It starts with a simple search term in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. “Blue eyes.” Hundreds of results. Jeffrey Epstein’s international trafficking agents send him pictures and descriptions of blue-eyed young girls: potential victims to be dispatched to his various homes. “I spotted two skinny blond blue eyes 21 years old ladies in Monaco last weekend and asked them for CVs,” one agent, whose name has been redacted, wrote. “Trying her best to move from her small town to Moscow; English isn't great. Could be fun for Paris, blue eyes,” wrote another. “Can't understand if her breast is real. Otherwise very pretty and sweet…Very blue eyes as we like.” 

One of Epstein’s victims wrote of being chosen for her eye color in a journal entry later shared with federal prosecutors. "Superior gene pool?!? Why me?" she wrote, describing Epstein's worldview as "Nazi like." "It makes no sense. Why my hair color and eye color?" 

Epstein — himself blue-eyed — seemed to prefer both his victims, and the people he bankrolled, to have blue eyes. “All of my fundees have blue eyes,” he boasted in one email. In the entryway of his Manhattan townhouse, he displayed dozens of prosthetic eyeballs in a frame. Epstein made notes and sent article links to his contacts asking if having blue eyes meant you were more intelligent or a “genius”. He even had a list of scientists and tech leaders with blue eyes — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Google’s Ray Kurzweil. “Total — 70 people Blue eyes — 41 Unclear (might be blue, but not 100% sure)” the list says. Appearing in the files — whether on this list or elsewhere in Epstein's records — does not connote legal wrongdoing.

Going deeper into the files, Epstein and his network of contacts discussed beliefs about how physical characteristics and race might denote intelligence. They exchanged emails about population control. They spoke of engineering women’s sex drives, building designer babies, and living in a world full of superintelligent humans that could merge with robots. They spoke of getting rid of the elderly, the infirm, and the poor.

The files offer a glimpse into a world where ideas about eugenics and race science have never gone away. On the contrary, they run through our elite universities, through the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley, and through the tech industry itself. Epstein’s was an exclusive club that counted among its members people who harbor dreams of re-engineering human minds and bodies, seizing control of our collective future, and building technology that, they hope, will one day merge with — or even replace — all of us.

In 2002, two decades before the launch of ChatGPT, Epstein hosted an Artificial Intelligence summit on his Caribbean island. In the years that followed, he cultivated close, regular contact with a network of  (predominantly male) scientists, researchers, academics and tech leaders working at the vanguard of AI, biotech, genetics and cognitive science, meeting them at universities like Harvard and at his various homes. 

In August 2018, a year before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell, he was in email correspondence with software consultant and bitcoin investor Bryan Bishop about funding a project to create “designer babies” — children with genes cherrypicked for their looks, health, strength, immune systems, sleep needs and even, in Bishop’s imaginings, abilities to live on a different planet. 

  “Attached is the doc you requested, it's the "use of funds" spreadsheet for the designer baby and human cloning company,” Bishop wrote to Epstein. “This gets us out of our self-funded ‘garage biology’ phase to the first live birth of a human designer baby, and possibly a human clone, within 5 years. Once we reach the first birth, everything changes and the world will never be the same again.”

Bishop went on to discuss how his ultimate ambition was to make “practically unlimited modifications to the cells before generating an embryo.”

In response to a request for comment, Bishop sent Coda a publicly available set of answers to frequently asked questions about designer babies.

“The reason people have an aversion to eugenics, and rightfully so, is because countries used genocide and sterilization to prevent reproduction by populations that they didn’t like. We have no intention of doing anything of the sort,” Bishop writes in the public FAQ. “‘Designer baby’ simply describes a child whose genome has been intentionally altered or chosen by their parents, rather than left entirely to the genetic lottery of natural conception.”

“It’s such a great subject,” Epstein responded after he read Bishop’s proposal. “We need to get a read on legal. Can’t do anything where US rules apply to US citizens regardless of where [they are].” 

Building a super-race of humans, and parachuting humanity into a different evolutionary era — or even obsoleting the human race as we know it — is a running theme in the Epstein files, and an increasingly prominent ambition for tech evangelists today.

“It’s eugenics all the way down,” said Jacob Metcalf, a founding partner at Ethical Resolve, a consulting firm working with tech companies to develop their ethics protocols. A common fantasy in tech circles, he said, is “to essentially control human destiny. And a lot of the times that human destiny is for humans to be replaced. That's the really bleak thing here. What could be more eugenic than getting rid of humans.”

In 2008, Epstein began conversations with the computer scientist Ben Goertzel. Over the years, Epstein would send Goertzel more than $360,000 to fund the researcher’s plans to build towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a term Goertzel himself popularized.

“I remain eager to move forward on working together to accelerate progress toward a human-obsoleting thinking machine,” Goertzel wrote to Epstein in May 2008. Eighteen years on, and the idea of obsoleting humans with artificial intelligence is widely discussed in the tech world.

When asked to comment on his exchange with Epstein, Goertzel told Coda: “I do think we will create forms of transhuman intelligence going beyond the scope of humanity as we know it, but I also very much hope and envision a strong role for humans even after this happens.”

Goertzel went on to describe a future where the world reaches the “Singularity” — a Silicon Valley buzzword signifying a tipping point where AI surpasses human intelligence. “I do think AI will eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy, but I think this can happen in a way that respects and nourishes human life rather than being harmful to it,” he said. “Epstein and I discussed this face to face a few times and indeed I was a bigger fan of the human species than he was, and more optimistic about its flourishing post-Singularity.” 

In an email to Epstein, Goertzel laid out a scenario where AI systems would start running their own economic activity. He envisioned this Artificial Intelligence economy acting as a “parasite to overcome the regular human economy” that would eventually “gain its own superhuman autonomy.” The ideas Epstein and Goertzel exchanged mirror a broader conversation unfolding in the tech world that imagines a future where ultimately, human labour could be rendered superfluous, and ultimately be replaced by artificial intelligence and robots.

Together, Goertzel and Epstein also discussed modifying human brains — a concept popular in Silicon Valley today, where numerous brain-computer projects are researching ways to cognitively enhance the human brain, and alter human personality, memory, and mental capabilities.

In 2008, when Epstein told Goertzel he was “off to jail” for a year, after he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution, Goertzel suggested the solution to his problems might one day be solved if human brains could be re-programmed.

“According to my understanding, the girls you were involved with were old enough to know what they were doing, so society really has no ‘moral right’ to lock you up,” Goertzel wrote to Epstein. “This is a fucked-up society we live in. But past ones have really been no better -- the fault is really w/ the human brain architecture, which is precisely what I'm aiming to supercede in my AGI work.”

When asked to comment on these remarks — and in particular the implication that Epstein’s problems might be solved if his accusers' brains were one day re-engineered — Goertzel told Coda: “This was a general observation that the messed-up nature of our society generally is rooted in the way our brains have evolved... and that advanced tech will let us modify our brains to make ourselves and thus our society better.  There was no implication intended (nor stated) that women’s brains are any more or less messed up or in need of improvement than men’s.”

Goertzel reflected that his comments on Epstein’s victims being “old enough” were “regrettable and unfortunate in hindsight,” adding that his impression was that Epstein had been involved with adult women, not “disgustingly curating high school students for sexual purposes. I should have paid more attention.” 

In 2013, three and a half years after Epstein was released from jail, Goertzel approached Epstein for funding to build a “toddler robot”. Given Epstein’s criminal history of abusing minors, this has inevitably attracted attention online. “When we were discussing measuring the IQ of robot toddlers, the topic was never sexualized in any way,” Goertzel told Coda when asked about the project. “While I had nothing to do with Epstein's perverse sexual tastes or abuse of women, what I have read about his awful doings in the newspapers relates to his interest in teenage girls not toddlers.”

Epstein was particularly interested in funding projects that built — like Goertzel’s –- on transhumanist theories. Transhumanism is a worldview that captivates many of the most prominent tech leaders in Silicon Valley today. It believes in a future when the human body can be endlessly altered, genetically engineered, and ultimately fused with artificial intelligence. 

“Transhumanism is a much more radical concept than eugenics,” explained Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and researcher who has written extensively about eugenicist ideas within artificial intelligence. “In eugenics, you're trying to create a more superior human by breeding humans through generations. In transhumanism, you're trying to get rid of humans altogether.”

For transhumanists, she added, “their idea is to get rid of any undesirable properties they see with humans."

Perhaps the most well-known proponent of transhumanism in the Epstein files is Peter Thiel.

“I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?” New York Times journalist Ross Douthat asked Thiel last year. “Uh—,” Thiel said. “This is a long hesitation!” Douthat said. “Should the human race survive?” “Yes, but I would like us to radically solve these problems,” Thiel said. “We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.”

Thiel’s name appears in the files more than 2000 times, and Epstein reportedly invested some $40 million into Valar Ventures, a firm co-founded by Thiel. The two spoke of building secret societies and shared an interest in transhumanism and cryogenics — Epstein wanted to freeze his brain and penis when he died, so that one day he could be revived, while Thiel has also stated his body will be frozen after his death. 

They also appeared to share an interest in bringing an end to the democratic systems of today, imagining a different system altogether. Epstein, for his part, spent his life puppeteering the most powerful people in the world and undermining democratic systems. Thiel, meanwhile, first expressed his own anti-democratic views in 2009 when he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” adding that since women were allowed to vote, the notion of a capitalist democracy became impossible. When the Brexit vote came through, Epstein wrote to Thiel: “Brexit, just the beginning.” Thiel asked — “of what”; Epstein said – “Return to tribalism, counter to globalization, amazing new alliances.” 

Globalization — and the idea of internationally powerful governing bodies — is a worldview that both Epstein and Thiel seemed to distrust. In March, in a palazzo in Rome, a stone’s throw from the Vatican, Thiel gave one of his infamous lectures in which he espoused his views about an “antichrist” that gets in the way of technological progress. This antichrist, he suggested, could be an internationally powerful body; the product of globalization. I stood outside the palace as attendees — priests, students, researchers — mutely hurried out, refusing to speak to the cluster of reporters waiting for Thiel’s black Mercedes. 

“He has a totally irrational side, which lives on fear, of what danger might happen,” one audience member told me of Thiel on condition of anonymity, recalling how, up close, Thiel looked haunted and ill. “His head is full of future scenarios, which is what’s killing him. I think he’s scared.”

Thiel did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Epstein didn’t confine himself to lofty conversations about a future collapse of the global order or re-engineering humanity. He also had ambitions for his own personal eugenics project. In 2019, it emerged that he wanted to seed the world with his DNA — and reportedly have 20 women impregnated at a time at Zorro ranch, his New Mexico property.

Epstein tried to recruit Virginia Giuffre for this very project. He “fantasized about improving the human race by fathering children who carried his superior genes,” she recounted in her memoir, published posthumously late last year.  “He’d talk about using his Zorro ranch as a literal breeding ground to propagate babies.” When Giuffre was 18 years old, she recalled, Epstein asked if she would carry his child and hand over all legal rights to it – “like a modern-day handmaid.”

In a haunting diary entry from another Epstein victim, written between the ages of 16 and 17 and shared with federal prosecutors, a girl describes being told she will be sent to Zorro ranch — possibly to participate in the very same project. “Go to New Mexico? What in the hell? This makes no sense. What about school?” she writes, describing how Epstein chose her for her hair color and eye color, and tried to convince her she would create “perfect offspring.”

