The wellness industry’s anti-vaxxers
Online influencers promoting ‘natural’ cures and holistic living are spreading dangerous misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccination, said Allyson Chiu and Razzan Nakhlawi in The Washington Post.
WHEN KRISTINA W. received her first dose of the coronavirus vaccine earlier this year, she was terrified. Until recently, she said, she believed that vaccines were so dangerous she was willing to “go into an all-out war” to protect her children from receiving any immunizations. “I had this deep-rooted fear that they could, and possibly even would, kill my children,” said Kristina, 26, a mother of two who lives in New Mexico and spoke on the condition that her full name not be used out of concern for her safety.
Now, although she considers herself “pro-vax” and understands that vaccines are safe and necessary, that knowledge doesn’t always quell her anxiety. These lingering concerns, she believes, are a testament to the power of the anti-vaccination narratives she was exposed to in natural parenting and alternative health groups on Facebook, some of which had convinced her that routine childhood immunizations had nearly killed her eldest son. “If you’ve never been anti-vax and back to vaccinating, you don’t quite understand the level of anxiety” that can come with resuming vaccinations, Kristina said. “You have that logical knowledge that vaccines are just fine. They’re this great thing. But emotions aren’t logical.” Experts say the content shared in some wellness communities has powerful emotional and psychological foundations that can cause even science-minded people to question the public health consensus on the ability of vaccines to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. Some voices within the wellness space are adept at building connection, gaining trust, and sowing doubt—all while appealing to widely held beliefs about healthy living.
“This is what makes some in the wellness community so dangerous,” said Stephanie Alice Baker, a sociologist at the City University of London, who is careful to add that not everyone in the wellness space is trying to cast doubt on vaccines. “It’s not that the wellness community per se is conspiratorial, or that everyone has these kinds of nefarious interests where they intend to manipulate and deceive,” she said. “It’s that once you trust leaders and influencers in this space, then when they become more conspiratorial and extreme, you are susceptible to go down that path with them because you already trust them.”
In some ways, the messaging and themes used by some vaccine-hesitant members of wellness communities reflect those that have been documented in the broader anti-vaccine movement. But there are certain approaches, experts said, that especially key in on the interests and vulnerabilities of people who are invested in wellness culture.
HE ONLINE WELLNESS community rose to prominence amid an erosion of trust in traditional authorities, such as government, health, and science institutions and mainstream media, said Baker, co-author of Lifestyle Gurus, which explores how authority and influence are created online. This loss of faith has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has produced conflicting and confusing guidance from public officials.
TIn a “low-trust society,” Baker said, “you look for other sources to trust and where to place your trust because we can’t be experts on everything. We need other authorities and influential people to guide us.” In the wellness world, those authorities might include nutritionists, physical trainers, lifestyle bloggers, spiritual coaches, naturopaths, yoga teachers, and holistic health experts. Among them are online influencers with large and small followings. Sometimes, in fact, a more modest following can lead to more trust; marketers say that micro-influencers (10,000 to 50,000 followers) and nanoinfluencers (fewer than 10,000 followers) may be seen as more truthful and authentic. Ashley Taylor, who says she is a registered nurse and holistic health coach, posts frequently about “freedom” on Instagram to more than 51,000 followers. In one colorful post that was deleted after the publication of this article, Taylor wrote, “Approval from a 3 letter agency does not override your right to autonomy and to decide what goes into your body.” While she emphasized in the post’s caption that she wasn’t trying to make decisions for her followers, she also listed multiple reasons she doesn’t “have a lot of trust in the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration].”
Promoting distrust can be especially effective when it plays into existing doubts about traditional institutions—doubts that often stem from legitimate concerns about health and safety or poor experiences with the health-care system.
Lydia Greene, a mother of three who was a self-described “anti-vaxxer” for more than a decade, vividly recalls the nurse who dismissed her concerns when she thought her first child had a reaction to vaccinations. “The nurse basically blew me off and made me feel dumb,” said Greene, 40, who was a quality-control chemist at a pharmaceutical plant before she left her job to start a family. Greene said she increasingly turned to online parenting forums for guidance, where she was exposed to anti-vaccination beliefs that convinced her to stop vaccinating her children.
“You just feel so lost,” she said, “and these are your people, and they tell you what to do when you’re not sure.”
In this climate of distrust, experts said, many people in the wellness community present themselves as truth seekers at constant risk of being silenced by mainstream authorities or online moderators. When these people’s posts are flagged online, Greene said, they often claim the platform’s moderators are just “trying to get the sheep to take the vaccine.”
Experts said it’s also important to recognize potential financial motives behind the truth-seeker framing: It can help influencers promote and sell alternative therapies, such as herbal tinctures and essential oils, which undergo far less regulation than vaccines and drugs approved by the FDA.
“Do your own research” is a common refrain in anti-vaccination spaces, said Renee DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory who studies the spread of malign narratives across social networks. But it’s often said by people “sharing links to sites that are very aligned in a particular way, usually an anti-vaccine way.” When followers of wellness influencers do try to do their own research, they often find posts that carefully cherry-pick data. For example, some influencers will point to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, known as VAERS, as evidence of widespread deaths and injuries from vaccines, while ignoring the broadly acknowledged limitation of its data. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, which co-sponsors the database with the Centers for Disease Control and the FDA, a report alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event. Furthermore, anyone can file a report to the database with “incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, and unverified information.” In some Instagram accounts featuring natural and holistic living content, vaccine misinformation is slipped in between general posts about well-being and is designed to blend in with a profile’s overall visually pleasing aesthetics: vibrant photographs of food, flowers, and landscapes as well as serene palettes and attractive fonts.
Yolande Norris-Clark, who goes by “bauhauswife” on Instagram, describes herself as a “writer, birth educator, freebirth coach, iconoclast.” She shares information about natural birth practices, and photos of herself and her children in scenic landscapes, with her 46,500 followers, along with posts questioning vaccines and the medical establishment. In one post, Norris-Clark shared a minimalistic text graphic that read “The very notion of injecting a foreign substance into a human being’s body to promote ‘health’ is not only absurd, but utterly perverse.”