Wellness-adjacent alternative health influencers dominated the top Covid misinformation spreaders

Evidence

When the Center for Countering Digital Hate issued its list of what it termed “the Disinformation Dozen,” a group of twelve individuals that its research found were collectively responsible for originating roughly 65 percent of the junk claims circulating about Covid and vaccines, the list wasn’t populated with well-known right-wing media stars, as one might expect. Instead, it had a chiropractor and three different osteopaths, including one in Florida with a booming supplement business; a couple that sells essential oils to cure cancer and DVD sets on “taking back” your health; the editor of Health Nut News, who posts anti-Semitic memes about how the Rothschilds and “the Global elite are running the show.… #NewWorldOrder #TruthTeller”; and the guru behind the newsletter GreenMedInfo, who posts memes about how Bill Gates is using the vaccine to depopulate the earth in between advice about healing yourself with superfoods. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 565

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ongoing tracking of ‘diagonalism’ — wellness culture, anti-vax, conspiracy, and far right converging — as the concrete evidence base for the thesis. — connects to: Health misinformation moved from fringe to mainstream political discourse — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 53