Coalescence between the diverse strains of both New Age woo and conspiracism became very observable during the Covid pandemic and the new possible pathways to the Far Right opened up by antivaxxer activism has been a matter of concern for opponents of the far right and anti-disinformation specialists. Conspirituality appears to represent a marriage of feminine/feminist narratives around the wholeness of natural health practices/aversion to excessive health technology innovation/adverse lived experiences of women of medical authoritarianism and masculine nationalist anxieties about wokeness, gender identity politics and the loss of cultural location due to the twin evils of globalisation: loss of manufacturing jobs overseas and immigration.
Both the spiritualist inspired antivaxxers and the MAGA devotees of Donald Trump respectively have trouble with basic factual knowledge. Many of the former deny that Covid-19 was actually a coronavirus; to them it was just a seasonal flu. The latter’s belief in the ontology of “alternative facts” is well attested to, the most notorious being the “stolen election” lie around the 2020 US Presidential Election. Both raise the spectres of hidden, unaccountable power be that of Big Pharma or The Deep State. Both fear that the influence of both represent an existential threat to individual liberties. Both share a distrust of big government which has morphed into the most incredible paranoia around “New World Order” institutions and personages be they the United Nations, World Economic Forum, World Health Organisation and globalists like George Soros and Bill Gates. Both preach a gospel of individual responsibility and ultimately oppose socialised medicine, and such opposition goes hand-in-hand with the snake oil sales MO of alternative or disgraced medics such as Christine Northrup. The threat to public health which this hostility to the Nanny State means my review of New Age Conspirituality demonology and liturgy has to start with the figure that to many of that parish is the Devil Incarnate – the epidemiologist, Dr Anthony Fauci.
For thirty-eight years, Anthony Fauci served as Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until his retirement in December 2022. He has been adviser to both Democratic and Republican parties. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, not least for his efforts in developing a global programme to fight HIV/AIDS estimated to have saved twenty million lives.[1] But because of his central role in organising vaccination programmes throughout the course of the COVID pandemic in his capacity as Lead Public Health Director in the US, he has been the archetypal villain of the piece for conspiritualists.
But why is vaccination such a bugbear for these discontents? Metaphorically, the very act of vaccination, involving as it does the puncturing of the defensive casing of skin, is an act of invasion. It is an underhand means of enabling the introduction of foreign organisms into the bodies of native, pure blood Americans (or any unsullied peoples). It is a way of enslaving free citizens, without their awareness of their captivity.[2]
The vehemence of opposition to vaccination from its enemies is, in my opinion, to the visceral opposition to artificial contraception and other means of controlling women’s fertility that since the late 19th century emanated from Christian, mostly Catholic, religious fundamentalists. For both anti-vaxxers and opponents of contraception, both medical innovations represented an attack on the natural and/or divine order of things. Both involve violation of bodily purity. They are almost diabolic transgressions of the cosmos. Both use pseudo-science to portray the most outlandish effects of the respective measures. Opponents of Covid vaccines jumped on reports of rare and localised pericarditis deaths resulting from the Astra Zeneca shot to universalise this small risk. Opponents of the MMR jab persist in peddling the wholly discredited link between it and the incidence of autism in children advanced by the disgraced British medic Dr Andrew Wakefield. Opponents of abortion cherry pick medical data to claim associations of pregnancy termination with breast cancer and infertility. Quite simply, to their detractors artificial contraception and vaccination are, plain and simply, dirty.
Both also represent threats to the purity of nations and ideals. Restrictions on women’s reproductive freedoms are part and parcel of pronatalist state agendas. The tightening up of abortion laws in mid and late 19th century America was motivated largely to protect the purity and fecundity of the WASP majority from being overwhelmed by waves of immigration from Catholic countries like Ireland and Italy. Bearing in mind the overlap between both constituencies, could it be that the perceived invasiveness of the jab in the minds of antivaxxers resembles the “invasion” of the US from beyond its borders by Mexican and other immigrants as conceived in the minds of MAGA followers?
