Jennifer Margulis: The intersection between antivaccine beliefs and cancer quackery

Back before the pandemic, in 2018—a time that now seems like ancient history—I took note of a woman whom I referred to as a rising star in the antivaccine movement, because she was. At the time, I took notice of Jennifer Margulis mainly because, after having co-authored a book with antivax pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas and for a blog post that brought her to my attention entitled Medical Doctors Concerned We Are Giving America’s Children Too Many Vaccines Too Soon. It was a typical antivax assertion of the time, that vaccines were causing autism and all sorts of other health problems in children because we were giving too many of them to children at too young an age. (Of course, antivaxxers would never say how many and at what age they considered “safe.”) Her post was the “gateway” that led me to look at the sorts of antivaccine misinformation Margulis had been laying down on her website and elsewhere. After the pandemic hit (and totally predictably), Margulis pivoted effortlessly, as so many antivaxxers did, to anti-COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and grift. Of course, she has no clear expertise in medicine to speak of, as her PhD is in English, specifically 19th century American Literature, African-American Literature, and American Studies, but that hasn’t stopped her from becoming prominent in the antivaccine movement.

It turns out that her history dated back before 2018. The first time I had ever written about her was in 2010, when she appeared in a documentary, The Vaccine War, about the antivaccine movement. In that documentary Margulis asked why we were still vaccinating against polio now that it was so rare in the US? She next came to my attention when she opposed SB 277, the California law passed in 2015 that banned nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, seeing “pharma shills” everywhere among the law’s supporters. By 2017, she was supporting Dr. Bob Sears, co-authoring the aforementioned antivax book with antivax pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas, and appearing in Ty and Charlene Bollinger’s The Truth About Vaccines. After that, she periodically showed up to speak at various antivax rallies, which brings us back to 2018, when I first referred to her as a rising star in the antivaccine movement.

While it is true that I detest antivaxxers, even so I wouldn’t wish what has happened to Margulis on my worst enemy—not even Mike Adams. It’s recounted on a GiveSendGo fundraising campaign by Ginger Taylor, whom you might recognize as one of the main bloggers over at the antivaccine blog Age of Autism, with the campaign entitled The Eyes of Jennifer Margulis:

For many years, those seeking insight into how to navigate this difficult health care landscape have been blessed by the compassionate, loving brilliance of Jennifer Margulis. Her books and her articles for the Epoch Times have been like a lighthouse in the storm for untold numbers of people struggling to find truth and healing. Now she is the one who needs our support as she begins her own journey to preserve her eyesight, her health, and her life.

You can read Jennifer’s cheerfully grieving piece on the prospect of facing Ocular Melanoma on her Substack. https://jennifermargulis.substack.com/p/n1 Please consider becoming a paid supporter of hers there as well.

As we know, alternative health interventions can be very expensive, and Jennifer (the family’s primary breadwinner) has stopped everything to change her life into one of total healing to beat this steep challenge. So let’s dig deep to make sure she has what she needs to heal totally.

Please pray for Jennifer that God would give her wisdom and understanding into how the condition arose and how to heal it, that any complication from the condition would be interrupted and reversed, for Jennifer to experience joy in this difficult time, and that she would feel God’s constant presence and love.

Again, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, and, whether Margulis or her antivax fans believe it or not, I feel for her. Ocular melanoma—also known as uveal melanoma—is a melanoma that arises in the eye. It’s a rare cancer, but treatable. Unfortunately, as you might imagine, all the treatments risk the loss of vision in the affected eye. Sometimes, if the cancer is large, the treatment involves enucleation (removal of the affected eye). For smaller cancers, there is the possibility of surgery on the eye to remove just the cancer or targeted radiotherapy, both of which pose a risk to the vision in that eye. There are also less common therapies, such as laser ablation, photodynamic therapy, and cryotherapy. As Cancer Research UK notes, this possibility is a something that really, really freaks people out—and understandably so—but enucleation is also associated with a more than acceptable quality of life. Like most cancers, the prognosis depends upon the stage, with metastatic disease having a dismal prognosis and more localized disease having a favorable prognosis, but, again, the price for that prognosis can be the loss of the affected eye.

Personally, I really hope that Margulis chooses conventional therapy. Yes, it will be horrible for her if she loses vision in that eye or has to lose the eye itself, but you know what? At least she’ll be alive and should, after an adjustment, be able to live a pretty normal life.

