders, such as those passed by Governor Whitmer. Elon Musk also reopened his California-based Tesla factory in May, in defiance of county restrictions, with enthusiastic support from then President Donald Trump on Twitter.
A year ago, many of these headlines would have seemed unimaginable. Yet anger over the economic consequences of the pandemic has fueled the outrage of many Trump supporters — especially after his defeat in November’s Presidential election. On January 6, news that a pro-Trump mob had attacked the United States Capitol building in Washington D.C. shocked the world. It was no surprise that many of the rioters were maskless.

The post From vaccine skeptics to Covid deniers — the global anti-lockdown movement appeared first on Coda Story.

“We wish it were the case that talk of the internment camps was a myth, fabricated by the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA. But it is not,” read the letter, addressed to the Monthly Review, alluding to a denialist conspiracy theory that the humanitarian crisis in Xinjiang is fabricated by American spy agencies. The letter condemned the Monthly Review’s article displaying “agnosticism, let alone denialism, towards what is clearly a shocking infringement of the rights of Uyghur people.” 

Since 2017, the Chinese government has implemented a vast system of prisons, camps and surveillance apparatus in Xinjiang to control its Muslim minorities, in the name of combating terrorism. Beijing’s crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslims has been criticized by world leaders and been the subject of significant international media attention. 

But more recently, a backlash has built up momentum, largely pushed by ultra-left defenders of the Chinese government and Beijing’s state media. It seeks to downplay the atrocities gripping Xinjiang, and paint Western coverage of Uyghur oppression as a plot designed to spark a new cold war. 

The Monthly Review article, “Sinophobia Inc: Understanding the anti-China Industrial complex”,  was originally published by Qiao Collective, a diaspora Chinese media platform aimed at “challenging U.S. aggression towards China.” The open letter in opposition to the article was signed by an international group of 35 academics. They criticized the report’s claim that China’s activities in Xinjiang are a part of a legitimate anti-terrorism campaign, and rejected the argument that the Chinese Communist Party has been subjected to “double standards” because the same criticism is not leveled at the Western war on terror. 

The letter condemned both U.S. anti-terrorism campaigns and China’s activities in Xinjiang. “China’s deradicalization discourse represents a deliberate appropriation of Western counterterror practices,” the letter read. It also criticized brutal Islamophobic policies in the West as well as in China. “Uncritically invoking China’s “terrorism problem,” and downplaying the severity of Beijing’s response to it, paints a left-wing façade on a global discourse of counterterrorism that poses a threat to Muslim communities everywhere,” the letter said. 

The scholars also drew attention to some of the most extreme aspects of the Xinjiang regime, including arbitrary incarceration on a massive scale, combined with the building of a network of camps, “workhouse style” training and factory programs and the mass separation of families. “The link here between capitalist expansion and the oppression of indigenous communities is one the left has long been familiar with. To fail to recognize and critique these dynamics in this case is a form of wilful blindness.” 

The publication of the letter marks a significant moment in which scholars on the left have come together to dispute some of the most potent narratives that seek to distort the reality of the Xinjiang humanitarian crisis. “The link here between capitalist expansion and the oppression of indigenous communities is one the left has long been familiar with. To fail to recognise and critique these dynamics in this case is a form of wilful blindness,” the letter said. 

International coverage of the brutal crackdown on Xinjiang’s Uyghurs has often been dismissed by Chinese state pundits and leftist international voices as an unfair display of hypocrisy and western imperialism. The letter published by the Uyghur academics addressed and rebuked these arguments. 

The lead author of the letter, David Brophy, a historian of China and Inner Asia at the University of Sydney, declined to comment.

Academics and journalists alike have frequently been accused of American collusion when they draw attention to the Xinjiang crisis. “The Chinese state media organization, the Global Times, has accused me of forming part of the "backbone" of a group of scholars who were secretly working for the U.S. intelligence agency,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Xinjiang at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a signatory to the open letter. “I am deeply critical of American militarism and I have never worked for the U.S. government.”

Byler, who said he was speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the group, added that he hoped the letter would make it more difficult for leftist “scholar-activists” to continue to promote Xinjiang-related disinformation. “I do not know how leftist activists will respond, they may continue along the path they have already begun. I think inside the academy this letter will become a touchstone for principled leftists.” 

The Monthly Review has not yet acknowledged the letter, and did not respond to a request for comment.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly named Darren Byler’s institution. It is the University of Colorado, Boulder, not the University of Boulder, Colorado.

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Farooq Muhammad had been living in Mexico for two years on a work permit before he traveled to Pakistan in February for what was intended to be a monthlong trip to visit relatives in the city of Multan. Due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, his return to Mexico was delayed until September, by which time his work permit had expired. When he finally managed to fly to Mexico City, he expected to renew his documentation upon arrival, as is normally permissible under Mexican law.

However, when Muhammad arrived at the Benito Juarez International Airport on September 9, authorities refused him entry into the country, and detained him without access to a lawyer. Muhammad, who does not speak Spanish or English, has said he was not given any reason why his entry was denied, or even provided with a translator. The official explanation for his detention is that he was the subject of a “migratory alert,” an opaque Mexican legal procedure for flagging passports on grounds the state is not required to disclose.

Muhammad has accused the Mexican authorities of attempting to pressure him into getting on a return flight, and twice physically assaulting him when he refused.

As harrowing as Muhammad’s ordeal has been, “the most concerning thing is that it's not an unusual case,” his attorney Luis Xavier Carrancá Álvarez told me. “On the contrary, it shows a systemic practice by the migration authorities and their complete disregard for foreigners’ human rights.” 

The case has received little media attention in Mexico, and authorities have remained publicly silent on it.

Back in September, after a few days passed without hearing from Muhammad, who has no access to a mobile phone, his relatives contacted the refugee law clinic at the Ibero-American University, where Carrancá is an advocate. The clinic has previously represented migrants trapped in Mexican airports. 

Carrancá’s colleagues secured an injunction from a judge prohibiting Muhammad’s forced return to Pakistan, and finally managed to visit him in person on September 17. The lawyers have also filed a complaint regarding Muhammad’s case with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a Washington-based international body set up by the Organization of American States.

Carrancá said Muhammad is being held in a waiting room lacking any natural light or ventilation, which he cannot leave except to go to the bathroom, for which he must ask a guard for permission. Muhammad doesn’t have access to a food court or airport restaurants. The only food provided by the authorities is fruit, sandwiches which he cannot eat due to Islamic dietary restrictions, and vending machine products.

Muhammad shares the room, nicknamed “La Burbuja” or “The Bubble,” with other travelers awaiting deportation. Carrancá said no social distancing or mask requirements are observed, leaving Muhammad potentially vulnerable to Covid-19 infection.

Carrancá said Muhammad is “really desperate,” and “psychologically ill from all the stress,” as well as physically emaciated. He has repeatedly requested to be detained in a jail rather than the airport.

