Larry Cook: A time warp cornucopia of antivax quackery

In the age of COVID-19, everything old is new again with respect to antivaccine quackery. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s antivax group Children’s Health Defense even held a 23 year memorial at the CDC over the Simpsonwood conference, which became the basis of RFK Jr.’s fear mongering antivax conspiracy theory in 2005 published in Salon.com and Rolling Stone while antivaxxers like Steve Kirsch have been resurrecting the old “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory that first arose in 2014 but was really popularized by Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield’s conspira-documentary VAXXED. I admit that I didn’t do more than sample the video, given that it was over four hours long, but truly I felt like we were doing the Time Warp to 18 years ago. I was further reminded of dredging up of every debunked old bit of antivax quackery earlier this week when I came across longtime antivaxxer Larry Cook‘s June 2023 update to his Vaccine Injury Treatment, Recovery And Resource Starter Guide.

Truly, antivaxxers are partying like it’s 2005, only six years later than Prince’s song with Cook being among one of the foremost dancers.

I’ll show you what I mean with Cook’s introduction:

Now that I am back on Twitter I am getting a lot of requests by parents on how to help their children who are vaccine injured, have ADD/ADHD or autism, or have other issues related to vaccine injury or similar concerns. My suggestions for these issues are typically pretty much the same, so I am going to list them here in a sequential order as a quick start guide so you can get going right away, with the hope that you will read the rest of this page as soon as possible. The main goal here is twofold – get rid of the toxins and increase nutritional support to improve neurological function and function overall.

I used to joke that the only reason that antivaxxers didn’t used to say that COVID-19 vaccines caused autism was because they hadn’t been approved for children under 5 yet. Now that they are approved for infants as young as 6 months, Larry Cook shows that he’s lumped COVID-19 vaccines in with all the other vaccines that he had previously blamed for autism, ADHD, and other conditions routinely blamed on vaccines. I won’t discuss everything in his “vaccine injury treatment” protocol, but just a few of these will show you how much everything is the same.

First up, something I haven’t written in a very long time, Zeolite! Oh, wait. I did hear about it more recently, when I pointed out very early in the pandemic, before there were COVID-19 vaccines, how COVID-19 immediately turned into a golden opportunity for quackery.

Cook opines:

DETOX using zeolite based Pure Body Extra (cell detox / full body) and Pure Body (gut detox). I’ve been promoting these two products for over three years because they work and they work fast, especially on toddlers. Make this your top priority and do it at least many several months, but preferably much longer. I’ve been using it for over three years. CLICK HERE to learn all about Pure Body Extra(cell detox) and to get $50 off on your first order of both (look for the image of both). If you’ve purchased in the past, buy more here.

As I’ve said many times, the antivaccine movement is a purity cult that has falsely come to believe that vaccines somehow contaminate that purity and cause all the conditions and diseases that antivaxxers like Cook blame on them. They believe so passionately that vaccines are filth that contaminates them that they will even risk their lives by refusing “vaccinated blood” when they need a transfusion to save their lives. Even before the rise of the anti-COVID-19 vaccine antivaccine movement, I pointed out how so much of antivaccine beliefs (and alternative medicine beliefs in general) are based on “purity” and the alternative medicine treatments based on ritual purification often called “detox.” It’s the reason that I so often invoke scenes from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in which Gen. Jack D. Ripper rants about fluoridated water as a Commie plot to “sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids” when discussing these concepts.

Cook goes on to invoke “not-a-Doctor” Henele (he’s a naturopath) and his treatments. Let’s just say that I’ve encountered this quack before, posting out, as I repeat myself, that he’s a naturopathic quack, something that should be obvious by the fact that he founded the Energetic Health Institute, where he offers all manner of classes, including Holistic Lifestyle Specialist, Holistic Practice Specialist, and Cleansing+Fasting Specialist, which brags about becoming an “energetic cleansing specialist.”

Cook also includes a bunch of treatments that are probably not harmful, might even be OK for nutrition, but won’t treat any of the conditions for which he recommends them, including autism and “vaccine injury.” We’re talking things like B vitamins (which, contrary to what Cook claims, are not a cure for schizophrenia), vitamin E (which, Cook claims, “protects the kidneys”), and amino acids. He touts lithium orotate as a “mood enhancer” and “addiction crusher.” Not having encountered this common supplement before, I had to wonder if lithium orotate is just a backdoor way of providing lithium to the bloodstream, which theoretically could help someone who is bipolar. Practically, though, it’s just an uncontrolled, unmonitored method of dosing with lithium, whose blood levels really do need to be monitored when treating bipolar disorders and that can also produce a number of adverse events, which is why only a healthcare provider trained in its use (like a psychiatrist) should be dosing patients with lithium.