Given how much I used to write about cancer quackery, particularly Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s antineoplaston quackery, I was curious what sort of alternative cancer treatments she is seeking. Unfortunately, her article describing her learning about her diagnosis is on her Substack, and it’s one of her newsletters that are behind a paywall. She begins by noting her symptoms:

For a few months now I’ve had floaters in my eyes. They’ve been bothering me. So I did what I often do when I have a health problem: I ignored it, telling myself the problem would go away by itself. 

But when the vision in my left eye started to get occluded, I suspected I had a more serious problem. 

It takes a lot to get me to go to the doctor. But the floaters weren’t self-resolving and my vision was getting noticeably worse.

Reluctantly, I made an appointment to see an ophthalmologist. The eye doctor wanted to see me ASAP.

“I either have a brain tumor or I need surgery,” I said to my husband before I left.

I will note that surgery for floaters is rarely needed and usually done only as a last resort, with a less radical option being to disrupt the floaters with laser treatment. In any event, here’s what happened next:

The tech at the eye doctor’s had me do an eye test. My right eye got an A+. But when she asked me to read the largest letter on the screen with my left eye, I couldn’t even see that there was a letter on the screen. It was a black smear that may or may not have had straight lines. 

Turns out it’s not good to be nearly blind in one eye. 

The ophthalmologist believed I had a “detached retina,” which would likely require emergency surgery—laser if it were straightforward, non-laser if not—and that the procedure needed to be done immediately to keep the retina from detaching further. He referred me to a retinal specialist who wanted to see me right away.

On the one hand, it’s rather wonderful when medical doctors find you interesting. On the other, you don’t ever want to have anything going on with your health that actually interests a medical doctor. Believe me on this.

So my left eye and I drove to the retinal specialist. We may have cried the whole way. Crying is good for your eyes. 

At that point in my day, the idea of taking a knife to my eyeball was terrifying. 

Hence the crying. 

Indeed it is. I’ll even take this opportunity to let you in on a little secret. I’m a surgeon. I trained as a general surgeon. I’ve resected large swaths of dead bowel, dived into bellies full of pus, drained huge abscesses, gotten drenched in bloody diarrhea, and had urine hit me in the face during a trauma code. Yet I find eye surgery seriously cringey and gross. I can’t do it. Eye trauma freaked me out back in the day when I was still doing trauma.

So I get it. I really do. The thought of having surgery on my eye, much less losing an eye, creeps me out.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I’ve been very nearsighted since I was in grade school and have required glasses with a strong prescription as long as I can remember. As a result, sometimes joke about looking forward to getting cataracts so that I can get my lenses replaced and not have to wear glasses with thick lenses anymore, but then I think of the surgery necessary and…let’s just say that I get it, even more so because losing the vision in one of my eyes would end my career as a surgeon. I empathize, again, whether Margulis—should she see this—and her fans believe me or not.

A reader sent me the text of the rest of her post, and this is what happened next:

After all the exams were completed and the husband had been dropped off by a dear friend (we only own one car), the doctor made his diagnosis.

“I think you have melanoma. In your eye,” he said. “I can’t be one hundred percent sure but that’s what it looks like to me. I see a greater than 10 millimeter tumor.”

I hadn’t seen that coming. Get it?

Apparently there’s a five in a million chance of this kind of cancer. For the past five years, my husband has been dealing with a life-threatening heart condition so rare it only affects one in a million people.

What are the odds? Wait. We know the answer to that question already.

I also get it. People never think things like this will happen to them. The rarer the disease the more disbelief they feel when they do, and Margulis clearly feels this disbelief:

Plus, I’m a writer who strives to open people’s eyes to injustice and hypocrisy, especially when it comes to how corporate greed and for-profit medicine put profits over people.

So what am I not seeing? What have I turned a blind eye to? Why a tumor in my eye?

It’s hard not to notice how Margulis does use a lot of sight and eye metaphors about her diagnosis and her having not realized how badly the vision in her eye had been affected until now. I can’t blame her, but I also can’t help but note that, since 2010 at least, her career has been about anything but “opening eyes.” She’s been an active spreader of antivaccine misinformation since at least 2010. None of this is to say that she deserves to have an ocular melanoma. No one does.

This brings me to the affinity between antivaccine beliefs and alternative medicine. The online fundraiser started by her friends is, thus far, relatively modest, only $10,000, but it’s already raised more than that, over $12,500. But what will it be for? It’s not yet clear, but this is what Margulis is thinking now:

If I go the allopathic medical route, first I need to confirm the diagnosis via an MRI. If it’s cancer and it hasn’t spread, my options are to have a radiation patch sewn onto the white of my eyeball and then radiate the heck out of my eye or the doctors may recommend that we try shrinking the tumor via proton beam therapy. Either way, according to the retinal specialist, even if they get the cancer, I risk losing my sight in that eye. And/or losing my eyeball. This kind of cancer can metastasize and spread, via the bloodstream, to the liver.