To date, Muhammad’s lawyers have only been able to meet him in person twice, and have not otherwise communicated with him.

Muhammad’s case is in line with a new trend under Mexico’s current government. Francisco Garduño Yáñez, head of the government body which supervises migration, is an immigration hard-liner who has “been using the pandemic as a way to punish migrants,” said Carrancá. He cited as an example Garduño’s refusal to provide adequate sanitary measures in detention facilities, as a deterrent to Central Americans seeking entry into Mexico.

At least two migrants are known to have died from Covid-19 in Mexican detention facilities, said Carrancá.

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Von Dreien, a fresh-faced 19-year-old, spoke to host Norbert Brakenwagen with great seriousness about emotions being stored in human hair, reincarnation and our individual missions “as human beings here on this planet.” 

“When we love ourselves unconditionally, that love will automatically heal us,” she said.

In recent years, Von Dreien has become a leading light of the Swiss New Age scene and a highly lucrative brand. The Swiss media frequently refer to her as an “esoteric star.” On her website, she describes herself as being “blessed with a multidimensional awareness and other paranormal abilities.” 

Von Dreien has made her career by sharing these self-proclaimed gifts with the world, via various social media channels, at speaking engagements and in writing. Looking at the comments on her website, it appears that her audience is mainly composed of middle-class, white women with an interest in spiritual growth and self-improvement.

Some of them may not know that Von Dreien is not her real name. In her pre-fame days, she was known as the somewhat less aristocratic-sounding Christina Meier. Her professional alias is actually a reference to Weiler Dreien, the small village in the mountainous, German-speaking eastern part of Switzerland, where she grew up. 

It is not unusual for entertainers and influencers to operate under assumed names and, with all her talk of inner harmony, love and peace, Von Drein often sounds like any one of countless similar figures around the world. The difference is her reach — in a country of just eight million people, her YouTube videos frequently attract hundreds of thousands of views — and that she bolsters this following by expressing questionable views on a variety of serious matters. 

In a March newsletter, Von Dreien shared her thoughts on Covid-19. “I don’t think the coronavirus is as dangerous as it’s being made out to be right now,” she wrote. “In my view, it is an attempt to put people into a state of panic. She went on to add that “people who pull the strings have brought this virus into the world to further their plans.”

Von Dreien has strong views on the deployment of 5G networks around the world. In April 2019, she wrote that “5G can manipulate the thoughts, emotions, behavior and bodily functions of people and animals.” Again, she attributed the technology’s rollout to powerful individuals working behind the scenes, in service of their own ends.

She has also made problematic — if rather nebulous — pronouncements on matters of racial identity. At a February seminar, held in a small Bavarian town, she spoke of what she believes to be fundamental differences between the collective consciousness of people from different parts of the world. After describing the “earthly energy” of people from South America, she went on to state that those from “Mitteleuropa” are more in tune with “higher levels” and a true “beacon for the world.” 

Her words resonate with a growing global mistrust of academia and science. A recent article in Science magazine reported that only 50% of Americans plan to be immunized against Covid-19 when a vaccine becomes available. Meanwhile, anti-5G sentiment attributing the effects of the coronavirus to the technology is growing, from the United States to Russia. 

A family business

Three books feature prominently on Von Dreien’s website. The most recent, titled “Christina: Consciousness Creates Peace,” is by Von Dreien herself. 

Bernadette Meier, a former Swiss marathon champion and Von Drein’s mother, is the author of the other two. “Christina: Twins Born as Light," was published in 2017 and documents her daughter’s “extraordinary birth, childhood and youth,” as well as her “remarkable insight into today’s world affairs.” The second, “Christina: The Vision of the Good,” came a year later. Both occupied the top 10 non-fiction bestseller list in Switzerland, Austria and Germany for months and are available in German, French, Italian and English-language versions.

Von Dreien’s affairs are managed by a company named Christina von Dreien LLC, in which Meier plays a prominent role. One of the main jobs carried out by Von Dreien’s team is coordinating her schedule of public appearances. Her next tour, billed as “Create Peace Consciously,” will take place in Bern, Switzerland; Salzburg, Austria; and Friedrichshafen in Germany. 

According to the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Von Dreien’s seminars usually sell out weeks in advance. Her last event, held in the Swiss city of Wil, was attended by 500 people, each paying nearly $220 — a total of more than $120,000 in one day.

Nicola Good narrated the audio version of Von Dreien’s book. According to the Swiss daily Tagblatt, she is also working with Meier and  Von Dreien to establish a school inspired by Von Dreien’s teachings. She is quick to dismiss any suggestion that Von Dreien spreads conspiracy theories and disinformation for personal gain. 

“I don’t know what this word disinformation is supposed to mean. There is only different information,” she told me, via email. “The mainstream media no longer fulfills its function as the fourth estate, but rather reflects the wants of the government.” 

Representatives of Von Dreien’s company declined requests to comment for this article.

Open minds 

Cornelia Gatz, a Munich-based feng shui consultant, is a keen follower of Von Dreien. Recalling one seminar she attended, she told me that she had “rarely seen a room with hundreds of people that seemed so harmonious and peaceful. Christina was calm itself, inspiring people with her love.” 

After reading Von Dreien and Meier’s books, she felt the need to connect with people who found them similarly valuable.

Gatz founded a Facebook group dedicated to Von Dreien’s work. More than 2,500 members spend hours every day discussing such topics as auras, energy fields and levels of perception. 

“I founded the group, in order to put Christina’s teaching in practice with people that are interested in working on themselves in this way,” Gatz explained. 

Many of the group’s members see themselves as spiritually hypersensitive individuals and seek to deepen their connection to a wellspring of healing power that they refer to as “the source.”

“Can I connect to the source to protect myself against radiation?” one member asked in a recent group discussion. 

Still, Gatz refutes the idea that Von Dreien is peddling conspiracies and pseudoscience. 

“I think it is important to understand what Christina’s actual intentions are when she writes about issues like 5G or Covid-19,” she said. “She’s primarily interested in the self-determination of people, which I completely support.” 

For Von Dreien, the pursuit of self-determination appears to entail an absolute distrust of government, established expertise and what she, in a May newsletter, termed “our so-called democracy, which is only interested in control and surveillance.”

Instead, she actively promotes “alternative” sources of information, such as Transinformation.net, which she frequently links to on her website. Founded in 2014, this German-run site serves its readers a cocktail of esotericism, pseudoscience and conspiracy theory.

On protests against coronavirus measures that took place in Berlin in late August, it stated that “Germany is an extremely important energetic node on the planet, which the cabal has always tried to suppress and manipulate.” 

Transinformation’s authors go on to state that over the past two years, the consciousness of the German people has expanded and that “with the protests, maybe we are now seeing the physical manifestation of this.” 