The teenager chronicles her pregnancy, pasting a sonogram into the scrapbook, before giving a traumatic account of giving birth with Ghislaine Maxwell beside her. “Ghislaine said to push all the pain away. I don't understand. Blood and water all over the bed.” As the baby was born, she writes, Maxwell covered her eyes. “I saw between her fingers this tiny head and body in the doctors hands.”

The girl describes hearing the baby’s “tiny cries” before “they took her.”

“I’m nothing but your property and incubator,” the teenager writes of Epstein. The diary is a terrifying piece of evidence that appears to link to Epstein’s longstanding fixation with creating genetically bespoke humans. The diary author’s lawyers, Wigdor LLP, declined to comment.   

Epstein’s fever-dreams of creating an army of children carrying specific genes reflect a broader trend of “pronatalism” — a movement historically tied to eugenics — that’s thriving in Silicon Valley.

 Millions of dollars of funding are currently being poured into projects creating “superbabies,” while billionaire tech oligarchs including Elon Musk — whose name appears more than 1000 times in the files — reportedly want to use surrogates “to reach legion-level before the apocalypse.” Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

In the files, women appear either as victims, as objects, or as vessels for genetic engineering experiments. They are an inconvenient reality, people to be controlled and re-booted. Epstein wrote a 2013 email implying that women “are like shrimp. You throw away the head and keep the body.” 

“The obsession with "artificial" life appears tied to a masculine desire to try control the production of life – ultimately ridding themselves of their dependency on women," said Gabriella Razzano, Co-Founder of OpenUp, a social impact tech lab based in Cape Town, who is also a senior advisor at the African AI Observatory. “I think there is important work to be done on tying the narratives that are very revealing in the Epstein files to understand how, and why, technology is being developed as it is.” 

The trading of ideas about intelligence — both artificial and human — takes a particularly sinister turn in a 2016 exchange between Epstein and the cognitive scientist and AI researcher Joscha Bach, whose research Epstein funded to the tune of $300,000.

Bach writes to Epstein about a study claiming that “black children outperform white children in motor development, even in very poor and socially disadvantaged households, but they lag behind (and never catch up) in cognitive development even after controlling for family income.”

Epstein responds with racist ideas about his notion of how to “make blacks smarter”, adding — “maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation. The Earth’s forest fire. Potentially a good thing for the species,” before contemplating a world with “too many people,” where “many mass executions of the elderly and infirm make sense.” 

Epstein then imagines creating a future “Übermensch” — a superior human with cherry-picked attributes. “What I like is the idea that ubermensch could be the melding of humans, put together in one brain,” Epstein writes. This bespoke human, he suggests, would include traits from marginalized groups, who he appears to believe have a stronger awareness of how to navigate power structures because of their historical exclusion. “An increased motor system, an increased awareness, an increased status calculator (Blacks, jews, women). Ubermensch could be the combination of the best of humans, not the best of a specific race or gender. Fun idea.” 

Bach told Coda in a statement: “I was summarizing a scientific study in a private email. Studies like this get often abused in ideological discourse to justify discrimination, which I strongly oppose and condemn.”

“I am firmly opposed to any form of racial discrimination, and I reject the use of group-level statistical claims to make judgments about individuals or to justify unequal treatment.” 

He continued: “It goes without saying that if global warming were to lead to a reduction in the human population, it would be accompanied by immeasurable suffering. Our civilization would break down, leading to a return to dark ages, in which the elderly and infirm were often killed, because people could not support them, and often did not care about supporting them. Every reasonable person understands that this is horrible and not desirable in any way.”

Epstein “was often callous about human suffering in a way that I found disturbing but worth understanding, as a window into the perspectives of the rich and powerful,” Bach added. 

Alongside Epstein’s conversations about mass executions for the old and and the sick, he was also interested in Silicon Valley’s dream concept of living forever — he had numerous email conversations with the longevity guru Peter Attia about prolonging his own lifespan, and funded a Harvard project geared towards “the end of aging.” In an email to Attia, Epstein mused: “I’m not sure why women live past reproductive age at all.” Attia, who published a statement about his relationship to Epstein, did not respond to requests for comment. 

This interest in “longevity” — living for as long as possible, even living forever, is popular among the elite precisely because they find themselves in an elite class, says David Robert Grimes, a scientist and disinformation expert who has written about longevity and race science in Silicon Valley. “They're both sides of the same coin — the Silicon Valley eugenics, and also the longevity stuff. They promote an idea that ‘we are exclusive and we are special',” he said. "It helps them to justify deep social inequality."

The tech elite did not inherit this ideology by accident. Stanford University, the intellectual heart of Silicon Valley, was once a major hub for the American eugenics movement, which later helped to inspire Nazi race laws. Stanford’s founding president, David Starr Jordan, was a prominent eugenicist, campaigning for forced sterilization of people with undesirable genetic traits. The university removed his name from its buildings in 2020 — but in Palo Alto, his beliefs did not disappear with the nameplate.

"Instead of eugenics we just call it longevity or biohacking," Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who has spent years investigating Silicon Valley's belief systems, said on a panel with me at a journalism conference last year. "It's the same."

The ideology Epstein bankrolled in private is being built in public. It’s a vision of the future in which a select few get to upgrade and extend their lives, while tightening their grip on the systems that determine which humans are worth investing in — and which are not.

It sounds like a dark sci-fi fantasy, except, as the files show, that fantasy is being funded and pushed into reality. Most of us will never be in the rooms where these ideas are discussed. All of us will live with the results.

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The post “All my fundees have blue eyes.” Epstein and the tech world’s dark ideology 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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“It was a philosophical question but, according to textbook science, grass isn’t really green, it’s just the light reflected from it has a certain wavelength,” Vickers says. “I thought there’d be a consensus on it.”

Instead, Vickers’ question prompted fierce semantic debate. Some colleagues argued that grass has objective properties — color being one of them. Others contended that only light exists in a physical form: what a human perceives as green is merely certain molecules reflecting electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength between 520 and 570 nanometers.

The open-ended, theoretical question rendered the survey data nearly worthless. Rather than general agreement, all that emerged was lively scientific and philosophical discussion across academic inboxes. But the high response rate gave Vickers encouragement: his idea for an Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus could really work. All he needed was to ask a more straightforward line of inquiry.

It was while writing his book on the relationship between science and truth, Identifying Future-Proof Science, that Vickers became convinced that there should be a more accessible way to establish general academic agreement on disputed topics. “The traditional theory, even for non-experts, is to decide what to believe based on the science itself,” he explains. “But the more I wrote, the more I thought, ‘That’s not how the real world works.’ You’d never say to someone worried about getting vaccinated, ‘Here, read this textbook on the science of vaccines’ — it’s summarizing decades of research; you’re asking someone who might not have the background knowledge to read, judge and understand it.”

Help for the time-stressed non-academic, says Vickers, will come in the form of a large-scale poll of global experts responding to popular scientific issues via a set of four options, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” at the extremes, and “weakly agree” to “weakly disagree” in the center. Results will be published in academic journals, with the eventual aim of a physical institute housing vast teams of researchers, data scientists and IT experts working towards the goal of greater societal consensus on subjects like climate change and pandemics.

Vickers’ hope is to also aid academia itself: there is a lack of hard data quantifying how many experts agree on the biggest topics of the day. “It’s actually difficult to find how many global scientists believe that Covid-19 is caused by a virus,” he says. “And the best attempt to quantify the scientific community’s opinion on whether climate change is driven by human activity has 2,780 respondents: a tiny fraction of the world’s scientists you could ask, and nearly all were from Western countries.”

Driving the initiative is the fight against misinformation. Expertise has long been weaponized as means of power and deception, particularly among marginalized and minority communities, says Nicole Grove, editor-in-chief at the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. In some cases, it’s created a sense of mistrust, undermining the credibility of some institutions. “It wasn’t that long ago that doctors were recommending ‘healthy’ brands of cigarettes to their patients, where seemingly scientific research was used by tobacco companies as verifiable evidence that we now know was completely manufactured.”  

Experts say that there has perhaps never been more dispute than there is today on what makes a fact, a fact. “The internet is an amazing access point for knowledge, but it’s also changed the way people are able to produce what appears to be evidence to support any point of view,” adds Grove. “One can always find someone with credentials who will take on any position at any time. My sense is misinformation is more about bombardment than a lack of information.”

Social media has also created echo chambers that fan the flames of conspiracies, even in the face of incontrovertible proof. “Research suggests that people are attracted to conspiracy theories when their psychological needs are frustrated,” says Karen Douglas, professor of social psychology at the University of Kent. “They can turn people away from mainstream politics and science in favor of more extreme political views and anti-science attitudes. And these theories seem to arise even when the scientific consensus is clear.”

Vickers acknowledges that his proposed consensus-finding institute won’t appeal to sections of the population that think the whole system is corrupt. But he believes his idea could benefit broader society, particularly on health issues. He cites a June 2022 study showing that Covid-19 vaccine uptake was significantly boosted in the Czech Republic once a skeptical public were shown that 90% of 9,650 doctors trusted in its safety. “The high consensus helped correct a misconception that only half of physicians were confident in the vaccine,” he says. “It ultimately led to higher vaccinations, meaning fewer deaths. It may sound dramatic, but the cost in a lack of consensus can be that stark.”

Beyond health crises though, there are questions over whether experts should be burdened with an altruistic role in educating the public on what they consider to be a scientific fact. “Scientists shouldn’t be loaded up with societal duties no one else has,” says James Ladyman, professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol. “The rise in misinformation is a matter for regulation and government — it has nothing to do with science.”

There are also concerns that a frictionless polling model could supersede the complex, nuanced pursuit of acquiring and discussing knowledge. “Science is a highly structured social organization in which consensus is achieved semi-formally through conferences, meetings and journal publications,” adds Ladyman. “It’s not a flat structure where people vote and everyone has equal say. When a scientific institution wants to take a position on a topic, it typically sets up a subcommittee that writes a report with details of their inquiry — it doesn’t poll all its members.”

While a hard figure may not exist, there is a consensus among the scientific community that smoking cigarettes is a leading cause of cancer and that human activity is the main driver of climate change. Determining a general agreement among more debated topics, such as whether biological sex is the main determinant of gender, may pose more of a challenge. 

“A shared commitment to telling the truth about nature, and to getting that truth out there, still leaves a lot of room for disagreement among even the most expert of scientists,” says Gregory Radick, professor of history and philosophy at the University of Leeds. “And much is lost when scientific knowledge gets boiled down to an answer to a simple ‘yes or no’ question.”

It means that facts can be disputed by experts. Ladyman says that a mass-survey model risks creating more noise in a system already blasting information round-the-clock. “In principle, finding out the scientific consensus on a topic could be good. But it presupposes that the information can’t be found out already. I find it unlikely that a significant number who don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change would change their mind if they saw there was a huge scientific consensus about it — they probably wouldn’t care.”

However, Vickers believes that his Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus needs to happen, especially if it can help people make better informed health decisions. “In the 20th century, it was too easy for the tobacco industry to make it look like there were two sides to the story — a global poll would have shown there were perhaps only 2% of rogue scientists that existed,” he says. “The goal isn’t to tell the public the facts — it’s to accurately measure the opinion of the scientific community and then provide people with data that could be useful to them.”