Then, of course, there’s hyperbaric oxygen, because of course there is. Quacks love it:

Mild Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment: I discuss this below. It is an excellent, non drug therapy that has lasting results. It is a top therapy that I recommend. Try to do at least 20 sessions, preferably 40. You’ll start to see gains in 7 to 10 sessions. Find one near you by searching “hyperbaric oxygen treatment” and your city.

Notice how you need to do lots and lots of sessions of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It’s a steady income stream for quacks.

Hyperbaric oxygen has some uses in medicine (e.g., for burns and chronic wounds), but in fact its evidence-based uses are pretty limited. It is, however, a very popular seemingly all-purpose treatment among quacks, particularly those of the “autism biomed” variety, even though a decade ago the FDA issued a warning that hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) has never been shown to be effective against autism, diabetes, cancer, neurologic disorders, heart disease, and a number of other conditions for which quacks commonly use it.

Cook also touts “biomedical treatment” for autism which we used to refer to back in the day as “autism biomed.” Apparently there’s almost nothing that autism biomed can’t do:

What you want is biomedical treatment – often called biomedical treatment for autism. Replace the word “autism” with “vaccine injury” and it all will make sense. For the most part, autism is extreme vaccine injury (yes, I know that there are exceptions). Biomedical treatment is the process of treating underlying causes and effects of vaccine injury. You want this type of treatment. Biomedical treatment may include chelation therapy to remove heavy metals, B12 and glutathione injections to help repair detoxification pathways, mild hyperbaric oxygen treatment to accelerate cell repair, supplements and dietary change to repair the gut and improve nutrition intake, omega fatty acids to repair the nervous system and cell walls, and so, so much more. This kind of medical intervention is intense but it is also treating the root causes of dysfunction and therefore helping the body to heal. Give the body what it needs and it has huge capacity to heal – this is what you want.

The only thing that seems not to be in Cook’s guide is stem cell quackery. I was actually a bit surprised by that given the popularity of quack stem cell clinics among antivaxxers to “recover” their autistic children.

I had thought about going through some of Cook’s recommendations for old autism quackery, like Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) and his recommendation for some autism quackery that I didn’t recall having heard of before, like the treatments advocated by The HANDLE Institute, which claim without evidence to “rewire weak and disorganized neurological systems” in autism, ADHD, etc., but then I thought that these might justify posts of their own in the future, given that it’s been a long time since I’ve written about TACA and I’ve never written about The HANDLE Institute, as far as I can remember and searches of my blogs have been able to tell. Instead, I knew that I had what I needed to make my point when I came across this:

CEASE Therapy is a highly effective and all natural homeopathic detoxification that also includes dietary changes and other interventions aimed at healing the child. In one of my video interviews a mom shared that she could not afford traditional biomedical treatment and so she opted for the less expensive CEASE Therapy for her autistic son who got that way from vaccination. After much work, she was able to restore her son’s functioning with CEASE Therapy. Click here to watch her story.

I just want to remind you again to replace the word “autism” with “vaccine injury” because it is very important to recognize that autism, in most cases, is in fact, extreme vaccine injury. For the times when it is not, autism can almost always be traced to some sort of environmental poisoning trigger – it’s just that injecting poison into a child via vaccinations is the fastest and easiest way to cause autism and autistic like symptoms (Autism Spectrum Disorder or ASD for short).

You can learn more about CEASE Therapy and find a CEASE practitioner at www.cease-therapy.com.

I’ve written about “CEASE Therapy” before on more than one occasion, dating back to over a decade ago. It’s homeopathy, a.k.a. The One Quackery To Rule Them All. In the case of CEASE Therapy, homeopaths claim to be using something they call “isotherapy,” in which they do this:

The homeopathic method as applied in the treatment of vaccination damage consists of administering four successive remedies of the suspected vaccine. Each course consists of the following dilutions 30C, 200C, 1M and 10M. The duration of a remedy course depends on the severity of the problems and the reactions of the patient and can vary from 2 weeks to 2 months. Potencies should be repeated until no further improvement is seen before passsing to the next poetency. After each course a 1 or 2 week break is applied. The administration is carried out by letting 2 granules melt in the mouth.