To his accusers, such as the Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham, Anthony Fauci is a personification of the ‘medical deep state.’ For how unAmerican could it be for an epidemiologist out to deprive Americans of their sacred freedom of movement; the sovereign integrity of their physical person and their right to not to wear masks at any time of their volition. The demonisation of Fauci among Ms Ingraham’s ideological colleagues and soulmates has assumed Tennessee Monkey Trial or pre-Enlightenment proportions. In this Kulturkampf, scientific research and years of research are metaphorically consigned to the bonfire by the latter-day Inquisitors of Fox News and the Alt-Right media ecosystem. For Tucker Carlson, former Fox News anchor, Fraud is ’a hypocritical buffoon’ and ‘a dangerous fraud who has done things that in most countries at most times in history would be understood perfectly to be very serious crimes.’[3]
The hyperbole took on even more hysterical, not to say egregiously offensive, dimensions by accusations of Nazi type criminality from within the Fox News bubble. In November 2021, Lara Logan, accused Fauci of causing ‘immense suffering’ and declared that he ‘does not represent science, what he represents is Josef Mengele’, the notorious Nazi doctor who performed experiments on Jews in Auschwitz.[4] Antivaccine activists have called for those involved in the development of vaccines to be arraigned under the Nuremberg Code of ethical principles for human experimentation drawn up after the Nazis’ fiendish experiment programme, ignoring presumably the fact that participation in the medical trials for Covid vaccines was entirely voluntary.
A month later, Jesse Watters, another Fox News agitprop commentator, urged, metaphorically as its viewers were asked to interpret her instruction, ‘activists’ to ambush Fauci with questions that would be ‘the kill shot… Boom boom’ He’s dead! He’s gone...’ Metaphor or not, some of Fauci’s critics have been willing to put into practice such guidance with emails from a deranged crank called Thomas Patrick Connally who in April 2021 expressed his fervent wish ‘that you and your entire family will be dragged into the street and beaten to death and set on fire.’ For this wish, Connally was prosecuted and convicted but death threats have been persistent enough for Fauci to require round-the-clock security.[5]
In the US Congress, Fauci’s self-anointed prosecutors sought to represent him and vaccines as agents in the attempted theft of US citizens of their God-given liberty. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas described Fauci as ‘an unelected technocrat [who] distorted science and facts in order to exercise authoritarian control over millions of lives.’ Rand Paul of Kentucky, the first Senator to contract Covid, has tried to prove with missionary zeal that vaccine protection is overrated, by enunciating that, on the basis of two prints (neither published or peer-reviewed), that the immunity acquired by infection was at least as effective as vaccination and announced that he would eschew vaccination. However, this confidence did not factor in questions over the duration of that immunity and, more saliently, of whether or not immunity acquired against, for example, the Delta version of the virus would counteract Omicron or other developing variants.[6]
Hostility to the ‘medical deep state’ into which conspirituality has morphed into is a quintessential aspect of the libertarian right discourse around rugged individualism, the liberty of the self and opposition to Big Government. The gospel of Health Freedom required not just an anti-Christ in the form of the Faucis who have in its view abused their positions of scientific authority to impinge on the rights of individuals and families, but a search for redeemers, populist medical heroes who would challenge this tyranny and provide a form of medication that would bypass the need for vaccines. Enter Dr Vladimir Zelenko, portrayed as ‘a simple country doctor’ but actually a suburban physician whose practice was located in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community of Kiryas Joel in New York. In the last week of March 2020 as the pandemic had tightened its global grip, in an open letter to President Donald Trump, claimed that a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, a drug used against immune system disorders including lupus, plus azithromycin and zinc, prevented the onset of any serious, life-threatening disorders in Covid-19 infected patients.[7]
Despite Zelenko’s claim that among the 600-odd patients using the prescription there had been ‘zero’ cases of intubation, ventilation, or death, he had conducted no comparative trials, nor published any of his ‘research’. However, this did not prevent the adoption of hydroxychloroquine as the free Americans’ Covid antidote by hard right media personalities like Laura Ingraham and Joe Rogan and, most consequentially, by Trump himself. The findings in August 2020 of a scientifically rigorous trial of the drug by infectious disease researchers at the University of Minnesota that it had no measurable effect in the prevention of infection nor in the mitigation of the severity of symptoms did not stymie any right-wing enthusiasm for it and for the defiance of mask wearing instructions. In the cause of this crusade for health freedom and defiance of the medical deep state, prominent danger deniers and vaccine refuseniks like Herman Cain – Tea Party activist, CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and former presidential candidate died after attending maskless Trump rallies as did five popular right-wing talk hosts in August and September 2020 including Jimmy de Young, who insisted that vaccination was ‘a form of government control’ and Bob Enyart, who believed vaccines were ‘immorally developed’.[8]