Vickers’ epistemic agency is still in the funding stages. His team is currently debating who qualifies as a scientist, from the obvious choice of an academic affiliated to a relevant science department or institute, to the borderline cases of a former nurse now giving health lectures at universities. 

Then, there’s dividing the scientists up: a meteorologist and, say, a pediatrician may receive an equal vote on a climate change question; the consensus among each scientific discipline, however, could be shown separately. Finally, there’s the issue of ensuring a high enough response rate for strong enough data — the plan is for a personalized email to be sent within institutions, just like in the original question to Durham scientists, to get as many survey queries answered.

Consensus for an institute determining scientific consensus is, ironically, difficult. The next step is a pilot program in April, involving 18,000 scientists from 31 institutions across 12 different countries. The planned opening question should, at least, elicit strong assent: “Has science proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Covid-19 is caused by a virus?” “It’s not a particularly interesting question as most people accept that it’s been established, but we want to set a baseline for what solid scientific consensus looks like,” says Vickers. 

In an age where a rabbit hole of misinformation is only ever a few clicks away, Vickers’ hope is his idea will reach well-meaning people left confused by the online maelstrom. “Had a mass survey of global scientists existed when the pandemic began — questions on how Covid is transmitted, mask efficacy, vaccine safety — I think it would have helped the public,” he says. “There’s a mess of information out there.”

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As she and her staff readied themselves to welcome their first patients in Seewalchen am Attersee, an idyllic lakeside town of 5,700, she received an email that outlined in painstaking detail how its author would come to Kellermayr’s office and slaughter her and her entire staff.

That message was the start of a harrowing seven-month ordeal for Kellermayr, one which ultimately led to her shuttering her practice in late June. It was the first of hundreds of threatening messages she received because of her public comments about the coronavirus pandemic — threats she said the police largely downplayed, leaving her without the support she needed.

“This is not going to end soon,” Kellermayr told me in mid-July, her short, wavy brown hair pulled halfway back and glasses framing her face. “I don’t know if, in a few years, I can live a normal life without looking left and right before going out the door.” 

Sixteen days later, Kellermayr was found dead in her office. Austrian authorities deemed her death a suicide, which an autopsy confirmed days later. She was 36 years old.

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A post shared by Dr. Lisa-Maria Kellermayr (@drlisa)

Kellermayr’s death on July 29 prompted an unprecedented outpouring of support from across Austria. It also sparked outrage at the lack of help she said she had received from authorities. 

To many, her case is a wake-up call in a country that has failed to adequately address both the threat posed by coronavirus conspiracy movements and the pernicious growth of online harassment and terror. Kellermayr is far from the only medical professional who has been targeted due to their stance on coronavirus vaccines or the pandemic; still, her case is a particularly vivid example of how profoundly such threats can reshape the day-to-day lives of those who receive them.

On Monday, thousands gathered at Vienna’s Stephansplatz and in half a dozen other cities to light candles in her honor. The bells of St. Stephen’s Cathedral tolled as people held up tea lights and commemorative candles and smartphone flashlights, and sang hymns. One raised a sign that read, “More Protection for Women on the Internet and in Real Life!”

Prominent politicians, including Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen and Health Minister Johannes Rauch, posted tributes to Kellermayr on social media; van der Bellen and his wife traveled to Seewalchen to lay flowers in front of Kellermayr’s practice.

Earlier this week, police in Munich announced they were investigating an Upper Bavarian man for a threatening message he sent to Kellermayr, suggesting a “tribunal of the people” would convict and execute her. And both the police and the Austrian Medical Association have come under intense scrutiny for their handling of her case. Austria’s justice ministry announced that a new EU regulation is set to strengthen its existing online hate speech laws, helping speed up investigations into threats and make it easier to track suspects across country lines.

Asked to comment on Kellermayr’s allegations that they had largely ignored her concerns, Upper Austrian police said in a statement that they had advised Kellermayr since November and addressed her and her practice’s safety in “numerous other conversations.” “The police protection measures around the practice were drastically increased,” the statement read, adding that “all legally possible measures were exhausted.”

Just weeks after closing her practice, Kellermayr had placed a mug of black tea in front of me in what was intended to be the office break room, but had instead become her kitchen. She had been effectively sequestered in the office’s small staff quarters for months, fearing for her safety outside.

For Kellermayr, the practice in Seewalchen had been a dream come true. After working in a rehabilitation clinic in the Alpine spa town of Bad Ischl and treating coronavirus patients around the Upper Austria region, she had arranged to take over a retiring doctor’s practice just a block from the bright turquoise waters of Attersee.

The lake was more than just a beautiful backdrop: It had been a solace to her in the early days of the pandemic, when she was still living in Bad Ischl. After a tough shift treating Covid patients in the early days of the pandemic, she would sometimes take the long way home and stop along the shore of Attersee; a few minutes watching the clear blue water immediately improved her mood, she said.

She had planned renovations to the office with a view to making it the kind of workplace in which she’d spend years, even decades: Covid-friendly ventilation systems in each of the exam rooms, an office overlooking the lake, and staff quarters in the back intended for a late night or occasional on-call shift.

But the death threat, emailed with the subject line “I am going to execute you,” shook her sense of security in a town where she was still new and working to establish herself. “When someone writes something like this in such detail, he’s not thinking about this for the first time in his life,” she told me. “That’s what gave me the feeling that, okay, this is serious.”

The aftermath of Kellermayr’s death offered fresh evidence of just how deeply ingrained these messages of conspiracy and hatred have become. Some users in conspiracy-minded Telegram groups celebrated Kellermayr’s demise, saying it was what she deserved for vaccinating so many people against the coronavirus; others seemingly saw it as encouragement to harass other prominent women online in similar fashion. 

“Unfortunately, Dr. Kellermayr wasn’t alone with these experiences,” said Pia Lamberty, co-director of CeMAS, a German organization that tracks online extremism and conspiracy narratives. “There are so many doctors who vaccinate people and were threatened for that, and they’re often left alone with their experiences and have to pay for security measures on their own.”

A female political scientist based in Vienna, who has also been targeted online because of her work on right-wing rhetoric, received a message telling her to “do a Kellermayr” and kill herself too. And a German doctor announced she had deleted her Twitter account this week, saying she had been deeply shaken by Kellermayr’s death and was no longer willing to deal with the “life-threatening fear” of speaking out about the pandemic on social media.

The case has impacted Kellermayr’s colleagues in Seewalchen, too. A fellow doctor in town recalled their professional interactions with shared patients as friendly and well-handled, and said more should be done to protect medical professionals, especially women, who face such threats. But she spoke only on the condition of anonymity, out of fear she could be targeted next. “A year ago it would have been different,” she told me.

Kellermayr grew up in Wels, a city of 62,000 about a 40-minute drive from Seewalchen. She trained as a paramedic and went on to study medicine in Graz and Vienna before landing her job at the rehabilitation clinic in Bad Ischl. She had never intended to become a doctor — growing up, she couldn’t stand the sight of blood — but eventually came to see it as her calling.

When the region was looking for volunteers to make house visits to Covid patients in early 2020, Kellermayr immediately signed up: She felt that young doctors like her, without families at home to put at risk, should be on the front lines of the pandemic. 

“I’m quite young, I’m single, I don’t have children or any other people I need to take care of,” she said. “That’s why I volunteered from the very beginning.”

Her experience treating Covid patients gave her an expertise many doctors didn’t yet have at the time. When she noticed a certain asthma medication reduced the need for hospitalization in her Covid patients with lung issues — a treatment later confirmed by various studies — she found herself being described as an expert by Austrian media, appearing on various coronavirus-related panels and being interviewed regularly. 

Kellermayr had never sought out the media spotlight. Before the pandemic, her Twitter account was largely filled with tributes to the comedy duo Joko & Klaas, who hosted her favorite television series. She took time off to attend a taping of their show, gleefully posting photos of her tickets. (Joko & Klaas dedicated their show to her one night earlier this week.) 

The newfound attention came with downsides — people commented about her weight and appearance — but at first it felt “completely harmless” and the normal consequence of being a woman online, she told me. None of it derailed her work or kept her from pursuing her ambition to own her own practice. And when a doctor in Seewalchen announced he was retiring and was looking for someone to take on the care of his several thousand existing patients, Kellermayr jumped at the opportunity.

But by November, just as Kellermayr was readying herself to run her practice on her own, the mood in Austria had become mutinous. Government officials announced a new lockdown to combat rising infections, and Austria became the first Western democracy to mandate vaccines for adults (a law the country has since scrapped). Across the country, the nearly-weekly coronavirus protests grew bigger and more radical, often drawing tens of thousands of people in Vienna. The situation was particularly tense in Upper Austria: Earlier that fall, a new anti-vaccine political party, “People Freedom Fundamental Rights” (MFG), had won seats in the Upper Austrian state parliament with 6.2% of the vote.

Kellermayr saw video footage of a demonstration outside a medical clinic in her hometown of Wels: Protesters had blocked the clinic’s main exit, keeping ambulances and others from getting in or out. Incensed, she tweeted about the incident — only to have the Upper Austrian Police refute her post directly, calling it a “false report.” (There was a second entrance that still allowed ambulances in and out, they said).

A screenshot of the exchange made the rounds on Telegram, which is when the more serious threats began. Kellermayr reported the first especially gruesome one to the police, who she said were helpful. They took down details and came by to check on her and the practice. But after a week passed with no real-life visit from the threat’s author, police told her they didn’t believe it was necessary to investigate further.

For Kellermayr, though, her faith in her safety and security had been broken. How could she be sure that she and her staff were in no danger when the anonymous threats continued arriving in her inbox? She reached out to politicians from all the major parties, asking for police protection or funds to help cover the cost — several thousand euros per month — of the private security officer she had engaged. In each conversation, she was told the same thing: Her situation was terrible and they wished they could help, but there was no legal structure to help her. 

Kellermayr stopped going home to her apartment in Wels when she saw bumper stickers on cars out front that alluded to a deep international coronavirus conspiracy. She had also heard her downstairs neighbors talk approvingly about conspiracy narratives on their balcony one evening. It underscored for her the insidious nature of anonymous online threats. She had no way of knowing whether those openly wishing for her death or plotting to cause her harm came from distant towns and cities or were her neighbors, or a patient, or someone she walked by every day on the street.

Eventually, the pressure of keeping up the practice became untenable. Kellermayr’s mental health and that of her staff suffered in the months that followed, and after investing $102,000 into safety renovations and a security guard, Kellermayr could no longer justify the costs of staying open. 

“Basically, it’s about my whole existence on every level — which is at stake because I’ve tried to help and do the right thing in this pandemic,” she told me. 

What’s more, she had received another message from the same person who threatened her in November, making it clear to her that the end of many coronavirus restrictions wouldn’t mean an end to the threats. “​​I hope you don't believe you can still get out of this, do you?” the message read. “That corona is over and everything is forgotten again? Not for me, oh no — I have no problem waiting longer before I strike.” 

Not long after, Kellermayr announced via Twitter that the practice would close, criticizing the authorities for their lack of action.