“Then it’s a whole different ballgame,” he said. Metastatic ocular cancer isn’t a walk in the park. Here I am, a woman who makes a living as a science writer, using clichés and mixing metaphors. It must be serious.

Let me just say once again that I really, really hope that Margulis chooses the “allopathic medical route.” (I know, I know. “Allopathic” is a derogatory term invented by the inventor of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, to contrast conventional medicine with his One Quackery To Rule Them All, with Hahnemann believing that, unlike homeopathy, “allopathy”  only treated disease by opposing symptoms and that they offered nothing in terms of preventing illness or addressing the root causes of disease Margulis’ use of the term betrays her bias.) Her use of the term betrays her bias.

I also need to emphasize that Margulis does not yet know if she has ocular melanoma. In a followup post on Wednesday, she noted:

I don’t know yet if I have cancer in my eye. I don’t think you can safely biopsy the cells inside your eyeball but I am hoping that the ocular oncologist at the Casey Eye Center in Portland, Oregon will be able to confirm or refute the diagnosis when I see her next week.

In the same post, she speculates that a woman’s cervical cancer might have been cured by just “talking”—or maybe massive lifestyle changes—rather than hysterectomy, although she does concede the possibility that Pap smear results had been mixed up. Meanwhile, she invokes a very common alternative medicine view of cancer:

Louise Hay, the metaphysical thinker who wrote the international bestseller, You Can Heal Your Life, argued that cancer is a disease caused by deep resentment that literally eats away at your body. 

Hay—herself a survivor of vaginal cancer—believed strongly that if you can clear the mental patterns that caused the cells to grow unchecked in the first place, you open up space to allow your body to heal.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve likened the alternative medicine view of cancer to The Secret, that New Age mystical idea that, if you only want something badly enough, the universe will manifest it to you. Her view is reminiscent of a lot of cancer quackery, such as German New Medicine and its bastard French offspring Biologie Totale, which state that cancer is a reaction to past psychic trauma that must be addressed before the cancer can be cured. Indeed, alternative medicine is rife with bogus concepts based on the idea that cancer is not a disease, referring to the “wisdom of cancer cells” and how your intention is able to go a long way, if not all the way, in curing cancer. Unfortunately, as I have said many times, the flip side of these beliefs is that if your cancer progresses to incurable then it must be your fault. Either you didn’t want healing enough or you did something wrong. Come to think of it, the same consideration applies to getting cancer in the first place. If you read Margulis’ writing, you’ll see that she is hinting at this concept herself, with all her self-questioning regarding why she probably has ocular melanoma.

She also cites someone with whom longtime readers of this blog might be familiar. After relating anecdotes of patients who “beat cancer,” she mentions Chris Wark:

When he was 26, Chris Wark was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had a golfball-sized tumor in his large intestine. 

When the doctors removed the tumor they found it was malignant. 

Wark had surgery (as did Hay), but he opted out of chemotherapy (as did Hay). His family and friends thought he was crazy. But Wark felt strongly that his cancer was a result of his stressful and unhealthy lifestyle. He believed, like Louise Hay, that he could find a gentler, less toxic way to heal.

I’ve discussed Chris Wark’s story in detail before. If you want the full version that explains the difference between adjuvant chemotherapy (used to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence after definitive surgery for the cancer) versus primary treatment with chemotherapy (in which chemotherapy is the primary treatment), read my ten-year-old post Chris beat cancer? He did indeed, but it wasn’t quackery that cured him. Basically, Wark was one of those fottunate patients with stage 3 colon cancer for whom surgery alone was curative. He could have reduced his risk of cancer recurrence significantly by accepting adjuvant chemotherapy, but he gambled. Fortunately for him, he didn’t lose that gamble. To put it succinctly, it was the surgery, not the quackery, that cured Chris Wark, and he was just lucky enough not to have been one of those patients who recur without chemotherapy.

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In his book, Chris Beat Cancer, Wark describes five component to what he calls the beat-cancer mindset:

1. Accept total responsibility for your health
2. Be willing to do whatever it takes
3. Take massive action
4. Make plans for the future
5. Enjoy your life and the process

“My intention is not to blame or shame you,” Wark explains, “but to empower you to take control of your situation and change your life.”