But none of this prevented the enthusiasm of another vaccine-alternative: ivermectin. Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic and anti-inflammatory drug most commonly used to rid livestock and horses of nematode-borne disease, but occasionally prescribed for head lice and rosacea. In December 2020, Dr Pierre Kory, a lung specialist at a Milwaukee hospital, in the first of his two testimonies about ivermectin to the US Senate Homeland Security Committee hailed it as ‘the penicillin of Covid’, citing as evidence of its efficacy in the prevention and treatment of the virus an Australian study reporting the inhibition of the virus’s ability to replicate when grown in vitro. What he did not inform the Committee was that the concentration of the drug needed to achieve that result in a petri dish was incomparably higher than anything that could be safely tolerated by humans. But nonetheless, ivermectin became the latest go to medical accessory for antivaxxers. It was cheap, available over the counter and required no needle shots. Despite the lack of any conclusive trials or any evidence of its success, it became the drug of choice for doctors’ organisations sceptical of vaccination including Kory’s Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, the British Ivermectin Recommendation Group (BIRD) and America’s Frontline Doctors. In August 2021, 88,000 doses of the antiparasitic drug were sold in the US, compared to 3,000 two years ago. Two of ivermectin’s most fervent advocates, Joe Rogan who took it weekly. and Dr Kory himself, contracted nasty doses of Covid. As use of ivermectin rose in the summer of 2021, so did hospital admissions for ivermectin poisonings, with patients reporting vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of balance, dizzy spells and, in some cases, serious cerebral disorders. But neither this litany of ill effects nor the warning given earlier in the year by the drug’s manufacturer Merck that there was no evidence that was suitable or effective for Covid-19 could or would dampen the enthusiasm of Ivermectin’s supporters.[9]
Over 600,000 Americans succumbed to Covid during the length of the pandemic. It is fair to state that opposition to vaccination and to public health measures such as mask wearing and the promotion of quack cures such as ivermectin account for a great proportion of those deaths. A similar public health disaster unfolded in Brazil under the Presidency of Trump supreme acolyte Jair Bolsonaro.
Both the spiritualist inspired antivaxxers and the MAGA devotees of Donald Trump respectively have trouble with basic factual knowledge. Many of the former deny that Covid-19 was actually a coronavirus; to them it was just a seasonal flu. The latter’s belief in the ontology of “alternative facts” is well attested to, the most notorious being the “stolen election” lie around the 2020 US Presidential Election. Both raise the spectres of hidden, unaccountable power be that of Big Pharma or The Deep State. Both fear that the influence of both represent an existential threat to individual liberties. Both share a distrust of big government which has morphed into the most incredible paranoia around “New World Order” institutions and personages be they the United Nations, World Economic Forum, World Health Organisation and globalists like George Soros and Bill Gates. Both preach a gospel of individual responsibility and ultimately oppose socialised medicine, and such opposition goes hand-in-hand with the snake oil sales MO of alternative or disgraced medics such as Christine Northrup. The threat to public health which this hostility to the Nanny State means my review of New Age Conspirituality demonology and liturgy has to start with the figure that to many of that parish is the Devil Incarnate – the epidemiologist, Dr Anthony Fauci.
For thirty-eight years, Anthony Fauci served as Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until his retirement in December 2022. He has been adviser to both Democratic and Republican parties. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, not least for his efforts in developing a global programme to fight HIV/AIDS estimated to have saved twenty million lives.[1] But because of his central role in organising vaccination programmes throughout the course of the COVID pandemic in his capacity as Lead Public Health Director in the US, he has been the archetypal villain of the piece for conspiritualists.
But why is vaccination such a bugbear for these discontents? Metaphorically, the very act of vaccination, involving as it does the puncturing of the defensive casing of skin, is an act of invasion. It is an underhand means of enabling the introduction of foreign organisms into the bodies of native, pure blood Americans (or any unsullied peoples). It is a way of enslaving free citizens, without their awareness of their captivity.[2]
The vehemence of opposition to vaccination from its enemies is, in my opinion, to the visceral opposition to artificial contraception and other means of controlling women’s fertility that since the late 19th century emanated from Christian, mostly Catholic, religious fundamentalists. For both anti-vaxxers and opponents of contraception, both medical innovations represented an attack on the natural and/or divine order of things. Both involve violation of bodily purity. They are almost diabolic transgressions of the cosmos. Both use pseudo-science to portray the most outlandish effects of the respective measures. Opponents of Covid vaccines jumped on reports of rare and localised pericarditis deaths resulting from the Astra Zeneca shot to universalise this small risk. Opponents of the MMR jab persist in peddling the wholly discredited link between it and the incidence of autism in children advanced by the disgraced British medic Dr Andrew Wakefield. Opponents of abortion cherry pick medical data to claim associations of pregnancy termination with breast cancer and infertility. Quite simply, to their detractors artificial contraception and vaccination are, plain and simply, dirty.