These words, like Von Dreien’s own, go far beyond ideas of rainbow-hued spirituality, alternative healing practices and pseudoscience — all of which are worrying enough at a time when the world is still battling a virus for which there is no known cure. Instead, they speak to ideas of secretive groups, clandestine plots and the inherent superiority of ethnic Europeans. Now, more than ever, this kind of thinking is a dangerous thing to open people’s minds to.

Illustration by Gogi Kamushadze

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From Perm to Omsk to Novosibirsk, understaffed health care facilities are struggling to keep infection rates down and adequately protect medical workers. In regional hospitals “the situation is much more difficult than in Moscow” said Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Doctors’ Alliance, an opposition-aligned trade union.

Her organization has called attention to the plight of medical workers around the country via an interactive map, which shows the locations of health worker fatalities due to Covid-19, currently numbering 573, as well as complaints the union has received regarding issues like unpaid salaries or lack of protective equipment.

The Doctors’ Alliance also says that many doctors who were infected with the virus have not received compensation they are legally due from hospitals, because they are required to prove that the infection occurred at their workplace.

In May, Elizaveta Antonova reported for Coda Story’s Russian edition on Sergey Sayapin, a doctor at a St. Petersburg hospital where staff reported having to buy their own gloves and reuse disposable protective suits until they broke.

Sayapin had contracted the virus and blamed personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages in the hospital where he worked. Recently, we learned that he lost his job shortly after filing paperwork requesting compensation.

“I don’t believe in conspiracies, but in this case how could you not?” he asked. “As soon as I started talking about the problems in the hospital — the lack of action from management, especially from the head doctor, the lack of protective equipment, the mess with payments — all of a sudden the necessary documents appeared and they quickly laid me off.”

A Human Rights Watch report from June documented reprisals faced by health workers and their union representatives for speaking publicly about unsafe working conditions.

During the pandemic, Vasilyeva, who has been outspoken in her criticism of the government’s Covid-19 response, has been detained by police, and last week her organization’s press secretary was abruptly pressed into military service.

Meanwhile, health authorities continue to underreport Covid-19 deaths nationwide by not listing the virus as cause of death in cases where patients have died from complications of the disease. President Vladimir Putin, who recently won a constitutional referendum allowing him to remain in power by extending term limits, was criticized last month for abruptly lifting lockdown restrictions in time for a Victory Day parade.

Even according to officially reported numbers, Russia is ranked fourth in the world by total number of infections, after the U.S., Brazil, and India, with more than 6,000 new cases daily. But despite these grim statistics, “the messaging for Russians is now that they can freely go outside and go about their business — it’s as if Covid is over,” said Laura Mills, a Human Rights Watch researcher.

Mills said hospitals which were specifically designated as Covid-19 facilities have had some success acquiring PPE and medical equipment, often through charity drives. But with the advent of community transmission, ordinary hospitals cannot realistically keep out the virus — and, in terms of medical protections for health workers, “the situation in non-coronavirus hospitals is worse than the situation in coronavirus hospitals” said Vasilyeva.

Photo by Sefa Karacan/ Anadolu Agency Via Getty Images

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“They’re virgins, they’re sacrificial virgins,” Robert Lidon, the gathering’s organizer, told me. He was using a favorite trope of the anti-HPV vaccine movement: painting girls either as innocent victims of a cynical and exploitative pharmaceutical industry or in danger of succumbing to the promiscuity that they believe inoculation against HPV encourages. This thread of old-fashioned sexual morality runs through many of the movement’s constituent parts, from Christian conservative groups to secular activists like Lidon. 

Regardless of religious conviction or other motivations, anti-vaccine campaigners sit on a spectrum. Some falsely believe that immunization programs pose serious mental and physical health risks, while others go much further, subscribing to conspiracies that they are part of a shadowy population control project. 

On my second night in Dijon — while many attendees adjourned to a nearby, but more expensive cafe — I had dinner with a 30-year-old woman, who I found sitting alone in the conference center’s canteen. 

Celeste Bonnard asked to be referred to under an assumed name, for fear that talking about her beliefs would have consequences for her family. She was eight months pregnant and saving every cent she could for the arrival of her first child — a girl. She was adamant that she would not vaccinate her daughter against anything at all. 

“What are they trying to do? It’s poison,” she said. “Some people have a theory. The population is at eight billion. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was one billion. I think they just try to kill people.” 

To be an anti-vaxxer is to live in a terrifying, isolating world. Bonnard spends much of her days on Facebook scrolling through anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. She's planning to reorganize her entire life when her child arrives.

Allowing unvaccinated children into schools risks outbreaks of preventable diseases, especially among peers who cannot be inoculated for medical reasons, such as compromised immune systems or allergies. Accordingly, in 2018, France’s then-health minister Agnès Buzyn brought in a new policy — no vaccines, no access to state education. 

Ahead of Bonnard lie years of homeschooling and hardship. She will give up full-time work and, as a single mother, be forced to rely on her family for financial support. All because she refuses to vaccinate her daughter. 

“I don’t want my little girl to lose her smile, or become paralyzed,” she told me. “I will never vaccinate my child. I’ve lost all trust in my government.” 

Then Bonnard stopped talking. “What’s your opinion of it all?” she asked. 

The risks of refusal

As a teenager growing up in the UK, I was one of the first girls to get the HPV vaccine after its nationwide rollout in 2008. My older sister, who had left school by then, was too old to be eligible. Two years ago, after a routine pap smear, her doctor informed her she had HPV, which had developed into lesions on her cervix. If left untreated, they could progress into cancer. 

“I remember the doctor saying the word “cancer” and not really hearing anything else after that,” my sister told me recently. 

Removing the lesions required an operation under general anesthetic. My sister’s experience, though without complications, was painful and stressful. And, had she been born two years later, it would have been entirely preventable. 

HPV vaccine programs have been relatively successful in high-income countries like Australia and the UK, which have recorded dramatic drops in precancerous lesions in young women. In 2019, a major study by the Lancet, looking at 66 million young people, found that uptake of the HPV vaccine also protects unvaccinated people, because it makes the virus circulate less widely. Now that the vaccine is given to boys as well as girls in a growing number of countries, doctors and scientists anticipate that rates of cervical, head, neck and penile cancers will fall sharply in the next few years.

But in other nations, moral and religious opposition to the HPV vaccine has seriously affected levels of vaccine uptake. In Colombia, where there is a lack of both access to and education on the importance of regular pap smears, cervical cancer is one of the top killers of women. In 2012, the nationwide introduction of the HPV vaccine was initially hailed as a huge accomplishment, with 95% of teenage girls receiving the injection. 

Carlos Castro, medical director of the Colombian League Against Cancer, fought hard to get the government to fund the HPV vaccine for all young women. He told me that when the program was launched, he felt that Colombia had a chance to slash its cervical cancer rates. “Then,” he said, “the nightmare began.”

In May 2014, in a small village named Carmen de Bolivar, in the north of the country, a group of schoolgirls began to have mysterious fainting spells. 

