Two crazy old guys talking nonsense about public health policy – right? Well, yes. Last week, Donald Trump, flanked by his health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, declared that pregnant women who take Tylenol (paracetamol) increase the vulnerability of their babies to autism: a lie.
The president claimed that the Amish, many of whom shun modern medications and vaccines, “have no autism”: another lie. “I mean, there’s a rumour,” he continued, “and I don’t know if it’s so or not, that Cuba, they don’t have Tylenol because they don’t have the money for Tylenol. And they have virtually no autism, OK.” Again, nonsense.
All over the world, public health organisations, medical professionals and responsible politicians rushed to set the record straight. Full marks to Wes Streeting, the health secretary, for saying unequivocally: “Don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine.”
And shame on Nigel Farage who, when asked by LBC’s Nick Ferrari last Wednesday whether the president was right to make the link between Tylenol and autism, replied: “You know, we were told thalidomide was a very safe drug and it wasn’t. Who knows, Nick?”
Even worse, the man who wants to be our next prime minister said: “When it comes to science, I don’t side with anybody, right? You know? I don’t side with anybody, because science is never settled.”
This is a deplorable abdication of public responsibility. It is also profoundly stupid. It is indeed intrinsic to science that its frontiers are always being advanced, its findings refined, its scope increased. But the scientific method – especially falsifiability and, in medicine, the practice of double-blind, placebo-controlled testing – is inviolate. The point is, to use Farage’s clumsy phrase, we “take sides” with the researchers who stick rigorously to this practice.
Alas, that is not the end of the matter. The problem is that there is a considerable and fast-growing audience for the kind of pseudoscience and medical charlatanism in which Trump and Kennedy trade. A great many people – across the political spectrum – are receptive to this message, and it is idle to pretend otherwise.
The ugly basis of this appetite lies in the sharp decline of public trust in institutions generally, the spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media and the rise of post-truth. When, in 2007, the model and television personality Jenny McCarthy appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show to make her stand against vaccination, she said: “The University of Google is where I got my degree from”.
Thus did the sensible notion that the public should take a responsible interest in medicine, diet and exercise mutate into a challenge to the authority of health professionals per se. “Lived experience” trumped hard-won expertise; feeling eclipsed fact. Last week, for example, Trump attributed his (incorrect) views on the MMR vaccine to “what I feel”.
In her bestselling book, Good Energy (2024), his nominee as surgeon general, Casey Means, has a chapter entitled: “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor”. But this patients’ rebellion is only the start of what medicine is now up against.
Even more alarming is the cultural phenomenon that was first identified in the 2010s and aptly described as “conspirituality”. It represents a dangerous convergence of conspiracy theories and New Age wellness: it welds the belief that our lives are being manipulated by bad actors on to the sensibility of the yoga eco-ashram, the homeopathic clinic, the smoking teepee where the spirits await to heal you. It sells warmth and intimacy in contrast to the chilly bureaucracy of institutional healthcare.
As Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker write in their important 2023 book on the subject, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, it is “the handshake between hope and cynicism”. As they put it: “Regardless of gender, conspiritualists convene at the spa, or at the MMA octagon. They indulge in self-care products, but also cloak-and-dagger political intrigue. They crave nurturance, but also dominance.”
I have long been a militant opponent of “alternative” medicine. Yet I have lost track of the number of times that apparently sane, educated people have taken issue with me; citing the allegedly amazing therapeutic effect that they or a loved one have discovered by consuming industrial quantities of turmeric, smudging sage, subsisting only on juice for a month, or juggling with steak knives. The words “nature’s remedy” are my version of hate speech. But then, who needs antibiotics, MRI scans or chemotherapy when you can have your chakras given the once-over by a pale former advertising executive called Kevin?
Be in no doubt: people die because of this rubbish. In 2018, a study at Yale University of 1,000 patients with breast, prostate, lung or bowel cancer showed that those who used so-called “complementary” treatments were twice as likely to die as those who did not (mostly because they delayed or refused conventional treatment).
In June, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, the world’s largest cancer conference, senior doctors presented new evidence that patients are turning away from science-based medicine in favour of coffee enemas, raw juice diets and other snake-oil therapies.
In August, the inquest into the death in 2024 of 23-year-old Paloma Shemirani, from Uckfield in East Sussex, heard that she refused conventional treatment after a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and opted instead for “five coffee enemas a day”.
These are the real-world consequences of the deranged culture spawned by countless online influencers; celebrity brands such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop that legitimise nonsense; and the inability of supposedly intelligent people to grasp that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.
To this epidemic of idiocy, the wave of conspirituality has added the more sinister notion that public health policy is just another means by which the “Deep State”, Big Pharma or even – at the fringes – the 13 satanic bloodlines of the Illuminati seek to control and enslave us all.
As Beres, Remski and Walker note, it is all too easy to cross “the threshold between green smoothie social media into the cesspools of anonymous message boards”.
There is, they add, a pathway “linking the appearance of progressivism to some very reactionary impulses”. The route, one might say, from Burning Man to the burning cross; from New Age to new right.
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The great rocket booster to such delusions was, of course, Covid-19. As the first pandemic of the digital age, it was always destined to present governments, NGOs and the medical profession with an entirely new range of challenges. At precisely the moment that public trust was most essential, a global army of online contrarians was braced not only to leap on missteps by those in authority – missteps that are inevitable in any such health crisis – but to exploit humanity’s shredded nerves and cultural wounds to peddle their lies.