Both also represent threats to the purity of nations and ideals. Restrictions on women’s reproductive freedoms are part and parcel of pronatalist state agendas. The tightening up of abortion laws in mid and late 19th century America was motivated largely to protect the purity and fecundity of the WASP majority from being overwhelmed by waves of immigration from Catholic countries like Ireland and Italy. Bearing in mind the overlap between both constituencies, could it be that the perceived invasiveness of the jab in the minds of antivaxxers resembles the “invasion” of the US from beyond its borders by Mexican and other immigrants as conceived in the minds of MAGA followers?
To his accusers, such as the Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham, Anthony Fauci is a personification of the ‘medical deep state.’ For how unAmerican could it be for an epidemiologist out to deprive Americans of their sacred freedom of movement; the sovereign integrity of their physical person and their right to not to wear masks at any time of their volition. The demonisation of Fauci among Ms Ingraham’s ideological colleagues and soulmates has assumed Tennessee Monkey Trial or pre-Enlightenment proportions. In this Kulturkampf, scientific research and years of research are metaphorically consigned to the bonfire by the latter-day Inquisitors of Fox News and the Alt-Right media ecosystem. For Tucker Carlson, former Fox News anchor, Fraud is ’a hypocritical buffoon’ and ‘a dangerous fraud who has done things that in most countries at most times in history would be understood perfectly to be very serious crimes.’[3]
The hyperbole took on even more hysterical, not to say egregiously offensive, dimensions by accusations of Nazi type criminality from within the Fox News bubble. In November 2021, Lara Logan, accused Fauci of causing ‘immense suffering’ and declared that he ‘does not represent science, what he represents is Josef Mengele’, the notorious Nazi doctor who performed experiments on Jews in Auschwitz.[4] Antivaccine activists have called for those involved in the development of vaccines to be arraigned under the Nuremberg Code of ethical principles for human experimentation drawn up after the Nazis’ fiendish experiment programme, ignoring presumably the fact that participation in the medical trials for Covid vaccines was entirely voluntary.
A month later, Jesse Watters, another Fox News agitprop commentator, urged, metaphorically as its viewers were asked to interpret her instruction, ‘activists’ to ambush Fauci with questions that would be ‘the kill shot… Boom boom’ He’s dead! He’s gone...’ Metaphor or not, some of Fauci’s critics have been willing to put into practice such guidance with emails from a deranged crank called Thomas Patrick Connally who in April 2021 expressed his fervent wish ‘that you and your entire family will be dragged into the street and beaten to death and set on fire.’ For this wish, Connally was prosecuted and convicted but death threats have been persistent enough for Fauci to require round-the-clock security.[5]
In the US Congress, Fauci’s self-anointed prosecutors sought to represent him and vaccines as agents in the attempted theft of US citizens of their God-given liberty. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas described Fauci as ‘an unelected technocrat [who] distorted science and facts in order to exercise authoritarian control over millions of lives.’ Rand Paul of Kentucky, the first Senator to contract Covid, has tried to prove with missionary zeal that vaccine protection is overrated, by enunciating that, on the basis of two prints (neither published or peer-reviewed), that the immunity acquired by infection was at least as effective as vaccination and announced that he would eschew vaccination. However, this confidence did not factor in questions over the duration of that immunity and, more saliently, of whether or not immunity acquired against, for example, the Delta version of the virus would counteract Omicron or other developing variants.[6]
Hostility to the ‘medical deep state’ into which conspirituality has morphed into is a quintessential aspect of the libertarian right discourse around rugged individualism, the liberty of the self and opposition to Big Government. The gospel of Health Freedom required not just an anti-Christ in the form of the Faucis who have in its view abused their positions of scientific authority to impinge on the rights of individuals and families, but a search for redeemers, populist medical heroes who would challenge this tyranny and provide a form of medication that would bypass the need for vaccines. Enter Dr Vladimir Zelenko, portrayed as ‘a simple country doctor’ but actually a suburban physician whose practice was located in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community of Kiryas Joel in New York. In the last week of March 2020 as the pandemic had tightened its global grip, in an open letter to President Donald Trump, claimed that a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, a drug used against immune system disorders including lupus, plus azithromycin and zinc, prevented the onset of any serious, life-threatening disorders in Covid-19 infected patients.[7]