In response, a spokesman for the Upper Austrian police said Kellermayr was trying to “push herself into the public eye to promote her own advancement” and suggested she go see a psychologist. The head of the Upper Austrian Medical Association said he was open to the possibility of one-time payments to help doctors like Kellermayr, but seemed to suggest her outspokenness was to blame. “Sometimes it’s better to withdraw” versus continue posting on social media, he said.

To Kellermayr, there was a cruel irony in their statements. “If I’m not quiet, if I don’t keep my mouth shut, it’s all my fault — it’s too provocative to speak my mind,” she told me. “But when these anti-vaxxers go on the streets to speak their mind, they’re secured by hundreds of policemen.” It’s as if her concerns were less valid than those of the people who had been terrorizing her, she said.

Ultimately, it was not the police but a German hacker who gave Kellermayr some of the answers she had been craving. With relatively little effort, the “hacktivist,” Nella Al-Lami, found the man who wrote the first, most graphic threats in November: A neo-Nazi in the Berlin area, a man known to German authorities and who had access to weapons. (At the time of publication, no action had yet been taken against the man.)

By the time Kellmayr and I met in mid-July, life had settled into a previously unimaginable pattern. She was effectively under self-imposed house arrest. The morning she greeted me at her practice, the space was empty save for the two of us and Fraulein, the puppy she had adopted for security and companionship, who nipped at the hem of my dress and chewed on a copy of the local newspaper as we spoke.

No patients filled the two waiting rooms, one for infectious patients and one for noninfectious patients; no children played in the jungle-themed kids’ room with stools shaped like animals and a brightly-colored rug; no nurses busied themselves in the small lab or spoke with patients at the front desk. Mail and magazines were stacked in a pile on the break room’s table. 

But there were some glimmers of hope. Kellermayr felt she had recently found a receptive contact within Austria’s interior ministry, the head of the country’s state protection and domestic intelligence service, who checked in on her regularly. When we spoke, she said she believed that the practice might still open again later this summer.

Attersee lake, even if she could only see it from afar, still gave her some solace. It was the reason she had wanted to take over this practice in the first place. These days, though, it was also a reminder of her isolation, her withdrawal from social life. “You see all these people walking by, eating ice cream and having a good time,” she said, gazing out over the sun-dappled lake. “And up here it’s like a different world: For all these months, it’s felt like they’re living in a different reality than I am.”

At the end of our two-hour conversation, she gave me a warm smile as I left the 2500-square foot office that had become her entire world. She had spent the previous half a year locked in a cycle of fear and uncertainty, but managed to recount her story with clarity and conviction, even flashes of irony and humor. She was determined to reopen her practice and was, at the time, cautiously optimistic she could find a way to do it.

Four days after Kellermayr’s death, on a sunny August day, Seewalchen looked much as it had a few weeks earlier. There was little overt evidence that the town had just lost one of its few doctors in such horrific fashion, apart from the small makeshift memorial of candles and flowers in front of her practice. 

People around town seemed leery of or uninterested in discussing the situation. When I stopped by the city hall and asked if the mayor had a moment to speak with me, he appeared almost immediately — only to tell me he had no further comment on the situation, and to see the remarks he had made to Austrian media. “We are shocked by how far hate online can go,” he told local news. “We are losing an important member of our community, a doctor to whom many entrusted their health.”

Others agreed the case was “shocking” and “tragic,” but said they had not met Kellermayr personally and knew of the situation only from media reports. “It’s horrible that it came to this point,” said one woman, Karin, during her shift in a traditional clothing store in town. “She was so young; she had so much of her life ahead of her.” 

The conversations, polite, bland and noncommittal, appeared to emphasize the extent to which Kellermayr, as a relative newcomer to a close-knit town and someone without a family of her own, lacked a support system to help her cope with the harassment. That fact made it all the more difficult that she felt unheard by authorities.

When police in Austria believe a death to be a suicide, they say there was no evidence of “Fremdverschulden,” or third-party responsibility. As the first reports of Kellermayr’s suicide emerged on Friday morning, that phrase was repeated in countless news articles. 

It may be true in Kellermayr’s case that no one else was literally, directly involved in her death. But her recounting of how things unfolded, and the national discussion it has sparked, illustrate how the question of responsibility is not so easily resolved. 

Kellermayr’s fears and concerns went, time after time, unaddressed by authorities at all levels of Austrian government and law enforcement. And as a result, her case raises fundamental questions about what responsibility the state has to its citizens in times of unprecedented online hatred and abuse. “You get the feeling you need to protect yourself, because nobody’s going to help you,” she told me last month. 

“Everybody up to the chancellor knew about this case before I went public. Everybody said it’s horrifying and I should get help. But nobody helped me.”

If you are having thoughts about suicide, or know someone who might be having such thoughts, please seek professional counselling. Know that resources and help are out there. These websites contain information on suicide prevention helplines around the world: https://findahelpline.com/; https://blog.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines/

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The post ‘Nobody helped me’: Austria shaken by suicide of doctor trolled by anti-vaccine haters appeared first on Coda Story.

An ardently pro-government Weibo user claimed Dr. Zhang Wenhong, often described by Western media outlets as the country’s answer to Dr. Fauci, had plagiarized his PhD.

The claims prompted Shanghai’s Fudan University, where Zhang got his doctorate in molecular biology in 2000, to announce an investigation into his case, and news outlets outside China picked up the story as a cautionary tale of the consequences of deviating from the party line. 

But when a group of Chinese scientists living in China and abroad claimed there was merit in the allegations against Zhang, the shadowy levers of the Chinese state seem to have launched a hasty clean-up operation to restore Zhang’s international reputation as top scientist. 

On August 23, eight days after announcing an investigation into Zhang, Fudan University said he had been cleared of any misconduct. The statement clearing Zhang’s name was widely disseminated on Chinese state media, the initial Weibo post that had first alerted people to anomalies in Zhang’s work deleted and the user’s account suspended. Zhang’s dissertation was deleted from CNKI and Wanfangdata, two popular databases for academic papers.

A Shanghai publishing house soon brought out a new biography of Zhang to laudatory coverage in the Chinese state media. In a book review, Shanghai’s Xinmin Evening News described the scientist as an “unforgettable figure” of the pandemic. The biography was stacked up in bookshop displays in China, next to Xi Jinping’s writings. Dr. Zhang was a national hero again.

The Chinese state has become grimly intolerant of criticism under President Xi Jinping. Those questioning his policies often find themselves targeted on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat by faceless bots and anonymous handles, making it hard to tell if the outrage is actively orchestrated by the Chinese state or zealous netizens acting on their own initiative. 

Zhang’s vertiginous ride — from beloved doctor of the people, to villainous plagiarist, to state-certified national hero — suggests that when such disinformation campaigns cut too close to the truth, they can backfire to the embarrassment of the Chinese government and crack its carefully cultivated facade of polished omniscience. 

 “Zhang’s misconduct was far more serious than the original accusation,” said Fang Shi-min, a San Diego science writer with a biochemistry PhD, who won the 2012 John Maddox Prize for exposing pseudoscience in China.

Zhang, who is a member of the Communist Party of China, heads the center of infectious diseases at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital. He has 3.9 million followers on Weibo and, since the outbreak of the pandemic, has become something of a celebrity.

On July 29, Zhang posted a Weibo message that appeared to chide the Chinese authorities for their response to a Delta variant outbreak in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing. Mass testing, stay-at-home orders and tight surveillance had been rolled out in line with the country’s so-called “zero-Covid” approach, an absolutist strategy used by China, Australia and New Zealand to stamp out every last case and eliminate virus circulation entirely. 

“The path China chooses in the future must be to ensure a society that has a shared future with the world, that communicates with the world, and returns to a normal life, while protecting its citizens from fear of the virus. China should have such wisdom,” Zhang said, posting in Mandarin.

In the ensuing weeks a post about Zhang surfaced, written by Weibo user Dasheng Talks, a well-known blogger called Zhao Shengye, known for his extreme nationalist views. Zhao has, in the past, appeared to call on the CCP to destroy the world. 

 “Zhang Wenhong is definitely not an academic authority in the eyes of some people,” Zhao wrote before discussing how Zhang’s plagiarism thesis appeared to be copied from two other papers written two years before. “This is naked plagiarism! Plagiarism! Plagiarism!” 

The zealous post caught the attention of a select circle of scientists living in China and abroad, including Fang, the science writer from San Diego, who has earned a nickname as “the Science Cop,” for his blogs on the underworld of Chinese science over the past two decades. Hundreds of comments about the plagiarism claims began accumulating on Chinese forum Zhihu, as scientists and commentators began discussing the allegations.

After examining the thesis, Fang said more than 7000 words of Zhang’s doctoral thesis literature review appear to be copied from two other articles written in 1998 by Chinese scientists Huang Hainan and Wang Xiaochuan. Fang added that in the research section some of Zhang’s experimental results appeared to be the same as some of those found in a 1996 American paper published in Molecular Microbiology journal, led by a researcher, David Rouse, who now works as a senior scientist at the Food and Drug Administration in the US. Though Zhang’s paper cites Rouse’s, Fang explained, it refers to an unrelated sentence in the paper — not the experimental results.

Coda reached out to Rouse, who referred us to an FDA spokesperson, who declined to comment on the matter. 

“Although plagiarism is very common in China, this kind of outright plagiarism is rare. The plagiarists usually do some modifications to cover up plagiarism. Zhang didn’t bother to do that,” Fang said.

China has been embroiled in academic integrity debates for decades. In 2020, Coda reported on the proliferation of so-called paper mills that churn out bogus scientific research for Chinese scientists for a fee. Chinese authorities have pledged to crack down hard on academic misconduct and plagiarism.

So when scientists and academics detailed the extent of Zhang’s alleged plagiarism and published them on the Chinese messaging app WeChat, the posts clearly hit a raw nerve. Coda has independently verified that Chinese journalist Sun Tao was issued a notice from WeChat informing him that his post detailing the alleged plagiarism was removed for “violating laws, regulation and policies”. Six WeChat posts about the case, by Xiao Ying, a philosophy professor at top-ranking Tsinghua University, that called the dissertation “unscrupulously” and “shamelessly” copied, were deleted or blocked with the same notice. Xiao said on Weibo – before that account, too, was suspended – that simply writing the characters “Zhang Wenhong” seemed to be enough to have his posts flagged. On 23 August, Peking University neurology professor Rao Yi criticized Fudan’s decision in a WeChat post. It was promptly deleted. 

“The government is very protective of Zhang,” said a biomedical research scientist from China who now lives in the U.S. and anonymously uncovers fake papers. They said the government would not tolerate their top scientist having his credentials stripped. “The government puts so much effort into shielding the entire Chinese internet, deleting all these posts to protect him.”

“The government has started a propaganda campaign to boost Zhang’s reputation,” said Fang. “It’s unsurprising that Fudan University, or any other Chinese University, protects powerful or famous alumni. This has happened many times before. I’ve exposed numerous high-profile plagiarism and scientific misconduct cases – none of them were taken seriously by authorities.” 

Before Fudan University cleared Zhang, the scientist himself posted on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.

 “I am a bit lazy and rarely post on Weibo,” he wrote. “But recently many people have expressed concern for me, so I’ll update you on what I’ve been doing over the past few days.” 

He outlined the challenges China still faces in fighting the virus, and was careful to emphasise his support for the country’s Covid response scheme. “We must have a firm belief that the anti-epidemic strategy adopted by our country is the best way forward for us.” 

