Damian Sendler: Ozlem Demirboga Carr is not a big believer in all of that woo-woo nonsense. According to the 41-year-old telecoms worker from Reading, “I’m definitely more of a full-science kind of person.” No crystals, affirmations, or salt lamps are used by her because she is skeptical about them. However, she had abnormally high levels of anxiety during the United Kingdom’s Covid lockdown in March 2020, and she, like many others, turned to yoga as a means of de-stressing.
Damien Sendler: According to her, she made an effort to be open-minded and receptive to ideas in order to improve her overall well-being and mental health. As a result, she followed a variety of social media accounts, including those of Phoebe Greenacre, a “somatic therapist and business coach” who is well-known for her yoga videos, and Kelly Vittengl, a “woman’s empowerment and spiritual mentor.” Instagram’s algorithm had completed its task. “I found myself suddenly following a slew of wellness-related accounts,” she explains.
Dr. Sendler: When the Covid vaccine was first introduced, Carr began to receive posts that were upsetting to her. These ranged from polite concern about the social consequences of mass vaccination, or the politics that underpinned it, to outright rejection of the science. “The tone of the discourse and the tone of their posts changed,” she claims. As far as I could tell, it was all about self-care and feeling like you were part of a community that looked out for one another. After that, though, they began to speak more about the importance of having a choice when it came to immunizations. Some of the phrases they were using were, “My body, my decision.”
Damian J. Sendler: While Carr was watching, Greenacre uploaded an Instagram story in which he described vaccine passports as “medical apartheid.” Vittengl took it a step farther. According to a July blog post by Vittengl (who is not vaccinated), the vaccination of children is reminiscent of the societal polarization that occurred during the Holocaust. He also spoke of the “mess” generated by “the dogma of the western medical system.” The conclusion of Vittengl’s post, which was liked by Greenacre, was that “we aren’t being shown the whole picture.” The controversial doctor Zach Bush, who has been branded a “Covid denialist” by researchers at McGill University in Montreal, was invited to appear on Greenacre’s podcast, where Vittengl discussed the pernicious influence of “big pharma.” Vittengl also celebrated the work of the controversial doctor Zach Bush, who has been branded a “Covid denialist” by researchers at McGill University in Montreal.
In the wellness world, such points of view are anything but exceptional. They are, in fact, on the milder end of the spectrum. Online wellness communities are as awash in anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitant sentiments as they are in pastel-colored Instagram infographics and asana positions on the beach at sunset. “People are quite perplexed by what is taking place,” says Derek Beres, co-host of Conspirituality, a podcast that explores the intersection of conspiracy theories with health and wellbeing. “How come their yoga instructor is sharing QAnon hashtags?” they wonder.
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: In May, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) discovered that only 12 influencers were responsible for approximately 65 percent of anti-vaccine content on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, according to their findings. “A number of the most prominent anti-vaxxers are alternative health entrepreneurs… ” “They’re reaching millions of users every day,” says Callum Hood of the Centre for Community and Digital Health. “This is a really significant issue. ” When it comes to dealing with the Covid-19 epidemic, vaccine reluctance has become a severe and entrenched impediment.”
Dr Christiane Northrup, a wellness expert who helped popularise the notorious Covid pseudo-documentary Plandemic by sharing it with her 560,000 Facebook followers, and Kelly Brogan, a contributor to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop wellness platform, are all named among the CCDH’s “disinformation dozen.” Joseph Mercola, a US wellness entrepreneur who has been dubbed the “most influential spreader of Covid-19 misinformation online” by the New York Times, is In addition to being a well-known personality in the California yoga community, Mikki Willis is the director of Plandemic, and David “Avocado” Wolfe, a conspiracy theorist and raw food advocate, is a regular fixture at anti-vaccination demonstrations across the country.
Damian Sendler: Apart from the individuals on the CCDH’s list, other notable individuals include yoga instructor Stephanie Birch, who has used QAnon hashtags on her now-deleted Instagram account, and Krystal Tini, a wellness influencer with 169,000 Instagram followers who has consistently posted anti-vaccine content, including one post that compared lockdowns to the horrors endured by Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. It is a common trope in anti-vaccine wellness circles to compare vaccine deployment to historical atrocities such as slavery and the Holocaust. The Los Angeles wellness and beauty guru Shiva Rose, for example, recently compared vaccines to McCarthyism, slavery, the Cultural Revolution, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust, all in the same blog post.