Despite Zelenko’s claim that among the 600-odd patients using the prescription there had been ‘zero’ cases of intubation, ventilation, or death, he had conducted no comparative trials, nor published any of his ‘research’. However, this did not prevent the adoption of hydroxychloroquine as the free Americans’ Covid antidote by hard right media personalities like Laura Ingraham and Joe Rogan and, most consequentially, by Trump himself. The findings in August 2020 of a scientifically rigorous trial of the drug by infectious disease researchers at the University of Minnesota that it had no measurable effect in the prevention of infection nor in the mitigation of the severity of symptoms did not stymie any right-wing enthusiasm for it and for the defiance of mask wearing instructions. In the cause of this crusade for health freedom and defiance of the medical deep state, prominent danger deniers and vaccine refuseniks like Herman Cain – Tea Party activist, CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and former presidential candidate died after attending maskless Trump rallies as did five popular right-wing talk hosts in August and September 2020 including Jimmy de Young, who insisted that vaccination was ‘a form of government control’ and Bob Enyart, who believed vaccines were ‘immorally developed’.[8]
But none of this prevented the enthusiasm of another vaccine-alternative: ivermectin. Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic and anti-inflammatory drug most commonly used to rid livestock and horses of nematode-borne disease, but occasionally prescribed for head lice and rosacea. In December 2020, Dr Pierre Kory, a lung specialist at a Milwaukee hospital, in the first of his two testimonies about ivermectin to the US Senate Homeland Security Committee hailed it as ‘the penicillin of Covid’, citing as evidence of its efficacy in the prevention and treatment of the virus an Australian study reporting the inhibition of the virus’s ability to replicate when grown in vitro. What he did not inform the Committee was that the concentration of the drug needed to achieve that result in a petri dish was incomparably higher than anything that could be safely tolerated by humans. But nonetheless, ivermectin became the latest go to medical accessory for antivaxxers. It was cheap, available over the counter and required no needle shots. Despite the lack of any conclusive trials or any evidence of its success, it became the drug of choice for doctors’ organisations sceptical of vaccination including Kory’s Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, the British Ivermectin Recommendation Group (BIRD) and America’s Frontline Doctors. In August 2021, 88,000 doses of the antiparasitic drug were sold in the US, compared to 3,000 two years ago. Two of ivermectin’s most fervent advocates, Joe Rogan who took it weekly. and Dr Kory himself, contracted nasty doses of Covid. As use of ivermectin rose in the summer of 2021, so did hospital admissions for ivermectin poisonings, with patients reporting vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of balance, dizzy spells and, in some cases, serious cerebral disorders. But neither this litany of ill effects nor the warning given earlier in the year by the drug’s manufacturer Merck that there was no evidence that was suitable or effective for Covid-19 could or would dampen the enthusiasm of Ivermectin’s supporters.[9]
Over 600,000 Americans succumbed to Covid during the length of the pandemic. It is fair to state that opposition to vaccination and to public health measures such as mask wearing and the promotion of quack cures such as ivermectin account for a great proportion of those deaths. A similar public health disaster unfolded in Brazil under the Presidency of Trump supreme acolyte Jair Bolsonaro.
These deaths are the results of the wilful ignorance and hostility to socialised medicine by the Conspirituality movement and the pathways into the Alt-Right that it has facilitated. With the likelihood of future pandemics and the moves by the World Health Organisation to coordinate global cooperation against them; “health freedom” movements stand poised to, using the disinformation complex that is the corpus of social outlets like X/Twitter, inflict further damage on the capacities of public health authorities with inevitably fatal consequences.
[1] Simon Schama (2023) Foreign Bodies. Pandemics, Vaccines and The Health of Nations p.391
[2] Ibid, p.394
[3] Ibid, p.391
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid, p.392
[6] Ibid, p.397
[7] Ibid, p.393
[8] Ibid, pp.394-95
[9] Ibid, pp.395-96
[1] Simon Schama (2023) Foreign Bodies. Pandemics, Vaccines and The Health of Nations p.391
[2] Ibid, p.394
[3] Ibid, p.391
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid, p.392
[6] Ibid, p.397
[7] Ibid, p.393
[8] Ibid, pp.394-95
[9] Ibid, pp.395-96
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