In recent days, Zhang has been inundated with comments from supporters. “In the current era of anti-intellectualism and populism in China, students who dare and have always dared to tell the truth deserve our respect,” wrote one user. “Whoever wants to mess with you, we the masses won’t stand for it!” wrote another.

Zhang and Fudan University did not respond to requests for comment.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Rao Yi's WeChat account was suspended. His account remains active.

The post Hero, Zero, Hero: China’s Dr. Fauci is on a dizzy ride as pandemic persists appeared first on Coda Story.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Coda Story: The title of “How to Talk to a Science Denier,” is pretty self-explanatory. It’s not an easy thing to do, though. Plenty of people believe that you can’t change the minds of individuals who have wholeheartedly embraced conspiracy theories and fake science, but is there actually a way to communicate with them effectively?

Lee McIntyre: You asked that question in exactly the right way. The title of the book is not “How to Convince a Science Denier that They Are Wrong.” It’s just about how you can succeed in having the initial conversation with them, how you can get them to listen. Whether or not you are ultimately able to change their minds depends on a number of factors. 

My conclusion, after going out on the road and trying to do that with a variety of people, is that simply arguing with somebody over facts does not work. Everything depends on the approach that you take. If you’re patient and empathetic, and you show that you respect and can actually listen to the person, then you’ve got a much better chance of building trust and having them listen to you. In that kind of an environment, you at least create a chance for them to hear the facts. If you don’t approach them in the correct way, then all the facts you bring to them are useless.

If straight-up facts don’t work, can you appeal to people’s emotions? I’d have thought that would be particularly effective with, say, family members who have picked up bad ideas from their friends on Facebook.

You’ve put your finger on something important here. When you’re talking with people who presumably already love you and trust you, you’ve got a secret weapon. I heard a story recently about a woman who was talking to her dad about climate change, and he was just intransigent. She finally said, “Dad, why are you believing all of these strangers that you haven’t even met, and you won’t believe your own daughter?” That did the trick. She made it about trust and then the facts were actually accepted.

Given that we’re all surrounded by massive amounts of conflicting information every day, how do you easily recognize junk science? Are there any hallmarks that people should look out for?

The problem is that when somebody is hearing something that they want to believe is true, they tend to trust that source, even if it’s unreliable. Sometimes you can directly debunk that source, though. One of my main criteria is. “Does the person have something to sell?” If somebody has something to gain by denigrating the work of mainstream science, I think that should make you immediately suspicious. You know, people who present themselves as the next Galileo and say that they have all the answers and that the whole consensus of science is wrong... well, that’s just not likely to be true. Sometimes science does get it wrong. Sometimes the gadfly is correct, but it doesn’t happen very often. In fact, it’s a very rare occurrence.

It’s interesting that you mention that science occasionally gets things wrong. To me, that’s a big part of the scientific process: the ability to come to conclusions from observable findings and, crucially, to be able to change your mind when new and contradictory evidence comes along.

That’s right. The hallmark of science is an ability to change one’s mind when there’s new evidence, but people who will not change their mind, no matter what the evidence, they’re not doing science.

We hear the word “skeptic” used a lot these days — as a badge of pride and as a pejorative, depending which side of the fence you sit on. However, skepticism is a big and important part of scientific reasoning. What is the difference between useful skepticism and denialism?

I’ve never met a self-described science denier. I’ve only ever met skeptics. They always say there are more scientific in their approaches than the scientists, that they’re just being skeptical. And you’re right, skepticism is a very important part of science. But, think about the way scientists are skeptical. They’re open to new ideas, but they’re skeptical of whether they’re true until they’ve been tested. Once there’s sufficient evidence, they’re willing to make that leap and say, “This has good evidence. It is rational to believe that this is true. We understand that it may later be overturned by future evidence, but it is held up with our rigorous testing so far.” That’s a reasonable type of skepticism. 

An unreasonable type of skepticism is when someone says, “I will not believe that, short of absolute proof.” That’s the kind of thing that a denier says about the things that they don’t want to believe. They don’t say it about the things that they do believe. Take the flat-earthers I’ve spoken to, for example. They always say they’re skeptics, but they’re gullible as hell. They’re skeptics about the things that they’re hearing from science, because they don’t want to believe that they’re true, but if some incredibly unreliable source has a photograph or a video that appears to back up their view, they’ll buy it hook, line and sinker. 

I call what they do cafeteria skepticism. They go to the cafeteria and they pick out the things that they are going to be skeptical about and they’re not skeptical about anything else. That is not the way that scientists are supposed to reason.

If I had to distill your body of work down to a few words, I’d say that it concentrates on preserving and asserting the value of rational thought. For many people, this didn’t really seem like it needed defending so vigorously until the presidency of Donald Trump and the rise of global populism. The erosion of truth and empiricism has actually been taking place for a long time, though. What would you say was the real turning point?

Yeah, by the time Trump came along, we were already pretty far down that road. Trump wasn’t the cause of the post-truth world, he was the result. Actually, the turning point was back in the 1950s, when the idea of denialism became organized, when it became a campaign that was funded and planned by people with something to gain. 

What I’m referring to here is when the big American tobacco companies all got together and had a meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, because they were incredibly worried about a forthcoming scientific study that was going to show this link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Their public relations experts said, “You have to fight the science. You have to run a PR campaign that seeds doubt in everyone’s mind, so they don’t think that this science is true.” 

So, that’s what they did. They took out full-page ads in newspapers and they hired their own scientists. They didn’t have to prove anything. All they had to do was raise doubt about the forthcoming study. 

This story is well told in Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes’ book “Merchants of Doubt.” It provided the blueprint for all of the science denial that came about after — about climate change, about anything, and it’s followed right up to the present day with Covid-19. 

We really didn’t do anything about it, so science denial proceeded unchecked for the next 60 years. Then a very interesting thing happened, which is that political folks, for the most part on the right, looked at this and said, “Wow, look how successful they have been. If they can deny the truth about climate change, we can deny the truth about anything,” like how many people were at Trump’s inauguration, whether it rained on that day, whether the 2020 election was stolen or whether the people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 were peaceful protesters. 

Even if there’s video footage, all they need is to raise a campaign of doubt and have their own people say, ’No, it’s not true,” and make an alternative narrative. 

We’re very far down that road now — and we’re not at the end of it yet.

A significant number of people present science denial and conspiracy theory as the sole preserve of the right wing, be it for reasons of blunt populism or a die-hard belief in the sanctity of the free market. That’s not the whole story, though. As you point out in the book, people with liberal and left-wing sympathies can be susceptible to these narratives, too. What common ground do they have with their right-wing counterparts?

Well, they’re human. 

We all have built in cognitive biases and we’re all susceptible to the effects of this sort of thing. That’s why we have anti-vaxxers on both the left and the right. That’s why we have members of the anti-genetically modified food movement on both the left and the right. The fact that right-wing operatives have had so much success with denial of climate change and evolution doesn’t mean that science denial is solely a right-wing problem. There is nothing to prevent it from the left. The minute we start thinking about science denial as somebody else’s problem or that our political values make us immune to it, then we’re in big trouble. 

It’s something that we all need to watch because any sort of ideology can interfere with science. For the most part, scientists, I think, proceed in a very honest and straightforward manner, on the understanding that their results are going to be challenged by other scientists. When political values interfere with the investigation of empirical phenomena, when we’re allowing our political sympathies to tell us what is and isn’t actually true in the world as an empirical fact, that’s a very dangerous thing.

We’ve reached a point where science denial — for instance, disputing the impact of fossil fuels on the environment — is seen as an inevitable consequence of the vast sums of money at stake for certain industries. Now, we are in the middle of a global pandemic, which has thrown up a colossal amount of new and extremely questionable ideas. To me, it’s pretty difficult to tie a lot of them to financial imperatives and much easier to understand them within the context of a rising, belligerent strand of libertarianism and a growing mistrust of elites and experts.

It’s important to remember that what we sometimes call misinformation is, for the most part, actually disinformation, intentionally created by people with interests at stake, in order to mislead other people into believing that a false thing is true, so that they can benefit from it. Those benefits don’t have to be economic. Some of them are ideological. Like, the resistance to the theory of evolution is primarily from evangelical Christians. There’s no profit in it, but it is what they believe. What’s happened over the Covid-19 vaccines is the worst thing that could have happened for corporate America, having its business challenged by people not wanting to take the vaccines. So, why is that something that is happening on the political right? It’s an ideological gain, not an economic one. 

OK, so conspiracy theories, fake science and denialism have been around for hundreds of years. One big difference between then and now is that they were usually transmitted by word of mouth and old media. The internet and algorithm-driven social platforms provide an incredibly efficient way to transmit ideas, both good and bad. What role do you think those businesses should be playing in countering science denial and are they doing enough?

We don’t have to drop propaganda leaflets from planes anymore. We don’t have to have somebody standing on a street corner handing out leaflets saying that the moon landing was faked. I think of cognitive bias as the fuel and the internet as the accelerant, the gasoline. All you need is a spark. So, yes, I think that the creators and amplifiers of disinformation are something that we really do need to focus on. 

My book is about what to do once things have already gotten out of hand. Once the disinformation has been created and amplified, there are certain groups who want to believe it. There are ways that you can talk to them to try to get them out of it. However, I think you’ve also lost some of them and that, for them, the damage has been done. 

I was reading a report on NPR the other day — and this was shocking to me — that said 65% of the anti-vax propaganda on Twitter was due to just 12 people. They’re obviously very prolific, but that would be impossible without the social media companies allowing it to happen. They have to do more to stop it. It’s not only tearing society apart, it’s literally killing people.

If you think about Facebook, they have a tremendous problem with disinformation. What they don’t have a problem with is, say, terrorism-related content or pornography. You do not see that on Facebook. Ask yourself why. The reason is because they have scrubbed it. Pornography, particularly. They have a human team that goes through it all and removes it. It’s got to be the worst job at Facebook, but they care about it. They could do the same thing for disinformation. They’ve definitely got enough money to.

It seems that quite a lot of people have accepted the rise of science denial and conspiracy theories as a negative but inescapable fact of modern life. Are we stuck with them, or do you think that we can realistically make a change for the better?

I think we can make a change for the better. I saw a documentary not long ago called “The Brainwashing of My Dad.” It was about a young woman whose father had become radicalized by conservative talk radio and TV news. He was spouting conspiracy theories and he was just a more hostile, angry person than he was before he encountered that information. Then, his radio broke and he came back to his family. He became a much calmer person. I think if that could happen for the rest of us, if we can find a way to handle the problem of disinformation creation and amplification. Then, our societies can return to a more normal type of functioning. That’s maybe another book.

Lee McIntyre is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. “How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason” is published by the MIT Press.

The post Is there any point in talking to a flat-earther? One philosopher thinks so appeared first on Coda Story.

“We are more afraid of risks that we can't see,” said David Ropeik, an author and risk perception and communication consultant who has written extensively about the subject. “That's a lack of control. That's an awful lot of emotional baggage that radiation has to deal with.”

While events such as the Cold War nuclear arms race and the Chernobyl disaster did much to stoke widespread panic, scientists have long confirmed that low-level radio waves pose little risk to our health. However, bad science and conspiracy theories have continued to swirl around what many still believe to be an invisible enemy. Here are just a few examples.