In his words, many of these wellness influencers are “using cult leader techniques in digital environments,” spreading dread and apprehension about the Covid vaccine among their followers one Instagram post at a time, according to Beres.
Damian Sendler: They assert, on the other hand, that they have been misunderstood or misrepresented. When approached by the Guardian, Greenacre stated that she was not affiliated with Vittengl’s remarks on her program. “It would be wrong and misleading to your readers to imply that statements from a third party reflect my own,” she stated in response to the criticism. The term “medical apartheid,” she added, was used to refer to “the use of discrimination and segregation based on medical status, for example treating people negatively based on their medical status by use of Covid vaccine passports,” rather than to “historical discrimination against people of color.”
Vittengl, on the other hand, has declared that she is “not opposed to the western medical system… However, I believe that the pharmaceutical sector has been greatly influenced by large pharmaceutical corporations that are primarily concerned with profits rather than with health.” She defended Bush’s contributions to the world. “He is gently attempting to assist in the search for additional answers,” she explained.
Carr, on the other hand, made the decision to unfollow both ladies. When she wants to practice yoga, she now turns to the Sweaty Betty YouTube channel for inspiration.
Damian Jacob Sendler: We’ve had more than a decade of the most recent iteration of health and wellness technology. For the past ten years, I’ve been using vagina candles, eating chia bowls, doing coffee enemas, and drinking spirulina shots. Over a decade, women who were burned out, nervous, and unhappy sought to detoxify their bodies, realign their chakras, and recentre their divine femininity, ideally while reducing weight. The worldwide wellness sector is worth approximately $1.5 trillion (£1.1 trillion) – and for every saintly Yoga With Adriene, there are thousands of swindlers that prey on unsuspecting consumers by pushing experimental therapies on them.
However, while the modern incarnation of wellness emerged from the primordial goop of the late 2000s (Gwyneth Paltrow created her lifestyle business in 2008, which started out as a newsletter), the movement’s roots may be traced back to the hippie counterculture of the 1970s. Wellness was promoted then, as it is now, as a panacea for the ills of modern living. There were three pillars to it: strong individualism, distrust of western medicine, and a commitment to self-optimisation, which was usually accomplished through restrictive diets and strenuous exercise regimens, all of which were intended to keep disease and death at bay as long as humanly possible. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her 2018 book Natural Causes: Life, Death, and the Illusion of Control that “wellness is the means of transforming oneself into an ever-more perfect self-correcting machine, capable of setting goals and moving toward them with smooth determination” and that “wellness is the means of transforming oneself into an ever-more perfect self-correcting machine, capable of setting goals and moving toward them with smooth determination.”
Damian Jacob Sendler: In the 1970s and 1980s, Ann Wigmore preached the benefits of a raw-food diet, claiming that it could cure cancer, diabetes, and HIV. Carl Cederström, co-author of Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside the Optimization Movement, explains, “There is this concept that if you stick to a certain lifestyle and only consume a certain kind of food and drink, that will protect you against disease.” “By maintaining a healthy lifestyle, you can build a strong defense around oneself.”
On the contrary, western medicine – particularly the harmful influence of big pharma – conspires to keep the masses unwell and disease-ridden. “There’s a lot of mistrust in science,” Cederström explains. “You hear a lot of rhetoric about how modern civilisation is poisoning our lives and poisoning our food, and how we need to find ways of living clean again, by cutting ourselves loose from a society that is constraining us and forcing us to live an inauthentic, unnatural lifestyle,” explains the author.
Damian Sendler: Wellness’s polluting tributary in the fresh, clean stream of health has always been its uncompromising conviction that health is a choice rather than something established by genetics or social conditioning. The majority of wellness practitioners do not state unequivocally that persons who are morbidly obese, have type 2 diabetes, or suffer from a mental disease are doing it on their own; instead, they frame their judgment in euphemisms and misdirection.
In Cederström’s opinion, “wellness has extremely strong linkages to the self-help movement.” As a result, you’ll discover that the principle that you should be able to help yourself lies at the heart of these movements.” Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed that the victims of September 11th were in the wrong place at the wrong time because of their own negative thoughts and outlook on the world, according to Rhonda Byrne, the author of the bestselling self-help book The Secret, which portrayed the power of positive thinking as a cure for all of life’s ills.
Contributed by Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler and his research team