Doctors could not explain it. When someone pointed out that the girls had all received HPV vaccinations at different points in the previous year, the country’s media linked their symptoms to the injection. Camera crews descended on Carmen de Bolivar, and local politicians began to use the events there to further their own agendas. 

“I think they decided that this was an excellent motif to blame the government and the things they were doing wrong,” Castro said. 

The HPV vaccine was denounced by conservative political movements such as Catholic vote Colombia, which argued that the treatment was both harming young girls and encouraging sexual promiscuity. 

The effect was devastating. Hundreds of girls began having copycat fainting spells and Castro watched in horror as vaccination rates plummeted to below 5%. He described how lawyers and anti-vax campaigners fell upon the village, offering to help the families of the girls to sue the government and pharmaceutical companies. 

“In a matter of weeks, there were not only 15 girls with symptoms, there were more than 500,” Castro said. 

Doctors later diagnosed the situation as a case of mass hysteria.

Japan’s introduction of the HPV vaccine in April 2013 followed a similar pattern. After an initially successful launch, a nationwide epidemic of hysteria occurred, in which girls began to report involuntary movements, muscle weakness, and increased sensitivity to light and sound. Extensive media coverage pushed the government to withdraw its recommendation of the vaccine. National uptake plunged to below 1%. 

An investigation conducted by Japan’s Ministry of Health found that the symptoms were unrelated to the vaccine, but the damage was done. The World Health Organization, which commissioned a review that found no link between the vaccine and any serious adverse effects, has continually called for Japan to reverse its decision not to endorse the treatment.

A study published in the Lancet in February found that if the government does not change its position, almost 11,000 Japanese women will die of cervical cancer over the next 50 years. 

A disaster for science

When it comes to vaccines, France is the most skeptical country in the world. According to a 2018 Wellcome Monitor survey, one in three French citizens believe them to be unsafe.

The anti-vax movement is also widespread across the rest of Europe and the U.S., where it has reversed decades of scientific achievement. After announcing that measles had been eliminated from the country in 2000, the U.S. Center of Disease Control has reported the highest rates of infection in 25 years. Meanwhile, several countries in Europe have also lost their measles-free status. Around the world, 140,000 people died of the disease in 2018 — most babies and young children. 

Back in Dijon, Lidon told me there has been a surge of interest in his group since 2018, when President Emmanuel Macron brought in a new law that made 11 key vaccines mandatory for all French children born after that time. The HPV vaccine is recommended rather than obligatory, and uptake in France is very low: just 19% of 16-year-old girls received the shot in 2016, a figure that experts believe is thanks to disinformation circulated by the anti-vaccination lobby.

On the opening night of the conference, a British documentary titled “Sacrificial Virgins” was screened. “The Greeks sacrificed young girls to appease their Gods. The Incas of Peru drugged and buried young girls in the farthest corner of their Empire,” the voiceover ran. Then the audience was introduced to two teenage girls who, the film alleged, were paralyzed as a result of receiving the HPV vaccine.

Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Michigan, has devoted his career to fighting pseudoscience and health misinformation. He has examined a number of these claims and faced the difficult task of trying to explain to parents that their child’s illness has no link to the HPV vaccine. 

“There is no evidence that in general vaccination correlates with this sort of thing,” Gorski said. He added that tragic events are often “cynically exploited” by anti-vaxxers. Whenever a teenage girl dies unexpectedly within a few months of being inoculated, he said, they “come out of the woodwork and try to attribute it to the vaccine.” 

“We can't stand a tragedy that’s unexplained and finding a cause – even if it's the wrong cause – often gives these parents a purpose in life,” Gorski told me. “It's a horrible thing, because the consequence is that they blame themselves for their suffering or death, because they gave them permission to have the vaccine.”

Conservative attitudes

Narratives about helpless virgins have accompanied discussion of the HPV vaccine, even before it first became available. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex,” Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian activist group, told New Scientist magazine back in 2005.

After Ireland launched its HPV vaccination program in 2010, prominent religious figures lined up to say that it would encourage young women to have more sex. In 2015, a lobby group named Regret was set up, claiming young Irish women were “vaccine injured” – a phrase favored by anti-vaxxers who believe their children have been paralysed or left chronically ill after receiving the injection.

By its own admission, Regret could not produce evidence that any of its members had been harmed by the vaccine. That did not stop several Irish politicians, such as cabinet minister Finian McGrath, to campaign for its withdrawal. In 2016, uptake rates for the HPV vaccine plunged from 90% to 50%. The following year, McGrath admitted he had got it devastatingly wrong: “I cocked up,” he said, offering his “unequivocal support” to the vaccine’s rollout.

In 2017, the Roman Catholic Bishop Phonsie Cullinan told the Irish Times: “I wonder could the large amount of money being spent on this vaccine be better spent on programmes which encourage our young people to live clean and chaste lives.” 

According to a 2018 Harvard study, there is no evidence that promotion of the vaccine has any effect on how much teenagers have sex. Nevertheless, the promiscuity line is a powerful one. 

David Robert Grimes, an Irish cancer researcher at the University of Oxford, has campaigned for the HPV vaccine in Ireland for the past five years. He describes the opposition campaign as closely tied to religious identity and charged with emotion. 

“I’ve had situations where people have found my address,” he told me. “I’ve had to go to the police. People can be very violent.”

For Grimes, this is a personal matter as well as a scientific one. Last March, his close friend and campaigning partner Laura Brennan died of cervical cancer at 26 years old. She had been a powerful advocate for the HPV vaccine.

As a teenager, Brennan had been too old to receive the vaccine when it was first introduced in Irish schools. In a speech delivered alongside Irish health minister Simon Harris in September 2018, she reflected on this fact, saying,  “the HPV vaccine saves lives. It could have saved mine, but it can save yours.” 

Despite her illness, Brennan received huge amounts of hate mail from anti-vaxxers around the world – calling her “brainwashed” and even blaming her for her cancer, suggesting it was a result of promiscuity. “You should be ashamed of yourself; you got what you deserved; God’s judgement is just,” one message read. 

In February, Ireland’s health service said that it expected HPV vaccine uptake to hit 80% in 2020. In County Clare, where Brennan was from, the figure stands at 90%. This rapid recovery is her legacy. But, as long as unsubstantiated claims, threaded through with proscriptive views of sexual morality, are spread around the world, similar outcomes elsewhere will remain challenging.

 “I will always owe her a huge debt of gratitude,” Grimes said of Brennan. “But no one should have had to know her name. Ideally we get to a point where nobody is dying of these cancers, because we can prevent that.” 

The post Inside the anti-vaccine campaign that targets young women appeared first on Coda Story.

On April 29, ten African heads of state met via video chat. The meeting was presided over by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, in his capacity as chair of the African Union. Also present was AU Commission chair Moussa Faki Mahamat and John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).