Note that the “least dilute” dilution in the series, 30C, represents thirty 100-fold dilutions, or (10^-2)³⁰, which represents a 10⁶⁰-fold dilution, which is roughly 10³⁷-fold greater than Avogadro’s number. Basically, the lowest dilution is so dilute that it is incredibly unlikely that a single molecule of the starting compound is present. Clearly 200C is even more ridiculous, as as 1M (1,000C) and 10M (10,000C). It’s just water.

One thing that runs through all of this quackery is a common “alternative” medicine claim is that, unlike that nasty “conventional” medicine, Cook’s quackery “treats the root cause”:

Our conventional medical system is beyond broken – it is a cesspool of pharmaceutical industry interference whereby symptoms are treated with synthetic drugs purely for profit so that true wellness is never achieved. Conventional doctors are trained in this “disease management” process and few have the know-how or even awareness as to how to undo vaccine damage – and that’s assuming they even acknowledge it. So, whom you actually want to work with is someone trained in natural medicine – the philosophy of treating the underlying root causes so that the body will fully heal, thereby resolving outward symptoms. This type of medical professional goes by many names and has varied training depending on schooling: Functional Medical Doctor OR Integrative Medical Doctor (MD), Naturopathic Doctor (ND), Acupuncturist (LAc) OR Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Doctor of Osteopathy (DO), Chiropractor (DC), and Homeopath. Note that a naturopath and naturopathic doctor are not the same – the latter is licensed to practice medicine and the former is not. Do not go to a conventional doctor or pediatrician expecting any positive outcomes – they simply do not know what to do and will probably only make things worse.

I like to point out that homeopathy explicitly treats symptoms, not the “root cause,” as Samuel Hahnemann postulated the “law of similars,” which states that, to treat a symptom, you should homeopathically dilute something that causes that symptom. This “law,” of course, is not anything resembling an actual law based in science. It’s just something that Hahnemann made up ~225 years ago in Germany. Killing bacteria causing an infection, as antibiotics do, or targeting a virus to prevent disease, as vaccines? Now there’s really treating the root cause! The quackery advocated by Larry Cook only treats a funhouse version of the “root cause” as imagined by quacks in their fevered fantasies.

Even worse is his referring to his “parent’s guide” to what to do after a child dies after vaccination (apparently no matter how long after one) that is designed to find a way to blame vaccines. I wrote about that particularly despicable “guide” in 2012, noting now that it had strategies to try to falsely blame deaths from “shaken baby syndrome” (now known more commonly as shaken impact syndrome) on vaccines instead. He even references a 2018 “autopsy protocol” similarly designed to find a way to blame vaccines for infant deaths from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), which is not caused by vaccines.

Cook concludes with about as blatant and clear an antivax manifesto as you might imagine:

Children do not need to be vaccinated, and they never needed to be vaccinated. If you still have any doubts about going vaccine free, I hope you will read Dr. Moskowitz’s book – he explains eloquently why natural immunity is superior to vaccination and why vaccines are maiming and killing our children. Not every parent recognizes a vaccine injury – my mom didn’t. I stopped talking at 18 months and did not start talking again until three years of age and she never connected the dots. Neither did I, until I asked the SMV Group about their experiences with their children and I discovered that this has happened to many. So, in one sense, you are actually fortunate to recognize the injury/damage, and on even another level, you now have a clear guide to work from that your conventional doctor would never know how to do, or even acknowledge.

And so with this I hope you have encouragement and renewed hope that your child can be recovered or at the very least greatly improved by moving forward with this action plan. I know this may be daunting, but I also know you can rise to the occasion and help your child get better and possibly or probably even recover.

Yes, Cook is invoking the old “natural immunity” trope. Of course, there’s one big problem with “natural immunity.” You have to suffer through the disease, facing the risk of death or severe complications that many vaccine-preventable diseases can cause, in order to get it. Why would one do that when it’s possible to achieve immunity with a vaccine at incredibly low risk, all without suffering through the disease, particularly in the case of diseases for which “natural immunity” wanes but immunity can be boosted by periodic vaccination?

Truly, since COVID-19 hit, everything old is new again with respect to antivax claims and narratives. “Old school” antivaxxer Larry Cook is just taking advantage. Unfortunately, increasingly, “new school” anti-COVID-19 vaccine antivaxxers are going all-in on “old school” antivax narratives like the ones promoted by Larry Cook.