And what lies they told: ranging from disinformation about the therapeutic value of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to crazed allegations that it was all Chinese biological warfare or that 5G masts were “enemy infrastructure” that would activate microchips injected into the bloodstream by the Covid vaccine.
This elaborate tech-conspiracy, it was claimed, would enable Bill Gates to control us all. Belly bands were marketed to pregnant women to protect their infants from 5G.
Lockdown was the ideal pressure cooker in which such paranoia could, and did, fester. It encouraged billions of isolated people to feel both subject to unprecedented surveillance and utterly neglected.
The vaccine was not shared around the world as equitably as it should have been. But the speed of its production and its efficacy – at least in developed nations – will be remembered as one of the miracles of medical history. It saved countless lives from a disease that, lest it be forgotten, has already claimed more than seven million.
Yet it also became – almost literally – the spear’s tip of a furious political and cultural battle that endures to this day. Vaccines, by definition, are emblematic of collective trust: they represent not only self-protection, but also a readiness to protect others. They are the safest route to the herd immunity that has eradicated smallpox, almost eliminated polio and radically reduced the incidence of a host of childhood diseases.
But opponents of vaccines perceive them very differently: they see them as a poison rushed into industrial-scale deployment by the authorities in league with Big Pharma and Big Tech. They see them not as a gift to humanity, but as axiomatically inhumane.
According to this demented world-view, the injection is not a therapy at all. It is an invasion of the body, a contamination, a poisoning. This is why many vaccine refusers started referring to themselves as “purebloods” and joining dating apps exclusively for the unvaccinated. There is even an online market in sperm allegedly donated by men whose genes have not been wrecked by the satanic jab.
Again, one should never forget the real-world results of anti-vaxx craziness. A joint study in 2023 by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health estimated that between May 30 2021 and September 3 2022, at least 232,000 deaths in the US could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults.
Even before Covid, anti-vaxx lies were responsible for many fatalities. In June 2019, RFK Jr visited Samoa, where the measles vaccine was being blamed for the deaths of two infants – incorrectly, it transpired. But immunisation rates halved to 31% after his visit, more than 57,000 were infected and 83 died.
What was then the twisted preoccupation of a high-profile campaigner is now unfolding as public policy in the most powerful nation on earth. Among the most exciting branches of medical science today is mRNA-based vaccination. In August, Kennedy terminated 22 federal contracts worth $500m in that field and, for good measure, sacked Dr Susan Monarez, the director of the CDC, for refusing to dismiss vaccine experts “without cause”.
In this country, the government continues to pursue sane immunisation policies. Farage, on the other hand, gave a slot at Reform’s party conference under the heading “Make Britain Healthy Again” to Dr Aseem Malhotra, an adviser to RFK, who passed on a second-hand claim that “the Covid vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor, in the cancer of members of the royal family”.
To repeat the point: such quackery would be merely absurd, were it not that so many are receptive to it. In 2023, about 70% of UK adults said that vaccinations were safe and effective – down from 90% in 2018. Worse, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who say that vaccines are safe and effective fell from 80% in 2019 to less than 60% in 2023.
Why are we growing less confident in medical science and its marvels? Less emotionally invested in one of the foundation stones of the Enlightenment and of modernity? As Beres, Remski and Walker argue in their book, the champions of conspirituality have “found a compelling storytelling machine that amplifies their passions”.
Covid showed that “it’s not enough to have science on your side. Mythology helps, too. You need a compelling story. Conspirituality is a masterful storytelling medium… [Online influencers] can make the abstract, vaguely upbeat comms of medical professionalism seem pale in comparison.”
This is a striking analogue to the predicament now faced by technocratic centrists as they combat the populist right, with its grandiose narratives. Indeed, the connections extend far beyond metaphor.
It is no accident, for example, that Turning Point USA, the right wing youth movement co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk, has a successful wellness and spirituality podcast called Cultural Apothecary.
And it is no accident that the anti-vaxxers say that these life-saving serums are poisons. How easily that maps on to Trump’s claim, during the presidential campaign that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”.
In this respect, the cult of wellness aligns precisely with the quasi-eugenic spirit of MAGA (never forget that Himmler idealised the SS as the Third Reich’s equivalent of a yogic monastic order). The vaccine invades the body just as the migrant invades the homeland.
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From this ugly perspective, personal health is a matter of genetic purity, moral fibre and mental strength, not environment, nutrition and accessible medical care. Their “holistic” medicine offers the phoney promise of heroic transformation. Its heartless flipside is that those for whom it does not work are made to feel that they have failed. They are not just ill. They are weak.
Witness Trump’s trifecta: authoritarianism; the rising theocracy so evident at Charlie Kirk’s memorial in Arizona; and, less noticed but spreading at pace, the infection of conspirituality. Hi-jacking the faddish ideas that thrived in the counterculture of the 1960s and rose again among the affluent liberal middle class in the present century, it is now nurturing a hypermodern form of body fascism.
Therein lies only cruelty masquerading as compassion. The practical effect is old men exposing the very young to preventable disease, while telling mothers that, if their children are autistic, it might be their fault. Which really is sick.