The purpose of the meeting was to assess Africa’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and determine what should happen next. Broadly speaking, they were all on the same page - until Andry Rajoelina began to speak.

Rajoelina, the 45-year-old president of Madagascar, was the youngest person in attendance.  He came bearing what he said was good news: Madagascar had discovered a cure for Covid-19.

This was not the first time Rajoelina had made such a claim. He has been aggressively touting the benefits of Covid-Organics, a herbal drink invented by the Malagasy Institute of Applied Research. Rajoelina says the bitter drink can both prevent and cure Covid-19, and has distributed it to schoolchildren across Madagascar.

Rajoelina - a former DJ who first came to power in a military coup in 2009 - has released no evidence to support his claims.

At the meeting, Rajoelina urged his fellow African heads of state to embrace the herbal remedy. The other presidents did not push back, even though most had deep reservations. “You know how it works at the African Union. Once people say such a thing, his peers are supposed to compliment him,” said one source who was party to the discussions.

Grand claims

The Malagasy Institute of Applied Research occupies a tree-lined plot on the outskirts of Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. It was established in 1957 by Albert Rakoto Ratsimamanga, one of the country’s pre-eminent scientists, to research how local plants and traditional practices could be used to treat disease. Among its successes is Madeglucyl, an anti-diabetic drug derived from the Eugenia jambolana plant, widely used in Madagascar and abroad.

Covid-Organics is its latest formulation. The primary ingredient is artemisia, indigenous to China, imported to Madagascar in the 1970s, and now widely grown on the island.

Like chloroquine (also controversially touted by a head of state - Donald Trump - as a Covid-19 treatment), the plant’s active compound artemisinin is a recognised antimalarial treatment. But the World Health Organisation (WHO) advises against the use of the artemisinin compound as a preventative, and of the artemisia plant altogether, because the short half-life of the former and its low concentration in the latter accelerate resistance to treatment in active cases, rendering it useless against malaria.

President Rajoelina has made grand claims about the efficacy of Covid-Organics. It has healed two people who had Covid-19, he said. It has the “potential to change the course of history.” At a glitzy launch event in April, he said: “All trials and tests have been conducted and its effectiveness in reducing and elimination of symptoms has been proven in the treatment of Covid-19 patients in Madagascar.”

But this cannot possibly be true, said Shabir Madhi, professor of vaccinology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Madhi is also a founder and director of the African Leadership Initiative for Vaccinology Expertise. “There is absolutely no evidence that it has cured anything,” he told the Mail & Guardian.

Madhi noted that Madagascar only has a small number of confirmed coronavirus cases (158 as of 7 May). “That’s definitely not enough for a trial. Citing these sorts of numbers is a meaningless exercise.” 

He dismissed President Rajoelina’s claim that two people had been “cured” by the herbal remedy. “The majority of people who have this virus show no symptoms. Of those who develop symptoms, 85% of them have mild illness. You could treat them with water and it would have the same effect.”

History repeating itself?

This is not the first time Professor Madhi has witnessed politicians make grand claims at odds with established medical evidence. He lived through that dark period in South Africa’s history during which its leaders - principally former president Thabo Mbeki - disputed the science on how to treat HIV/Aids. At one point, cabinet minister Manto Tshabalala Msimang suggested beetroot and garlic were more effective treatments than antiretrovirals - despite all evidence to the contrary. A Harvard University study found in 2009 that this misguided policy may have caused more than 300,000 premature deaths. 

Both Africa CDC and the WHO are concerned about history repeating itself - and that using an untested herbal remedy such as Covid-Organics could have the opposite of the intended impact.

“We would caution and advise against countries adopting a product that has not been taken through tests to see its efficacy against Covid-19 and its safety in different population groups,” said Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s Africa region director. “We are concerned that touting this product as a preventative measure might make people feel safe to do other things [against medical recommendations, such as neglecting social distancing].”

The WHO and Africa CDC have offered to partner with Madagascar to test Covid-Organics in a proper medical trial. So too has South Africa. John Nkengasong, the director of Africa CDC, told the Mail & Guardian: “I heard the briefing the president of Madagascar made ... [we] look forward to seeing the data and the design of the study. We stand by to partner with the government of Madagascar to understand how the drug works and the science behind it.”

So far, Madagascar has not shared the data underpinning its claims. Both the government and the Malagasy Institute of Applied Research declined to be interviewed for this story.

Clinical trials are critical

A lack of evidence has not deterred several leaders from embracing Covid-Organics. Last week, Madagascar dispatched 1.5 tonnes of the herbal drink to Equatorial Guinea. Another shipment went to Guinea-Bissau. President George Weah personally greeted a plane as it delivered samples for Liberia. And Tanzanian President John Magufuli - who has claimed three days of prayer can cure Covid-19 - said he would send a plane to Antananarivo to collect a consignment.

But sources within the African Union suggest most leaders remain unconvinced - even if diplomatic protocol is preventing them from saying so publicly.

One of the few institutions to speak out is West Africa’s regional bloc Ecowas, which distanced itself from claims it had ordered Covid-Organics. It said although it recognises the importance of traditional and plant-based medicine, “we can only support and endorse products that have been shown to be effective through scientific study”.

The WHO has taken a similar line. This week, it said: “Many plants and substances are being proposed [as Covid-19 cures] without the minimum requirements and evidence of quality, safety and efficacy. Africans deserve to use medicines tested to the same standards as people in the rest of the world. Even if therapies are derived from traditional practice and natural, establishing their efficacy and safety through rigorous clinical trials is critical.”

This story was first published in The Continent, the new pan-African newspaper published in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It is designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp.

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“I couldn’t believe it when I checked the news this morning,” said psychologist and conspiracy theory expert Daniel Jolley at the University of Nottingham. 

Trump now falsely claims he did not suggest looking into disinfectant injections as a coronavirus treatment. “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” he told journalists in the Oval Office.

But over on Facebook, in a group for followers of the notorious pro-Trump conspiracy theory movement QAnon, users jumped to the president’s aid. “DID EVERYONE GET THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE TONIGHT?” wrote one user. Another posted pictures of newly purchased chemical agents with the caption “Suck it, Big Pharma.” “It seems far fetched but he is spot on,” wrote another. “He just revealed one of the greatest secrets in medicine and nobody even noticed.”

The use of disinfectant agents as a potential treatment for Covid-19 have been circulating among conspiracy groups for months, and was heavily re-promoted on Friday. In particular, disinfectant agent chlorine dioxide, dubbed by QAnon followers as the “miracle mineral supplement,” has been the chemical of choice for the group’s followers. “It kills all pathogens, bacteria, virus, fungus in your body,” wrote Facebook user Irene Klaver, 52, from the Netherlands. Klaver only joined the QAnon Facebook group, which has more than 86,000 members, on Tuesday, but said she had followed the movement for much longer.