If you are “totally responsible” for your health, how is it possible not to feel personally responsible if your health declines? Of course, as a physician, I have encountered a lot of patients with breast cancer who were living what even the alt-med gurus would consider an exemplary life, a lifestyle full of what they would consider healthy foods and lots of exercise, who nonetheless developed cancer. Health exists on a continuum, and, while there is no doubt that exercise, weight control, and a healthy diet go a long way to reducing the risk of various diseases, they only go so far. Some people are just unfortunate and become ill anyway. Yet, the entire alt-med mindset is such that illness is often blamed on the person who is ill for not having lived a sufficiently “virtuous” (from a health standpoint) lifestyle.

It’s a viewpoint shared with the antivaccine movement. I often cite Del Bigtree’s rant in 2020 against people who lived what he deemed an “unhealthy” lifestyle that resulted in chronic illness that rendered them at high risk for serious disease and death from COVID-19, telling them in essence that they’d made their beds and now had to lie in them and not to expect him to change his lifestyle in order to protect them. (This was before there was a vaccine.) In the same rant, he encouraged those of us who are “healthy”—for whom, to him, COVID-19 was not a big deal—to “catch that cold” in order to produce herd immunity. A much earlier example was Bill Maher, who claimed that, because his lifestyle was so healthy, he wouldn’t catch influenza on a plane with people with the flu coughing, leading Bob Costas to mock him with an exasperated, “Oh, come on, Superman!“

Right now, Margulis is taking Wark’s “massive action”:

In the meantime, I’ve taken what Chris Beat Cancer calls “Massive Action” and spent three hours being evaluated by an integrative-minded alternative medical doctor who was able to squeeze me in.

[For those of you who are interested, this “Massive Action” so far has been: cutting out all processed sugar; converting to an all vegan all whole, real, fresh, organic diet for the time being; adding wild harvested flash frozen organic wheat grass to my cancer-beating smoothie (my friend Jane says I need to take 18 cubes a day. I’ve started with 6. Wheat grass is gross not my favorite “food,” god help me); taking amla powder (Indian gooseberry) and wild cranberry powder daily (fresh cranberries are better but it’s hard to find them this time of year); drinking green tea, matcha, dandelion root tea, and nettle tea instead of coffee (please pause your reading to observe a moment of silence for my delicious cup of morning Joe); eating a lot of fresh organic ginger and garlic (yes I smell like a cross between a pizza and a Japanese curry dish); cutting out all dairy and even alternative milks (because they’re processed); doing organic coffee enemas daily and castor oil packs at night; intermittent fasting; and being more committed to daily meditation and my other stress-relieving activities like journaling and long walks.]

None of this is going to cure her cancer or even make a dent in it, particularly the organic coffee enemas, which are a favorite form of cancer quackery associated with the Gerson protocol. None of this is likely to harm her (other than the coffee enemas, which can cause a number of complications and have a small chance of harming her), but none of it is likely to help her either.

At present, Margulis wishes:

My green eyes, which I got from my mom who got them from her mom, have always been one of my favorite features. The retinal specialist who diagnosed me with ocular melanoma made it sound like losing my sight and/or my entire left eyeball was among the best case scenarios in my future. 

I hope a combination of evidence-based allopathic medicine and integrative healing will get my body back in balance and restore the occluded vision in my left eye. In the meantime, though, I’m just feeling grateful to still be alive.

The best-case scenario for Margulis, if it turns out that she does have ocular melanoma (which seems pretty likely from her account), is that she accepts everything that science-based medicine has to offer while also doing the quackery and then survives. As I often say in cases like this, while it will bother me that if this is what happens Margulis will almost certainly credit the quackery, not the science-based medicine, for her survival and is likely to become a cancer quackery evangelist just like Chris Wark, at least she will be alive. No one deserves a miserable death from cancer, which is the direction that I fear Margulis will be heading if she doesn’t accept treatment known to impact her survival rather than hoping that some sort of alternative medicine can save her.

Finally, we should view antivaccine views as part of a worldview. Quite often, besides the political dimension of the antivaccine movement these days, that worldview is New Age woo and beliefs that “natural is better,” all of which leads to an extreme distrust of “allopathic” medicine and the misguided belief that you can heal yourself if only you want healing badly enough. It’s one reason why I’ve noticed COVID-19 antivaxxers and ivermectin pushers start drifting into cancer quackery. Unfortunately, such beliefs do not protect against deadly vaccine-preventable diseases, and they do not cure cancer. I really hope that Margulis does not find that out for herself, but fear that she very well might. Rare cancers and a belief in alternative medicine do not mix.