More Arizona families are opting their kindergarteners out of vaccinations. Here in Arizona, Axios reports, 8.5% of kindergarteners were exempt last school year. That’s a whole lot higher than the national average, which sits a little over 3%.
Vaccine skepticism has been growing in recent years, and now one of the most famous among them, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
But vaccine skepticism doesn’t only come from the far right. In fact, Christy Harrison says the world of online wellness influencers who question the establishment when it comes to health decisions comes from both the right and the left.
“On the left, wellness influencers are often moms, or they’re like yoga practitioners or spiritual gurus in some way,“ Harrison told The Show, ”but might be a mom who claims to have healed herself from autoimmune disease by eating naturally and using natural home products and things like that, and eschewing medications and also is anti-vaccine or is promoting specific things for raising your kids.”
Harrison is a journalist, dietitian and author of the book “The Wellness Trap” as well as the Rethinking Wellness newsletter on Substack. She’s an expert on this world, and she said there’s also a wellness archetype that’s emerging on the right.
“Kind of a more masculine gym bro sort of fitness influencer type who’s very into preparedness and masculinity and virility and sort of wanting to enhance all that through supplements and dietary changes and time at the gym,” she said.
And Harrison says it’s getting harder to tell the difference between the two political perspectives on wellness on social media these days. The political horseshoe has become a circle — with little space left between far-left and far-right. They’re all anti-establishment now.
But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, Harrison said she started her career working in eco lifestyle magazines in the early 2000s. Back then, it was all left-leaning people who were questioning big agriculture from an environmental point of view. But even then, she saw echoes of what was to come.
Full conversation
CHRISTY HARRISON: I remember even then we reported on this phenomenon called crunchy cons, which were conservatives who had organic and free-range farms. They shopped local. They homeschooled their kids. They were more like back-to-the-land hippies than conventional conservatives at the time, who were more in favor of big business and big agriculture and things like that.
And I looked back at this “Crunchy Con Manifesto” recently because I was remembering that this had been a thing. And there’s something in there that really stands out today, which is big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. And I think we’re seeing that now. You know, that sort of crunchy con ethos is really taking over on the right more too.
LAUREN GILGER: So I can see the way that those two worlds have overlapped and intertwined in recent years. But talk a little bit about where this came from. How did COVID play into this and the kind of mandates that surrounded the pandemic?
As you mentioned, this goes back decades. But I’m imagining that more recently, the social media phenomenon and the pandemic might have played a role.
HARRISON: Absolutely. Yeah. So it does go back decades. On the left there’s the wellness movement sort of dating back to the ’60s and ’70s with hippie culture and organic food and alternative medicine and all that. And then that sort of crunchy con phenomenon actually emerged back in the ’70s and ’80s, there was sort of some convergence of left and right around that.
But I think with COVID, it really supercharged this anti-establishment perspective that people had and this questioning of the conventional health care system, of public health. There was some real botched messaging about masks, for example, in the early days of saying, “Don’t wear masks and save the masks for the essential workers.”
And then it came out, “Oh no, masks are actually important.” And specifically N95s, not just these homemade cloth things. And then you started to have questioning of mask mandates.
And I think with the right, there’s always been this sort of personal freedom argument that’s more salient. It’s like, “They’re trying to take away our freedoms. The government’s trying to make us into sheep and make us do what they want. And we need to resist that. And we need to take back our agency and our freedom.”
Left wing wellness I think is also very much about personal freedom and personal choice as well. And so it involves more like the choice to opt out of conventional systems to go against big food and big pharma and choose more things that are perceived as more holistic, wholesome, natural foods and medicine. So like alternative medicine and modalities that are perceived as ancient and non-Western, even if they are really co-opted and culturally appropriated.
And so that side, too, is very anti-establishment. And I think there is a real personal health personal responsibility streak even on the left. So I think the environment was just so ripe for this kind of amalgamation to happen, where the left and the right are sort of out there on the fringes now, and now what was so fringe is becoming more mainstream: this sort of anti-science, anti-establishment view of health.
GILGER: So let’s talk then about where we are now. This moment is such an interesting moment to talk about this spectrum of sort of misinformation on both sides. Where does somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his supporters fit into this spectrum?
HARRISON: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting because RFK Jr kind of symbolizes the meeting of those two sides in a lot of ways. He was historically a Democrat, but he for a long time has embraced conspiracy theories about vaccines. So I think his switch over to MAGA world and being embraced by the right, I think his point of view and sort of conspiracist beliefs about vaccines and all kinds of other things and wellness culture do fit more naturally with the MAGA movement and with that sort of far right belief in personal freedom.
And personal freedom at all costs, really. At the cost of public health, at the cost of science and institutions and all of that. And it’s just interesting to see that there’s this real embrace functional medicine people and Make America Healthy Again and getting ultraprocessed foods out of schools and all these things that there isn’t really good scientific evidence to support.
And this turn against processed foods especially and thinking about children’s health used to be such a province of the left or of Democrats. And even with Michelle Obama, especially her Let’s Move campaign and her efforts to improve school food and things like that were criticized on the right as a sort of unjust interference by government into public life.
And so now we see the same sorts of policies being proposed on the right.
GILGER: One of the reasons, Christy, this is so complicated, I think, is social media and sort of the misleading nature of what you can read there and who’s on it, but also just the fact that — and you mentioned this — that a lot of this is justified skepticism, right? There are problems with our health care system, with ultraprocessed foods, things like this.
How does that sort of bolster influencers, but also kind of just complicate things for the rest of us?
HARRISON: Yeah, I mean, I think the thing is that conspiracy theories generally always have some grain of truth. And I think with the conspiracy theories that we see around vaccines or other things in the health care system, there have been some unfortunate, genuine conspiracies, right? Like big tobacco’s conspiring to cover up evidence that tobacco actually does harm people and cause cancer.
So I think people have a justified skepticism. And I will say, as a dietitian I’ve looked into the scientific evidence behind a lot of these claims about food dyes and ultraprocessed foods and things like that. And I think the science is definitely not there to support cutting out ultraprocessed foods completely or banning these dyes completely. I think there’s a lot of nuance to that evidence.
But of course, that doesn’t sell on social media, right? Nuance and science and truth don’t really go very far on social media. And there’s actually evidence that misinformation spreads farther, faster to more people by more people than the truth.
GILGER: And there’s also such an opportunity on social media to sell stuff, which is what a lot of these influencers are doing.
HARRISON: Exactly. And it’s a proven, tried and true method to make people feel scared about something, to say “You don’t know what’s lurking in your food” or “This thing is poison and they’re not telling you” or “Doctors are covering this up” and “Here, buy my supplement to detox.”
GILGER: So let me ask you lastly, Christy, just how it is that we should approach this kind of content — not just on social media, but now, you know, in the mainstream, in the government, in the news, in our public officials?
HARRISON: The biggest thing is just to be incredibly skeptical of anything you see on social media related to health and wellness. And the same with government statements and public health recommendations coming out of the new administration.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a claim in, you know, some alternative medicine or functional medicine person’s blog post that’s like, “You need to cut out gluten because a study found that, you know, gluten causes inflammation via this, this and this pathway” or whatever.
And then they’ll footnote it, and there’ll be a link in the footnote that goes to the study.
GILGER: Which makes it seem legit, right?
HARRISON: It makes it seem legit. And most people don’t click through because it’s like, “Oh, there’s a footnote, there’s a study. Looks good.”
But take that extra step and click through, and you’ll often see that it doesn’t actually show what it claims to show. Sometimes these are just, now at this point I think sometimes AI generated.
