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Molekule declined to share any figures about the state of its business, but it’s safe to say the negative reviews have not prevented it from having a very good pandemic. The company raised a $58 million round of venture capital last February, pushing its fund-raising to nearly $100 million—far more than any other purifier start-up. Despite the critical reviews, many users love the company’s devices and anecdotally report that they work better than others they’ve tried. Luxury hotels, desperate to bring guests back inside, have installed them from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale to the Ocean House in Rhode Island, where a friend was recently told at check-in that the machine in his room was “medical grade,” as if he were buying weed. At a minimum, Molekule has brought aesthetics to the industry: Coway, Wirecutter’s pick, now sells a purifier in millennial pink and has a model of its own at the MoMA Design Store.

Like every purifier-maker, Molekule leaped at the opportunity to pitch its device as a pandemic solution. Yogi told a reporter that he was “very confident that this technology will destroy coronavirus” and that he wanted to send some Molekules to China. Last February, Jaya told a reporter that the virus was “a rather simple structure for us to be able to destroy” and that she had recently flown cross-country with an Air Mini plugged in under her seat. The attention only picked up when wildfires again raged through California last fall while

covid cases continued to rise. “Our product launches tend to be pretty timely,” Dilip told VentureBeat as Molekule announced its new Air Pro model, which promised three times as much power as the Air.

By now, every reputable purifier manufacturer has run testing to show that its device can handle covid. hepa filters have done well in tests, as has Molekule— although testing air purifiers’ covidfighting capabilities in a real-world setting is, for obvious safety reasons, impossible. Most of the air-purifier experts I spoke to have the machines in their homes for mold or pet allergies, not covid. If a sick person comes into your home, a purifier across the room isn’t going to help.

Then again, I never tested positive for

covid—maybe our purifier had worked? More likely, I had some form of immunity or simply got lucky. In any event, the purifier we bought was recently on back order, and if the industry has learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that Marc Shillum was right: Science isn’t what sells.

Jeffrey Siegel, the University of Toronto professor, told me the volume of fly-bynight operators entering the market had increased dramatically since covid began to spread. He had recently spoken to a woman looking to buy purifiers for a school district and pointed her to several specious claims on a company’s website that used what seemed to be language meant to obfuscate its purifier’s true capabilities. After the woman told Siegel she had asked the company about the issue, he checked the site again and discovered it was now making the same claim with different foggy language. When I got in touch with a purifier start-up called Happi that launched in December and advertised itself on Instagram as a cheaper Molekule (purifier ads now haunt me everywhere I go), the company’s founder told me he had pivoted to air purifiers from “electric rideables.” Everyone becomes a vulture when the world is burning.

With the far side of the pandemic coming into view, air-quality experts hope this will be a watershed moment in how we think about the air around us, which will be no cleaner after covid is under control. The question is how we’ll deal with all of the problems. Max Sherman, a retired scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has studied air quality for decades, is an advocate for simple solutions: Go outside, keep toxins out of your life, increase ventilation. He sometimes gives talks as Dr. Duct Tape, a nom de plume alluding to his belief in the effectiveness of patching up leaky hvac systems. Beyond that, hepa filters work—Dr. Duct Tape has three air purifiers in his home—and ultraviolet technologies like peco may develop into meaningful tools. (Last month, American manufacturer Westinghouse promised to solve the “covid quarantine stank” emanating from our indoor lives by using a patented purification technology called nano confined catalytic oxidation, or NCCO. Look out, peco.) Sherman had attended a webinar about Molekule’s technology and came away impressed. “As a techie, I love it,” he said. But he wasn’t ready to recommend it. Molekule simply didn’t move enough air to meet his and the industry’s standards— Air Purification 101. “It’s not going to be able to do the job unless you have a bunch of them,” he said.

That may be possible for the Julie Macklowes of the world, but it isn’t helping anyone without a few thousand dollars to spend on fresh air. Neither would the Molekule that Sherman said he would recommend: the Molekule Air Pro RX, a refrigerator-size purifier meant for medical facilities. The RX is big and bulky and comes with caster wheels rather than a vegan-leather handle. But it does move plenty of air. In the end, Dr. Duct Tape said, air purification is an ugly business.