Klaver told me she had been self-administering chlorine dioxide since February, taking three to four drops twice a day. When I asked her about Trump’s words, she said: “your President is absolutely right about all those treatments. It is effective, cheap and will save lots of people from dying.”

For years, chlorine dioxide has been promoted as a potential cure for conditions as diverse as autism, diabetes and cancer by internet cult leader Jim Humble, alongside Andreas Ludwig Kalcker, a German hero of the QAnon movement with a large online following. In April, Kalcker released an 8-minute video claiming the compound also worked against Covid-19. 

In a statement in August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s acting commissioner said of chlorine dioxide: “Ingesting these products is the same as drinking bleach.” 

President Trump’s other suggestion that Covid-19 could be treated with ultraviolet light also garnered praise from supporters. “He is now officially my hero, I actually teared up,” wrote one QAnon user, while others posted links about “the healing powers of ultraviolet rays” and “ozone therapy” – a toxic pseudoscientific treatment banned by the FDA but heavily promoted in anti-science groups.  

The rush to explain and support Trump’s claims is still underway, according to disinformation specialist Samantha North at Washington cyber security company Nisos. "There's a very tribal dynamic," she observed. “People cling at all costs to the narrative that comes from their "in" group,” she said, adding that she had observed online conspiracy theorists “trying to present all these complicated explanations for what Trump was doing.” 

The scramble to explain Trump’s intentions was also reiterated by the far-right outlet Breitbart news, who posted a “fact-check” article claiming “No, Trump didn’t propose injecting people with disinfectant.”

Irene Klaver, the Dutch QAnon recruit who’s been taking chlorine dioxide, felt Trump’s proximity to expert medical advisors meant he was well-placed to highlight potential treatments for Covid-19. “He has the right people to study all this and give us the people the best advice,” she said, adding: “If that is a possibility and it is safe, why not?”

This morning, Reckitt Benckiser, the British owner of Dettol and Lysol released a statement warning of the dangers of injecting their products. “Dettol” and “#disinfectant” were both trending Twitter topics for most of the day.

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On March 13, as the whole of Italy went into lockdown, Gellano left the U.S. to join his family back in Umbria, in central Italy. Almost all direct flights to Rome were cancelled, and Gellano was forced to take an unusual detour via Moscow. 

During his day-long layover at Moscow international airport, Gellano and his friend filmed themselves walking through the terminal, wearing masks and sunglasses. “We’re in Moscow airport, and we’re going to buy this famous Arbidol that fights coronavirus,” Gellano told the camera. They entered the airport pharmacy, and Gellano bought two packets of Arbidol: one for him, one for his wife. “So many people in Italy are dying – and they don’t have this drug. Can you tell me why?” he says, signing off the video with “a big kiss from Moscow.” 

Gellano uploaded the video to Facebook. “I don’t know why I did it, but I did it,” Gellano told Coda Story. “I told myself – ‘I’m making this video for the good of my country, for the good of the world.’”

The video went immediately viral, gaining more than 33,000 shares on Facebook, and circulating heavily over WhatsApp. “You’re a celebrity,” one of his friends texted Gellano. 

On March 17, a senator in Italy’s governing Five Star Movement, Elio Lanutti, tweeted about the drug: “Arbidol is a drug used against the most common flu viruses, it works by preventing the virus from crossing the cell membrane and penetrating inside it to replicate itself. Abidol 20 mg, is purchased in Russia in pharmacies.” 

Over WhatsApp and Facebook, conspiracy theories began to circulate that the Italian government was purposefully withholding vital drugs from its citizens. The former health minister Giulia Grillo had another message for her followers: “Who do you trust more,” she asked, “a doctor or a masked man in Moscow airport?”

As the world undergoes a frenzied search for an effective treatment for the coronavirus, a host of drugs have been cited as potential cures. Last week, President Trump tweeted about hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin – despite only anecdotal evidence for its effectiveness against Covid-19.

Italy has meanwhile seen a storm of interest in Arbidol – an antiviral flu drug with the clinical name “Umifenovir” – as a potential miracle cure. But according to experts in Russia, any evidence for its effectiveness is thin on the ground. 

Arbidol, developed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, has not been approved for use in the U.S. or Europe, and has never undergone a full clinical trial conducted to international standards. Its effectiveness against Covid-19 – or indeed any other virus – has not been proven. But it’s still one of Russia’s best-selling over-the-counter drugs. 

A group of doctors in Russia has been campaigning against the use of Arbidol, alongside a host of other Russian-made antiviral drugs, for years. In 2007, the drug was found to be “obsolete with unproven effectiveness” by the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences.

“We have a lot of so-called “antivirals” and “immunomodulators” with unknown efficacy on the Russian market,” said Yaroslav Ashikhmin, a doctor of internal medicine in Moscow and one of Arbidol’s most prominent critics. “There is absolutely no basis for the effectiveness of Arbidol,” he said. “Our suggestion is if the drug was really effective, the manufacturer would have done a clinical trial, but they don’t want to go to clinical trial because their sales are very big.” Ashikhmin added: “You can’t sell hope, and we need to prevent the selling of hope.”

Arbidol, manufactured by a Russian pharmaceutical company called OTCPharm, has a history of being promoted by Russian politicians. In 2010, President Vladimir Putin personally endorsed the drug by asking for it during a presidential visit to a pharmacy in the northwestern city of Murmansk. During the swine flu pandemic in 2009, Russia’s then Health Minister, Tatyana Golikova, recommended Arbidol for treatment of H1N1 and was accused of corruption after she was found to have a close friendship with Arbidol’s billionaire owner. Golikova was given the nickname “Madame Arbidol” by the media.

The latest campaign to promote Arbidol as a miracle cure began back in January, as Covid-19 began to spread beyond China’s borders. In Russia, a strange and hopeful message was broadcast to millions across four of the country’s most popular radio stations. “Around the world, the number of patients with new coronavirus, which causes dangerous pneumonia, is increasing,” the advertisement ran. “Studies have proven: Arbidol is active even against coronavirus.” 

Following the advert, a federal investigation into the drug company’s claims found them to be in violation of advertising law. Russian media reported that the company would be fined up to 500,000 rubles: around $6,300. 

Today, on Arbidol’s homepage, the company continues to advertise the drug as “active against influenza, SARS, and coronaviruses.” OTCPharm did not respond to requests for comment from Coda Story.

The sales pitch has worked: pharmacies across Russia reported a sharp increase in demand, with more than 1.3 million packages of Arbidol sold in February alone. Russian eBay users have been selling the drug to international buyers at $67 for 20 capsules, a mark-up of 32 times the original price of around $2 – the listings are continually being removed.

In early February, one of Beijing’s leading epidemiologists, Li Lanjuan, recommended China include Arbidol in their official treatment plan, prompting a storm of renewed interest in the drug. Last week, a randomized study conducted by a group of Chinese doctors found that Arbidol had not shown any clinical benefit on patients hospitalized with Covid-19. 