Microwaves and ovens

Ever since their introduction in the 1940s, microwave ovens have been the source of scientifically dubious fears. First intended for commercial catering, they made cooking faster and easier, but many considered them hazardous to health. Some opponents said they would remove nutrients from food or render it radioactive. Many believed that they would cause cancer.

In 1968, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Bureau of Radiological Health authorized the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act, which established safe radiation exposure limits. It turned out that early microwave ovens exceed its figures, but manufacturers acted quickly to fall in line with the new rules.

Still, the worries persisted. In 1998 the Journal of Natural Science, published by the World Foundation of Natural Science — an international -faith-based organization that has recently promoted dubious ideas about 5G and Covid-19 — ran an article based on the now-discredited studies of a Swiss biologist named Hans Hertel. “One day the world will wake up to the fact that microwaves do cause cancer, and are even worse than cigarettes. Microwaved food causes a slow death,” it read. 

While concerns about radiation and food safety remain, the World Health Organization has said that, used according to manufacturers’ instructions, microwave ovens are safe for cooking. “The design of microwave ovens ensures that the microwaves are contained within the oven and can only be present when the oven is switched on and the door is shut,” stated a 2005 report.

Nuclear threats

In the first half of the 20th century, radiation was mostly viewed as a force for good. The use of radium in the treatment of cancer received glowing media coverage, as did the medical use of X-rays. 

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by U.S. forces in 1945 changed everything. Over the following decades, serious incidents intensified global concern about the threat of nuclear radiation. In 1954, the Castle Bravo test saw the U.S. detonate a 15 megaton thermonuclear device on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. A miscalculation of the bomb’s yield led to radiation spreading much further than expected. Twenty-three crew members of a nearby Japanese fishing ship suffered acute radiation sickness, and one of them later died from complications linked to the explosion.

Such events had a detrimental effect on attitudes to nuclear power. Growing concerns about the safety of the technology became a devastating reality in 1986, when a reactor exploded at a nuclear power plant near the city of Chernobyl, Ukraine. Dozens died from direct radiation exposure and thousands more suffered from related illnesses. An official coverup of the incident and its implications only added to rising anti-nuclear sentiment.

While the conversation about the safety of nuclear power continues, some environmentalists now believe it to be a valuable energy source that can help to reduce climate-altering emissions.

Power lines

In the 1980s, concern began to spread that overhead power lines were responsible for increased incidences of leukemia in children across the U.S. Research carried out in 1979 by the epidemiologist David Savitz highlighted a group of young cancer patients in Denver, Colorado, and suggested that children who lived near electricity pylons were twice as likely to develop the condition as those who didn’t. 

Years later, Savitz clarified his findings and said the importance of his study had been diminished by subsequent research. “The line of logic was that these fields are very common. And that the logical prediction would be that this would be a major public health problem. And that was simply wrong,” he told the New York Times in 2014.

While there is still no confirmed link between power lines and cancer in children, the concerns have continued to manifest themselves in other ways. More recent reports show that living close to electricity pylons can negatively affect real estate prices.

Cellphones

In 1973, Martin Cooper, an executive at Motorola, made the world’s first call with a prototype mobile telephone. Ten years later, the technology became available to the general public. Now, about 3.6 billion people — or 45% of the world’s population — regularly use a smartphone. However, the belief that cellular technology is detrimental to health has long been widespread. 

One major driver of fears emerged in 1993 when David Reynard from Madeira Beach in Florida went on the CNN talk show Larry King Live and said his wife had died from a brain tumor because of radiation from her cell phone. Reynard sued the manufacturer, NEC America, but the case was later dismissed because, according to the judge, the claim lacked substantial scientific research.

Although health authorities around the world maintain that radiation levels from cell phones are so low as to be completely safe, producers of “anti-radiation” devices have sought to monetize public health fears. In the early 2000s, cell phone radiation shields appeared on the market, alongside phone cases that promised to neutralize allegedly harmful emissions. Global studies have found no evidence that they provide any protection, and the Consumer Protection Agency of the United States and the Federal Trade Commission has warned people against buying them. 

5G Networks

Opponents believe that new 5G cellular networks cause cancer, damage the environment and blight the lives of individuals who suffer from “electromagnetic hypersensitivity.” While EHS is not a recognized medical condition, large numbers of people say that the technology is directly responsible for a variety of symptoms, including headaches, nausea, dizziness and chronic fatigue. 

The rollout of 5G also coincided with the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Accordingly, theories linking it to Covid-19 have proliferated around the world. Some assert that 5G frequencies have helped transmit the virus, while others say that they weaken the human immune system, rendering people vulnerable to infection.

The anti-5G lobby has brought together conspiracy theorists, fringe scientists, populist politicians, environmental activists and a number of celebrities. Their ideas have spread across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp. Throughout the pandemic, activists have taken part in anti-lockdown protests and set fire to 5G communications masts across Europe, New Zealand and Australia. 

There is no credible evidence that 5G technology is detrimental to health in any way. Scientists have reported that the waves given off by 5G towers are incapable of damaging our cells. 

As Dr. David Robert Grimes, an Irish cancer researcher and campaigner against medical misinformation, told BBC back in 2019, “It's crucial to note that radio waves are far less energetic than even the visible light we experience every day."

Mariia Pankova contributed to research.

The post A brief history of radiation fears appeared first on Coda Story.

She finally received a diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. When other approaches failed to improve her health, she learned through “a friend of a friend of a friend” about something called the Lightning Process — a three-day in-person course that could, purportedly, help people recover from the illness.

Murphy, 30, who lives in Bournemouth, England, and worked in childcare before becoming ill, had no idea what the Lightning Process was or how it was supposed to work. She enrolled anyway. Her mother drove her to the training, which took place in a quiet country setting about a half-hour away and included a few other patients. When she arrived, she was reassured by the trainer’s words. 

“She was like, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be better in a few days — you’ll be dancing out of here,’ all this wonderful-sounding stuff, so I was quite hopeful,” Murphy told me via WhatsApp.

As she soon learned, the process involved a specific sequence of verbal statements and movements designed to derail the thoughts and actions that were supposedly causing her illness and jump-start healthy changes. To demonstrate, the trainer stood up at one point and extended her arm, holding her hand upright. 

“She said, ‘Stop! I have a choice, I can choose the pit or I can choose to live a life I love, and I choose to live a life I love!’” recalled Murphy. More vocal affirmations and exclamations followed. “In a nutshell, she was trying to sort of meditate or visualize herself in a good place and imagine away her symptoms,” she said. 

Murphy found the prospect of performing such actions over and over again to be daunting. “They say to do the Lightning Process whenever you’re having a symptom, whenever you’re feeling ill,” she said. “But I feel ill constantly, so how does that actually work? It’s not physically possible. Does that mean you just spend the rest of your life doing the Lightning Process?” 

When she raised questions like these at the gathering, the trainer admonished her for being “negative.” Despite her concerns, she yearned to get well and struggled for months to implement the program and stay active. Finally, she suffered a major relapse that landed her in the hospital with “crushing fatigue,” “pain all over my body,” “severe dizziness,” and “the worst migraine I’ve ever had.” She decided she’d had enough of the Lightning Process. 

“I can say, hand on my heart, that I gave it everything I had, and it didn’t work,” said Murphy, who remains homebound.

Psychological and behavioral interventions

Chronic fatigue syndrome — or ME/CFS — is a poorly understood ailment marked by profound tiredness, cognitive dysfunction, sleep disorders, and an unusual symptom called post-exertional malaise, a pattern of relapses after minimal activity. Many patients report that an acute viral illness triggered their ongoing succession of medical problems. It is estimated that as many as 2.5 million people in the U.S. live with ME/CFS and up to 250,000 in the UK, many of them undiagnosed. Seriously ill patients can be homebound for years. Some are bedbound and cannot tolerate lights, noise and other stimuli. 

In past decades, much research into ME/CFS treatment was devoted to psychological and behavioral interventions. More recently, these studies and their reported findings have been widely criticized as deeply flawed. A 2015 report from the U.S. Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), based on an extensive review of the literature, declared ME/CFS to be a “serious, chronic, complex, and systemic disease” not a psychiatric or psychological disorder.

Given the lack of approved pharmaceutical treatments, many patients have sought relief from alternative approaches — and the Lightning Process has been among the most controversial. Developed in the late 1990s by a British osteopath named Phil Parker, it is a goulash of osteopathy, life coaching, neurolinguistic programming, hypnotherapy and positive psychology. 

Parker’s official Lightning Process website, which attributes chronic illness to hyperactive stress responses, refers to it as “a training program that teaches you to change the way your nervous system controls your body.” But critics say that Parker’s expansive scientific claims — which he and colleagues outlined in a 2018 paper in a peer-reviewed Romanian publication titled the Journal of Experiential Psychotherapy — are not supported by legitimate research. 

“Despite trying to suggest a physiological basis for their approach, all the theory appears to consist of is that if someone is too stressed by being ill then telling them to stop being stressed will cure them,” wrote Jonathan Edwards, a professor emeritus of medicine at University College London, via email.

Last fall, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence issued a draft of new clinical guidelines for ME/CFS, which highlighted the key symptom of post-exertional malaise. The draft noted possible harms from increased activity and specifically advised against the Lightning Process. 
These days, Lightning Process practitioners are seeking to engage a new wave of potential clients: the long-haulers reporting persistent and often debilitating symptoms after an acute bout of Covid-19. This phenomenon, often called long Covid, can at times resemble ME/CFS, although the extent of the overlap between the two conditions remains uncertain.

Charles Shepherd, a Lightning Process critic and medical adviser to the ME Association, a U.K. organization that advocates for the interests of ME/CFS patients, noted this development with concern. “It is very worrying to find that desperate people with long Covid are being encouraged to spend large sums of money on the Lightning Process, a treatment that is completely unproven in relation to long Covid and ME/CFS,” he told me, via email.

In a recent email Parker sent in response to questions for this article, he told me that, so far, fewer than 100 people had taken the Lightning Process course for long Covid. “The anecdotal results are promising but it's far too early to tell if the LP provides a useful solution for this issue,” he wrote. 

Parker has spent decades exploring alternative approaches to health. Years after he had developed the Lightning Process, he promoted an enterprise called the European College of Holistic Medicine Healing Course. According to a website archived in 2007, Parker and a colleague were co-leaders of the program, which included lessons on, among other topics, “how to contact your spirit/healing guides to help you create the right space for healing,” “the use of divination medicine cards and tarot as a way of making predictions,” and “the use of auras for diagnosis of a client’s problems.” Student healers would also learn how to prepare a location in advance “so that any energy polluting the room will not interfere with the work you are doing.” 

Parker’s biography on the archived website offered details on his provenance as a spiritual clinician. While working with his osteopathy patients, it noted, Parker “discovered that their bodies would suddenly tell him important bits of information about them and their past, which to his surprise turned out to be factually correct!” After that, “he further developed this ability to step into other people’s bodies… to assist them in their healing with amazing results.” In 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile, Parker completed a doctorate in psychology at London Metropolitan University. 

In his email, Parker acknowledged his role with the European College of Holistic Medicine Healing Course, but dismissed it as irrelevant to his simultaneous work involving the Lightning Process. “I did once co-run a course, 14 years ago, on approaches to health based on concepts from alternative perspectives and non-western cultures,” he wrote. “However, I'm not and have never been a tarot expert or aura reader. This interest had nothing to do with the LP design and has no relevance to the LP.”

Blame and abdication 

Lightning Process training takes 10 to 15 hours over three days. The cost, including three hours of individual follow-up calls, is around $1,200 with one of Parker’s three associates and nearly $2,800 with Parker himself, according to his website. Private sessions are also available.

Some participants have subsequently trained to become official Lightning Process practitioners. A 2017 online news article in The BMJ, a major medical journal, zeroed in on this point, observing that the Lightning Process “has a cultish quality because many of the therapists are former sufferers who deliver the programme with great conviction.” A map on the U.S. site for the Lightning Process indicates close to 150 practitioners around the world, including just over 100 in Europe, mostly in the U.K., 13 in the U.S. and Canada, and 23 in New Zealand and Australia.

Lee, a 52-year-old musician and artist in Brisbane, Australia, became homebound with ME/CFS in 2009. Describing his years of suffering, he recalled being close to suicide at certain points. He began to feel a bit better in 2018, after trying some “brain retraining” approaches, and last year experienced “enormous” improvements with the “amazing” Lightning Process. “Now I can ride a bus alone, get groceries, even drive a car a short distance,” wrote Lee via Facebook Messenger.

Lee, who preferred not to use his full name, told me that other ME/CFS patients often insist that he couldn’t have had the illness in the first place. That bothers him, even though he understands why people might find his story hard to accept. “It’s a difficult thing to get your head around because it goes against all the assumptions we generally make about what we can and cannot influence our bodies to do,” he wrote. 

The websites of Lightning Process practitioners feature similar success stories. They do not highlight the accounts of people like Judith Murphy and others who report significant physical deterioration and emotional distress following a Lightning Process course. 

In 2013, Rachel Elliott’s teenage daughter contracted glandular fever, from which she never really recovered. She received an ME/CFS diagnosis, took a course of graded exercise therapy through the U.K.’s National Health Service and got worse, said Elliott in a Zoom call. (Elliott’s daughter agreed that her mother could share her story but preferred not to be named.)

Elliott told me that by late 2014 her daughter could barely get out of bed. At that point, she recalled, an NHS consultant suggested the Lightning Process. 

“It sounded very out-there to me,” said Elliott, an arts educator in north London. “We were just absolutely desperate, to be honest, and if an NHS consultant recommended it, what harm could it do?” 

Her daughter took the Lightning Process course in 2015. In the days immediately after, she thrived and resumed a very active social life. “It just seemed absolutely truly and utterly miraculous,” said Elliott. But, within weeks, the post-program boost began to wear off and her daughter’s health started to decline. No matter how hard her daughter tried to implement what she’d been taught, said Elliott, the exhaustion and other symptoms returned in force. 

“It really messed with her head, and she didn’t understand why after this effort, she was getting worse again,” said Elliott. 

Moreover, Elliott added, the Lightning Process practitioner appeared to blame her daughter. “He basically said he couldn’t help her anymore, she had some kind of block, and did I know what it was,” she said. “It was all about a flaw in her personality. That’s rubbish.” The events had an “extremely damaging” psychological impact on her daughter and caused bodily harm by encouraging her “to push herself hard and fast beyond safe physical limits,” Elliott said. 

Elliott said her daughter’s condition worsened in subsequent years and that she is now bedbound and fed by a tube. Her room is kept dark because the light disturbs her. She can usually communicate with her mother for a few minutes in the morning. Elliott recently wrote down on a slip of paper what her daughter asked her to convey about the Lightning Process: “If it works, it’s down to them, and if it fails it’s down to you. And if it fails, they just give up on you.”

In his email, Parker estimated that more than 25,000 people have taken the Lightning Process in the past 21 years and asserted that “the vast majority” of participants “achieve good and lasting change.” (I have reviewed the references Parker sent along with his answers, and they do not reasonably support this conclusion.) However, Parker wrote, “as we have always stated, with any intervention not everyone achieves the change they hope for.” 

Nonetheless, he said that reports that participants felt blamed for not getting better are “surprising and upsetting” to him, since “lack of blame” is a core concept of the program. “We are keen to understand more about why some people feel this way about it,” he wrote.

A grab-bag of approaches 

The Lightning Process, which is trademarked, piggybacks on the concept of neuroplasticity — the ability of our brains to adapt by generating new neurons and mapping new communications networks. The hypothetical and unwarranted leap is to maintain that people can exert conscious and effective control over this cerebral rewiring by using specialized techniques to ban unwanted thoughts or feelings and replace them with more desirable ones. Participants learn that they are “doing” rather than “having” their illness, and therefore can decide to stop “doing” it. 

The Lightning Process is one of a number of programs promoting relief from ME/CFS and other chronic illnesses through some form of theorized but unproven neurological housekeeping. The claims are often grandiose. The Dynamic Neural Retraining System, for example, promises “limbic rehabilitation” and teaches participants “how to change the function and structure of your brain.” The Gupta Program supposedly “triggers the body’s natural ability to heal” and bills itself as “the original & best neuroplasticity and holistic health program since 2001.” 

Overall, such programs include a grab-bag of possibly helpful strategies designed to interrupt the body’s fight-or-flight response, reduce stress and promote overall well-being. Among these strategies are philosophical teachings, breathing and meditation techniques, physical movement and mental exercises. Their websites feature books, videos and a range of courses and modules, along with testimonials from satisfied customers. 

Surveys of ME/CFS patients have found mixed results for the Lightning Process, with some respondents reporting improvements and others that they got worse. A challenge in interpreting such surveys, as well as anecdotal accounts of recovery, is the lack of a biological test for ME/CFS, which means that it is impossible to ensure that those said to have the illness actually have it. 

A standard definition used for years in the U.K. and elsewhere, for example, requires only one symptom — a period of unexplained fatigue lasting six months or more. However, cases of post-viral fatigue that will ultimately resolve on their own can sometimes extend for a year or more, making it hard to distinguish them from ME/CFS. Moreover, an unknown number of patients diagnosed with ME/CFS based on that definition or others might instead be experiencing fatigue due to depression, anxiety or related conditions. And some people might self-identify as having ME/CFS without having sought or received a clinical diagnosis at all. 

“What comes under the umbrella of ME/CFS is a very wide spectrum of clinical presentations and pathological or mental health pathways,” wrote the ME Association’s Charles Shepherd in an email. “My gut feeling is that the ones who do improve and remain so are the ones who have chronic fatigue or a chronic fatigue syndrome that is being driven by psychological and psychiatric factors.”

Ola Didrik Saugstad is a Norwegian pediatrician, neuroscientist and professor of medicine at both Oslo University Hospital and Northwestern University in Chicago. He says that the Lightning Process cannot “heal” patients with an organic illness like ME/CFS, but might “help some cope” with the condition. "The problem with the Lightning Process is that patients are instructed to repeat to themselves and everyone else that they are healed, they are healed, they are healed," he told me, via email. "And then we see tragedies, patients collapsing.” 

Parker says that he finds it “saddening and surprising” for others to question people’s diagnoses after they get well. “I think it’s important to rely on the pre-LP diagnosis of medical experts and medical case histories that confirm the presence of these conditions of those who then go on to recover,” he wrote. 

When it comes to proving its claims to the satisfaction of regulators, the Lightning Process has not fared well. In 2012, the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority criticized Parker’s site for promoting the program’s supposed effectiveness not only for CFS/ME, but for multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, food and chemical intolerances, addiction and other conditions. The agency noted that “the website was likely to mislead consumers regarding the benefits of the LP” and expressed concern that people might participate in the program instead of seeking medical care “from suitably qualified health professionals.” 

In response to a question about the ASA’s findings, Parker wrote that he believed a statement on the Lightning Process website about improvements among “people with CFS” had been justified, but that he had removed it after the advertising authority stepped in. He did not mention the ASA’s concerns about Lightning Process statements regarding multiple sclerosis and other conditions.

“Pseudostatistical jargon-filled waffle-fest”

More recently, Parker has stated that there is an increasing scientific base supporting the Lightning Process. But that scientific base has itself come under unflattering scrutiny.

In 2017, the positive results of a clinical trial of the Lightning Process for adolescents with ME/CFS, published in the influential journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, received widespread and credulous news coverage, with the exception of BuzzFeed, which offered an in-depth and much more skeptical view of the trial and the Lightning Process itself. Yet the researchers, a team from Bristol University, were later found to have violated core research principles designed to minimize the risk of biased responses. The journal ultimately posted a 3,000-word “correction and clarification” that undermined the credibility of the reported findings. (The correction and clarification resulted from my investigation of the trial and a subsequent complaint to the journal.) 

Last year, Parker and colleagues published a review of the existing literature on the Lightning Process, selecting 14 studies for assessment. In a blog post, Brian Hughes, a psychology professor at National University of Ireland Galway, noted that some of the included studies were not peer-reviewed and that other research was fraught with flaws. Although the review was published in Explore, a journal from a major academic publisher, Hughes described it as “a self-serving pseudostatistical jargon-filled waffle-fest, utterly untroubled by even the tiniest smidgen of scholarly objectivity.” (Hughes and I are colleagues and have recently co-authored a paper on ME/CFS.)

In November, the U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which develops clinical guidelines for medical conditions, issued a draft of new recommendations for ME/CFS after a three-year process of development. The draft specifically recommended against “therapies derived from osteopathy, life coaching and neurolinguistic programming (for example, the Lightning Process).” The agency plans to issue a final version of the guidance in August, after assessing public comment. 

The Lightning Process debate is now roiling Norway, where it has gained visibility through the efforts of committed proponents. Researchers are seeking to launch a clinical trial for newly diagnosed ME/CFS patients. In December, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair, the psychology professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology overseeing the research, told the science website forskning.no that it is “a completely normal study, on a par with other studies we do in the field of psychology.” 

Yet critics have raised serious methodological and ethical concerns. Among the objections are that the study lacks an acceptable control group, relies on subjective rather than objective assessments, overlooks potential harms, is designed in a way likely to generate biased results, and involves the use of public resources to test a commercial product. The investigators have defended the structure and conduct of the proposed study, which received regional approval last fall. A federal ethics committee is expected to release its decision on the matter this month.

The issue has played out in a spate of news articles and opinion pieces — both for and against — in Norwegian media. In January, Camara Lundestat Joof, a political columnist at the popular tabloid Dagbladet, wrote about her younger sister’s traumatic experience years before with the Lightning Process, after she developed ME/CFS following glandular fever as a teenager. 

Right after taking the program, wrote Joof in her column, her sister declared herself to be “bubbling over with energy,” ramped up her activities, and adopted the distinctive Lightning Process language and mindset.

“When I asked how her symptoms were, such as the acute muscle pain, she replied that she did not ‘do’ muscle pain anymore, because her symptoms were not something she had, it was something she did, and by reformulating herself she could also take responsibility for them,” wrote Joof. But her sister couldn’t sustain the pace and soon crashed badly. Years later, she still suffers from ME/CFS. (Last summer, Dagbladet published a letter I wrote about the issue.)