In Italy, a doctor called Ivo Bianchi, who frequently promotes “natural” treatments, posted a video in early March about Arbidol to his 17,000 subscribers on YouTube, commenting that Russia’s coronavirus victims had so far “healed very quickly.” “I think it's interesting to mention this drug, even though it's not approved in Europe,” Bianchi told his viewers. “As you know, there are political conflicts between Russia and Europe, there shouldn't be this kind of division within the scientific community.” 

Bianchi’s video was how Paolo Gellano – the Umbrian who first heard about the drug in a restaurant in New York – found out more about Arbidol. 

Dr Rohin Francis is a cardiologist in the UK who has been monitoring claims for potential Covid-19 treatments. He explained why some people find news of a potential viable treatment psychologically appealing. “All we can offer the public at the moment is maybes and uncertainties,” he said. “If somebody can come in saying “this will work, this will cure you – people are just going to gravitate towards that message.”

Last week, the Russian press reported that the country may soon experience a shortage of Arbidol as some of the drug’s key ingredients are manufactured in Italy. Meanwhile, Russia sent a huge military convoy of supplies to coronavirus-hit Italy, which so far has lost more than 10,000 people to the disease.

Paolo Gellano watched online from his home in Umbria as Russia sent its aid package. “I don’t know why they’re helping us – or if there’s something behind it,” he said. Gellano has now deleted his Facebook video after receiving multiple death threats, as well as offers to buy the Arbidol. “People wanted to pay €10,000 for it, but I said, ‘I’m not going to sell it,’” he said. “I never, ever thought it would go as far as it did.”

Gellano is currently in lockdown with his wife and family. His two packages of Arbidol remain unopened. “I haven’t taken it yet because I’m a little bit skeptical – and my wife is a little bit skeptical,” he said. “But in the unfortunate situation that I get coronavirus, I will take it.”

Katerina Fomina and Karina Levitina contributed research.

The post The campaign to promote a mysterious Soviet-era drug as a coronavirus miracle cure appeared first on Coda Story.

St. Petersburg, Russia | Natalia Yamshchikova

“We have too many catastrophes here. I’m still recovering from the fact that we’ll have Putin forever now,” said Yamshchikova. When coronavirus numbers were just breaking 100 cases in the country, President Vladimir Putin ordered a reset for presidential terms limits, allowing him to in effect stay president for life. A spike in coronavirus cases and the plummet of the ruble followed, leaving Russians with news whiplash as one crisis overtook another.

Milan, Italy | Marta Signori

With virtually all of the country on lockdown, ordinary tasks have turned into a “scary adventure” for close to 60 million Italians, said Signori.

Khon Kaen, Thailand | Peerapat Chatjutamanee

The stockpiling and reselling of masks for a higher price is leaving people without a defense against another major health risk in Thailand: urban air pollution, says Chatjutamanee. The country currently has 1,651 confirmed cases.

Wisconsin, United States | Sasha Krasutska

From the very beginning of the outbreak in the U.S., Krasutska said she “was thinking about the discrepancy between what the government was advising and doing.” Was the virus just another seasonal flu? Would only the elderly be affected? The mixed messages have sown confusion and contributed to the surge in cases.

Seoul, South Korea | Kang Sujung

Masks on the street, masks on buses, masks in the elevators. “Everyone is careful, but the virus remains,” said Sujung. Over a quarter million people have been tested for the virus, but new cases continue to appear.

Tbilisi, Georgia | Nika Kobaidze

Georgia took action weeks ahead of other European countries and the U.S., closing schools and limiting flights after just one person in the country tested positive. While there have been hardly any cases of local transmission, the local currency — the lari — has plummeted.

The post Drawing Covid-19: Artists around the world illustrate coronavirus in their community appeared first on Coda Story.

Indonesia

Terawan Agus Putranto

Minister of Health

While resisting calls to impose a lockdown, the health minister of the world’s fourth-most populous country has continued to repeat messages about prayer offering protection against coronavirus. With the nation’s total number of confirmed cases now standing at 1,414, a coalition of civil society groups, including Amnesty International Indonesia, has demanded Putranto’s resignation. The groups claim that Putranto has exhibited an “absence of sensitive, responsive and effective leadership” throughout the crisis. Much of this concern came in response to Putranto’s erroneous insistence that recovered COVID-19 patients are immune to the virus and his showcasing of such individuals at a public event — in direct contravention of his own ministry’s social distancing guidelines. Back in February Putranto slammed a study by Harvard University researchers that suggested Indonesia was downplaying its number of infections, referring to the document as “insulting.”

CV: The Indonesian Medical Association issued a recommendation to suspend Putranto in 2018 for violating medical ethics by devising and administering a controversial therapy for stroke patients. Putranto is a radiologist by profession and the first military doctor appointed to his post since the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998.

Iran 

Iraj Harirchi

Deputy Minister of Health and Medical Education

Harirchi made international news after a series of television appearances in which he assured Iranians — between coughs and sneezes — that the highly contagious coronavirus was under control. The next day, Harirchi confirmed that he had tested positive. His earlier statements that “quarantines belong to the Stone Age” also contradicted the numbers: Iran has over 40,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and at least 12 of its officials and politicians have died from the illness. Despite Iran having one of the region’s best healthcare systems, doctors are now finding themselves working without basic protective gear in hospitals close to capacity.

CV: Physician and faculty member at Tehran University of Medical Sciences.

Turkmenistan

Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov

President and former Minister of Health

As neighboring countries in Central Asia begin to acknowledge the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Turkmenistan’s government has pointedly remained silent. The country has not reported a single case and the word “coronavirus” has not appeared on any official websites since early March. Instead, at a recent government meeting, Berdymukhamedov spoke of the medical properties of “yuzarlik.” According to the president, when burned, this plant produces smoke that can prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Yuzarlik closely resembles a shrub named rue, which is a popular folk medicine across the Middle East and North Africa. Its seeds can also be used as a recreational hallucinogen. Radio Free Europe reported that, following Berdymukhamedov’s advice, state workers began “fumigating government offices, schools and even cemeteries twice daily with yuzarlik fumes.”

CV: A dentist by training, Berdymukhamedov is a totalitarian dictator. He is known for his unusual behavior, including playing live DJ sets on state television, erecting gilded statues of himself and lifting gold bars in parliament to demonstrate his strength.

Colombia

Mabel Torres

Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation

Prior to her appointment as Colombia’s science minister, Torres was a mycologist at the Technological University of El Choco. Most of her scientific work was focused on a fungal extract that she claims put a number of cancer patients into remission within months of taking it. Colombian scientists and medical societies are calling for her resignation because her statements are not backed up by clinical trials or the submission of research to peer-reviewed journals. While in office, she has doubled down on her decision to ignore these standard scientific practices. “I decided not to publish as an act of rebellion,” she told Colombia’s El Espectador newspaper. Now, Torres is in charge of allocating state funds to Colombian scientists carrying out coronavirus research. The president of Colombia’s Academy of Sciences called out Torres for her lack of leadership during the outbreak, saying she was “totally absent from the big decisions” to which the Minister responded in an interview that her work was meant to be done in “silence.”

CV: Torres is not widely published, making her a marginal figure in Colombia’s scientific community. In fact, Gustavo Quintero Hernandez, dean of the School of Medicine at Del Rosario University in Bogota has described her as “a total stranger” to the country’s science community.

India

Harsh Vardhan

Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Minister of Sciences and Technology, Minister of Earth Science

During a speech to the Indian Science Congress in 2018, Vardhan said that the Vedas, Hinduism’s oldest scriptures, detail ideas superior to Einstein’s theory of relativity, citing the late Stephen Hawking as the source. Vardhan appeared to be the victim of a fake news page on Facebook, which had posted quotes incorrectly attributed to the late British physicist. The minister also caused controversy with his arguments against the use of condoms to protect against HIV and his statements that sex education should be banned in schools.

CV: Visit Vardhan’s website for a detailed personal history. The minister also has his own app, which promises users a “peek into the soul of this great visionary and nationalist.” 

United States

Jerome Adams

Surgeon General

Adams has become one of the most media-friendly faces in the U.S. coronavirus taskforce, making numerous appearances on Fox News and elsewhere. However, experts have called out his repeated comparison of coronavirus to the flu as dangerously downplaying the severity of the disease. On the conservative morning TV show “Fox and Friends,” Adams said that he was “convinced that more people are going to die by far from the flu than from coronavirus — not only in our country, but across the planet.” He also asserted that 73-year-old Trump is “healthier than what I am,” when asked about Trump’s risk of exposure from travel. Adams also scolded the press for “bickering” and “partisanship,” urging reporters to put an end to “criticism or finger-pointing.” In another “Fox & Friends” appearance on March 23, Adams walked back the president's claim that chloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, offered a treatment for COVID-19, saying that it needed further testing.

CV: Board certified in anesthesiology. Appointed State Health Commissioner of Indiana in 2014 by then-Governor Mike Pence.

UK

Nadine Dorries

Junior Minister at the Department for Health and Social Care

Nadine Dorries’ hardline conservative views — including her proposal of a bill to make sex education optional for girls between ages 13 and 16, and her opposition to same sex-marriage — have caused controversy in the past. Her most recent headlines, however, were made when she tested positive for coronavirus earlier this month. On the day she began to show symptoms, Dorries came into contact with Prime Minister Boris Johnson, other members of the U.K. parliament and more than 100 other people. She said that she just thought she was feeling “a bit peaky.” Dorries returned to parliament on March 24 after a full recovery. Later that week both Johnson and his secretary of health Matt Hancock tested positive for the virus.

CV: Former nurse. Best known for her appearance on the British reality TV show  “I’m a Celebrity…Get me Out of Here”

The post Meet the coronavirus politicians who have no time for science appeared first on Coda Story.

Almost a decade ago, the U.S. National Academy of Scientists wrote a letter condemning “political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything.” 

As populism sweeps the globe, hostility towards scientists, climate campaigners and experts continues. 

The scientific establishment has become vulnerable to a wave of anti-reason. Donald Trump’s administration has attacked science more than 100 times since 2016, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The government has buried its own studies exposing the effects of climate change and has withdrawn funding for conservation programs. Scientists, researchers, and engineers are forced to protest on the streets in the name of science

In the years since that letter was written, scientific research has been distorted, amplified, and weaponized into a tool to confuse, control, and suppress further discovery. 

Coda Story is investigating how science is being undermined every day by shadowy interests. We’re looking at who they are, how they operate, and who is funding them. Our coverage will also examine how their influence affects all of us. 

The post Weaponized doubt appeared first on Coda Story.

A number of political and business forces are at play, capitalizing on the growth of the wellness industry, seeking to exploit the most vulnerable and create mistrust between us and our healthcare systems.

Once a person makes an initial leap of bad faith – such as campaigning against vaccines – they are more likely to make another. “Bad ideas don’t happen in isolation,” says Dr David Grimes, a cancer researcher and vaccine advocate at Oxford University, explaining how conspiracy theorists and proponents of alternative health theories cross-pollinate online. “You have to find a way of nullifying mountains of evidence against your position.” 

The stakes have never been higher. Yet institutions, healthcare practitioners, and doctors are now afraid to post online about vaccines for fear they will be attacked for advocating for them.

“You start to really hate your job,” said Dr. Chad Herrman, a paediatrician in Pittsburg who was subjected to a virulent anti-vaccine campaign in 2017. “You go down this rabbit hole of insanity, it’s kind of like the five stages of grief: you go through anger, denial, bargaining. It’s physically and mentally exhausting.” 

As online platforms like Facebook and Instagram become ever more powerful centers for anti-science ideas to proliferate, Coda Story will examine the networks that seek to destroy trust, sow divisions, and profit from fear.

The post Pseudohealth appeared first on Coda Story.

As White House watchers tuned into the latest impeachment proceedings this week, I was watching a live stream from a different hearing called Hijacking Our Heroes: Exploiting Veterans Through Disinformation on Social Media. In the room was Kristofer Goldsmith, an 34-year-old Iraq veteran, who I interviewed for my recent reporting about how veterans, U.S. servicemen and their families are systematically targeted on social media. Goldsmith was testifying before the House Committee on Veteran Affairs on November 13 alongside Twitter’s Public Policy Manager Kevin Kane, and the Head of Security Policy at Facebook, Nathaniel Gleicher.

For more than two years Goldsmith, a full-time student at Columbia University and a vocal advocate for veterans, has been calling on social media companies and U.S. government agencies to address the targeting of vets online. In his research he discovered an entire ecosystem of foreign actors microtargeting veterans in order to influence elections and destabilize democracy. The combined following of the pages he reported to Facebook was over 24 million users. 

From the two tech giant representatives, a series of all-too-familiar non-answers were the order of the day: I heard versions of “I’ll have to get back to you with that,” and “we have a clear policy for that” (which never turned out to be all that clear). Goldsmith said he sympathizes with the companies who have to “balance security and every good thing about the platforms.” His goal now is to “keep the momentum up” and get the attention of other committees in the House and Senate.

Goldsmith also urged congressmen to require Veterans Affairs and other government agencies to “shield veterans” from online threats and make cyber hygiene a “critical aspect of veterans’ overall health needs in the 21st Century.”

The last time I spoke to Goldsmith I asked him about his plans for the upcoming Veterans Day weekend. Goldsmith told me he was using the day to finish writing his congressional testimony. He had no plans to participate in any parades. “I’m more than tired of marching,” he said. “ I’m not going to be doing that.”

This is a story I’ll continue tracking: be sure to stay on the story with us and follow along here @katia_patin

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