Like Joof’s sister, Judith Murphy, the British woman who took the course in 2016, did her best after the training to keep up and stay active — but her condition declined anyway. In the months leading up to the crash that resulted in a hospital stay, she appealed to her trainer for support, she said. After a while, the trainer stopped responding.

“She just ended up ignoring me,” said Murphy. 

When the course began, the trainer described the Lightning Process as if it offered “an absolute guarantee” of recovery, Murphy recalled. But, in the end, she felt she’d been taken advantage of. “It’s very deceptive and it’s preying on weak, vulnerable, desperate people who will do anything to get better,” she said.

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Alisa Vitti | Flo Living

By Caitlin Thompson

Alisa Vitti, the founder and CEO of the women’s lifestyle company Flo Living, often starts her public appearances with the same anecdote. Years ago, she was over 200 pounds, with terrible acne. She only had her period a few times a year. 

Vitti’s story concentrates on her diagnosis with polycystic ovarian syndrome, a condition related to an imbalance of reproductive hormones. Dissatisfied with standard treatment options, such as birth control pills, Vitti went in a different direction. She developed a diet regimen that she says restored her hormonal health. It involves eating certain foods at specific stages in the menstrual cycle, like asparagus during the ovulatory phase and kelp during the menstrual phase. 

Vitti has turned this plan into a booming business. She has written two books, has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, spoken at SxSW and been profiled by the New York Times. Flo Living has over 122,000 Instagram followers and its founder regularly shares her philosophy with thousands of Facebook Live and YouTube viewers.

“If we can become fluent in the language of our biochemistry,” she said in a 2011 Ted Talk which has been viewed over 1.2 million times on YouTube, “then we can have access to an infinite source of energy, and vitality, and clarity, and unwavering purpose.” 

Vitti created — and trademarked — the concept of “cycle syncing," in which individuals coordinate their diet and lifestyle with their menstrual phases. Flo Living’s membership programs cost almost $300 a year.

According to Dr. Jennifer Lincoln, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Portland, Oregon, healthy eating and exercise can decrease bloating and offer some benefit to women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, but cycle syncing? 

“She’s totally overcomplicating it,” she told me. “It’s not to the degree of, ‘This week you have to eat this and this week you have to eat that.’ That’s just silly.”

Flo Living also sells an array of supplements, which cost between $41 to $129 a month. 

“There’s no data to support supplements for the vast majority of people, unless you have a true nutrient deficiency,” Lincoln added. “To make it even more niche and specific to your cycle is predatory and not based on good data.” 

The website does carry a disclaimer about its products: “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

Vitti wrote in a statement to Coda Story: “Flo Living is dedicated to creating programs and products that make navigating hormonal challenges easier for women. My work is supported and guided by respected research. Any assertions to the contrary are untrue.”

Joseph Mercola | Mercola.com 

By Masho Lomashvili

Before founding one the world’s biggest natural health websites, Dr. Joseph Mercola trained as an osteopath. In 1997, he created a blog where he began to outline his problems with the pharmaceutical industry. He advocated doctors spend more time with patients to help them heal and recommended a diet of unprocessed foods, along with plenty of exercise. Then he launched an online store and started to promote supplements, vitamins, protein powders and alternative treatments — including his own line of branded tanning beds to build up stores of vitamin D.

As countries around the world began to roll out Covid vaccines, Mercola was peddling misinformation in articles on Mercola.com with titles such as “Covid-19 'Vaccines' May Destroy the Lives of Millions” and “How COVID-19 Vaccine Can Destroy Your Immune System.”

In October 2020, the Center for Countering Digital Hate infiltrated a meeting attended by Mercola, other alternative health entrepreneurs, and a number of conspiracy theorists. At the gathering, plans were drawn up to sow fear and distrust in vaccination campaigns using Facebook pages, WhatsApp groups, YouTube channels and Twitter and Instagram accounts. 

In addition to raising doubt and confusion about vaccines, Mercola offers his own alternative treatments for Covid-19. Earlier this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration instructed Mercola.com to stop selling products falsely described as preventing or treating the coronavirus.

“Failure to adequately correct any violations may result in legal action, including, without limitation, seizure and injunction.”

But Mercola’s biggest contribution to the anti-vaccination movement is financial. Over the past decade, he has given out a total of $4 million to the movement. That figure includes more than $2.9 million to the US-based National Vaccine Information Center, one of the most prominent U.S. anti-vaccine groups, which accounts for approximately 40% of the organization's funding. 

Followers of Mercola view him as a dissident voice, bravely standing up to Big Pharma and a corrupt, profit-driven medical establishment. In reality, though, he has made a fortune from his products. According to the Washington Post, his net worth is “in excess of $100 million.” 

Mercola.com responded to a request for clarification on Mercola’s views on Covid-19 with a statement from an editor: “Dr. Mercola is a published author in peer reviewed medical literature demonstrating the clear link between vitamin D deficiency and severe cases of Covid-19. He will continue to express his professional opinions and defend his freedom of speech.”

Ty and Charlene Bollinger | The Truth About Cancer 

By Isobel Cockerell

While President Donald Trump told his supporters to march on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 6, Ty and Charlene Bollinger were holding their own anti-science MAGA Freedom Rally, just a few minutes away. The event featured a number of speakers, including Mikki Willis, the producer of the infamous “Plandemic” conspiracy documentary, prominent anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, and disgraced former Trump aides Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos. 

This foray into politics is a recent development for the couple. Ty Bollinger, a former bodybuilder, and his wife Charlene, an ex-model, live in a $1.5 million mansion in Tennessee and have, over the past 15 years, built an empire peddling unproven cancer treatments.  

They believe that chemotherapy is “poison.” Their YouTube channel — which has amassed more than 22 million views — features numerous videos in which they speak to people who treat cancer with everything from essential oils, vitamin C injections and juicing to something called vibrational therapy, which supposedly uses “electric frequencies” and “positive energy” to target tumor cells. 

A recent post on their website, titled “30+ Natural Alternatives to Consider Before Chemotherapy,” states that “conventional doctors create a false sense of urgency” and suggests that readers experiment with coffee enemas and pseudoscientific ozone therapy before seeking hospital treatment. 

When asked about the moral implications of advising people not to undergo chemotherapy, the Bollingers responded that they “have never told people not to do chemo.”

“Anyone with cancer is vulnerable to snake-oil. Although survival rates have never been better, cancer is still a frightening word,” said David Robert Grimes, an Irish cancer researcher and campaigner against medical misinformation. “In those circumstances, even the most sober-headed realist can be taken in by those who promise miraculous cures with no side-effects.” 

In response to a request for comment, the Bollingers told Coda Story in an emailed statement: “We are not ‘anti-science’ at all. That’s a pejorative term that is used to discredit someone’s position without really saying anything or giving details about why the position is wrong. The truth is we are pro-science and pro-choice when it comes to cancer treatments and vaccines, so the ‘anti-science’ allegation is totally false.” In the same statement, the Bollingers also confirmed that they didn’t think the pandemic was real. 

Their online store — which features the headline “Cancer does not have to be a death sentence” — sells a variety of products, including turmeric and hemp extracts, a $2,495 “hydrogen water” machine and an infrared sauna for $949. Customers can also buy DVD box sets of Ty Bollinger’s documentary series for $497 and one titled “The Truth About Pet Cancer” for $149. 

When asked to respond to suggestions that they are taking advantage of sick and vulnerable people for profit, the Bollingers said: “We give free DVDs and books to anyone who asks for them. We are trying to help them, not prey on them.”

Michael Kelly | Praesidium Life

By Mariam Kiparoidze

Spurred on by a recent boom in conspiracy theories that link 5G communications technology to a host of medical conditions, numerous devices are being sold online to “protect” individuals from the allegedly detrimental effects of electromagnetic radiation. Examples range from vastly overpriced USB sticks to wristbands and hats. Now, the New Zealand-based naturopath Michael Kelly is planning to add a new nutritional supplement to the list. 

“Coming Soon. Praesidium — the natural solution to electromagnetic radiation,” says the homepage of the supplement Praesidium, under a photograph of a black bottle with the product’s logo and the words “Swiss Made” printed on it.

There is broad consensus among scientists that the health risks of 5G are, at worst, negligible. However, Kelly has a record of questionable scientific judgement. He runs a health and beauty clinic called The Health Centre, in Auckland, which advocates fighting cancer with immunotherapy and a ketogenic diet “to starve” tumors. He is also chairman of the populist political party Advance New Zealand, which came under fire for spreading misinformation about mandatory vaccines throughout its election campaigning last year. He co-founded the company Praesidium Life last year with former joint party leader Jami-Lee Ross. 

Kelly is also involved in an associated website named Natural Solutions, which hawks a range of products that supposedly offer natural solutions to serious medical conditions. Among them is the protein GcMAF, a purported miracle cure for cancer, HIV and autism that is not licensed for medical use in a number of countries, including the U.K. and the United States.

Like several of the products sold by Natural Solutions, Praesidium was developed by Dr. Marco Ruggiero, an Italian microbiologist who in the course of his career has promoted a variety of pseudoscientific theories, including that AIDS is not linked to HIV infection. He was also behind another widely derided supplement, marketed under the name Immortalis, which promised to extend life to an “unimaginable” length. 

Kelly’s company, Natural Solutions, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about his businesses and the science behind Praesidium.

Oleg Epstein | Materia Medica Holding

By Katia Patin

In nearly every Russian pharmacy you can find at least a few treatments manufactured by Materia Medica Holding. Founded in the early 1990s by Oleg Epstein, the company prides itself on being the first to mass produce homeopathic remedies domestically. From supposedly antiviral pills to purported cures for alcoholism — and even a new “treatment” in development for HIV — Materia Medica has it covered.

However, most of its products have few active ingredients and some are simply sugar pills, according to biologist Aleksander Panchin who sits on the Russian Academy of Science’s commission to fight fake science. Founded in 1999 to expose pseudoscience, the commission also gives out annual “anti-awards,” which name and shame individuals and organizations promoting unscientific research or treatments. Epstein is a three-time winner.

Epstein, however, is also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Nominated in 2015, he has held on to his status despite the academy writing in a memorandum that the theoretical basis for many of his treatments — a concept he has referred to as “released activity” — is pseudoscience. The anti-science commission has no legislative powers, so Epstein’s pills are still officially registered as medicine by the Ministry of Health. In 2018, members of the commission named Materia Medica “the most harmful fake science project in recent years.” Epstein took his colleagues at the Academy to court, suing for defamation which ended in a settlement.

“Released activity” involves the use of highly diluted substances. Panchin has described Epstein’s supposedly “new” methods as a “rebranding” of homeopathy, which relies on similar principles. Still, Russian state media outlets regularly run stories about Materia Medica’s research, with no mention of the Academy of Science’s statements.

Epstein was born in 1962 in Khabarovsk, a region in the Russian Far East. His father, Ilya Epstein, was the director of an addiction center and was known for treating alcohol-dependent individuals with hypnosis. Epstein studied pharmacology in Tomsk and dedicated most of his career to homeopathy. In 2005 he was awarded a prestigious Russian Federation’s prize in the field of science and technology. By 2016, Materia Medica was bringing in more than $120 million a year in revenue.

Today the company’s website states that it is working to “discover, develop and make available highly effective and safe drugs,” with a global presence from Turkmenistan to Myanmar to Mexico. 

Epstein and Materia Medica did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

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