Antivax quacks: It’s always (also) about the grifter and grift

One of my favorite sayings about antivax “influencers” and “leaders” is some variant of this: Come for the quackery and ideology, stay for the grift. Alternatively, I like to say something along the lines of: It’s always (als0) about the grift and grifting grifter who engages in the grift. There are exceptions, but the typical leader or influencer in the antivax movement didn’t start out as a grifting quack.

For example, I like to cite the example of Dr. Joe Mercola, a longtime antivax “entrepreneur” (and quack) whom I now often call a quack tycoon because his net worth is north of $100 million—and likely a lot more since the pandemic turbocharged his business. He didn’t start out as a grifting quack tycoon. Rather, in the late 1990s, before there was social media other than Usenet and BBSs, he was a “pioneer” in the new world of Internet dissemination of information in that he ran an email list and website in which he promoted his “natural health” beliefs. He soon found that hosting charges were becoming onerous and started selling supplements, books, and the like online. It was this business that ultimately ballooned into his very profitable online empire, during which time he appeared to undergo audience or customer capture, becoming more radically antivax and quacky, until he became the man he is today, believing in a psychic channeling a “high vibrational” being and that he is the “new Jesus” who will save the world.

To repeat: Come for the “natural health”/ideology/quackery/antivax, stay for the grift.

The Washington Post published an article demonstrating that, in the age of COVID-19 at least, my characterization is spot on. Reported by Lauren Weber and entitled Tax records reveal the lucrative world of covid misinformation, the report is a deep dive into just how lucrative antivax quackery can be (and has been) for four of the biggest COVID-19 disinformation spreaders, which include two organizations that had been formed years before the pandemic and two new pandemic-era orgs:

• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s Children’s Health Defense
• Del Bigtree‘s Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN)
• America’s Frontline Doctors
• Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance

I have, of course, long been writing about RFK Jr. and Del Bigtree; to a lesser extent I’ve written about FLCCC and America’s Frontline Doctors. What’s depressing about reading Weber’s report is that it shows just how profitable antivax and COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation have been:

Four major nonprofits that rose to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic by capitalizing on the spread of medical misinformation collectively gained more than $118 million between 2020 and 2022, enabling the organizations to deepen their influence in statehouses, courtrooms and communities across the country, a Washington Post analysis of tax records shows.

Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., received $23.5 million in contributions, grants and other revenue in 2022 alone — eight times what it collected the year before the pandemic began — allowing it to expand its state-based lobbying operations to cover half the country. Another influential anti-vaccine group, Informed Consent Action Network, nearly quadrupled its revenue during that time to about $13.4 million in 2022, giving it the resources to finance lawsuits seeking to roll back vaccine requirements as Americans’ faith in vaccines drops.

Two other groups, Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors, went from receiving $1 million combined when they formed in 2020 to collecting more than $21 millioncombined in 2022, according to the latest tax filings available for the groups.

Combined, these groups are getting into Mercola-level territory in grift. You might remember that America’s Frontline Doctors made their first big splash in 2020 during that dark first summer of the pandemic when they made national news pushing an ineffective repurposed drug, hydroxychloroquine, as the solution to the pandemic in the form of a highly effective treatment with low toxicity. You might also remember that the current Surgeon General for the State of Florida, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, was a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, his grifter past making it no surprise that he has basically devastated public health in Florida, parroted antivax disinformation and made it into state policy, and altered a study to make COVID-19 vaccines seem dangerous by lying with statistics, among many other assaults on science. Most recently, he published a letter telling parents that keeping unvaccinated children home during a measles outbreak from their school was optional and voluntary, not mandatory:

With a brief memo, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has subverted a public health standard that’s long kept measles outbreaks under control.

On Feb. 20, as measles spread through Manatee Bay Elementary in South Florida, Ladapo sent parents a letter granting them permission to send unvaccinated children to school amid the outbreak.

The Department of Health “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance,” wrote Ladapo, who was appointed to head the agency by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose name is listed above Ladapo’s in the letterhead.

Ladapo’s move contradicts advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I note that this has been a longtime antivax wish, that their unvaccinated children not only not be excluded from school, but not even excluded from school in the middle of an outbreak of a highly transmissible disease. Indeed, it’s a policy that they tried to pass as law in Michigan back in 2017; fortunately, they failed.

Back to the four grifting organizations, though. RFK Jr. has been raising money off of antivax misinformation since 2005, while Del Bigtree discovered the grift in 2015 or so, going all-in with Andrew Wakefield in 2016 to make the antivax conspiracy film disguised as a documentary, VAXXED. Meanwhile, the FLCCC has really taken antivax quackery to a new level, thanks to Drs. Pierre Kory and Paul Marik.

But wait, you might say. Why do you say this is grift? Aren’t these people true believers, albeit deluded? This is a fair question. However, get a load of the typical grifter executive compensation! No, seriously. These are nonprofits, and these people are paying themselves some pretty impressive sums of money relative to the income of their orgs:

As the groups’ coffers grew, so did the salaries of some top executives. Children’s Health Defense paid Kennedy, then chairman and chief legal counsel and now an independent candidate for president, more than $510,000 in 2022, double his 2019 salary, tax records show. Informed Consent Action Network paid Executive Director Del Bigtree $284,000 in 2022, a 22 percent increase from 2019. Bigtree now works as communications director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

And:

America’s Frontline Doctors paid the group’s founder, Simone Gold, $581,000 in 2022, more than 17 times what she was paid by the group in 2020, according to tax filings. Gold’s lawyer, Jimenez, said she was released after serving 48 days of an original 60-day prison sentence in 2022 for trespassing in the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump.

And:

The salaries of Kory and Paul Marik, chairman and chief scientific officer of Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, also rose significantly. In 2022, Kory earned $368,815 from the FLCCC — nearly 60 percent more than his 2021 salary — and Marik earned $400,000, eight times his 2021 earnings, according to tax records. (The FLCCC reported that it did not pay the men in 2020.)

When asked about the increase, Kory told The Post that he and Marik had left their jobs as “full-time practicing physicians and medical educators” to “dedicate their full attention to the FLCCC.”

FLCCC didn’t pay Drs. Kory and Marik in 2020? Big deal. FLCCC was an embryonic organization then, formed in the middle of the year. Notice how fast they ramped up the executive pay in 2021, the year after the org was formed and then again in 2022. I bet that they raked in even more bucks hand-over-fist in 2023, but we don’t have the numbers yet. As for their excuses, well, yes, physicians can make in the range of $400,000, but not most of us. Generally, it’s the high-powered specialists who make that much or even more. For example, I don’t make anywhere near that. Even if I were not in academics, it would be difficult for a breast surgeon to approach that level of income, at least in my area. You could argue that Drs. Marik and Kory were trying to replace their full-time clinical income with positions that require far less work, but more importantly far less accountability, need for continuing medical education, and sticking to science-based medical practice. Of course, Dr. Marik let his medical license lapse to inactive status nearly two years ago and currently holds no medical license; he did this after having resigned from his faculty position at Eastern Virginia Medical School to “dedicate more time to multiple causes.”

As for Dr. Simone Gold, although it’s possible that she did, I highly doubt she’s ever made that much money as a clinician in her life. Of course, there’s been a great quack fight over whether or not she is still in charge of America’s Frontline Doctors in the form of a power struggle between the founder of AFLDS, Dr. Simone Gold, and AFLDS counsel Joey Gilbert, complete with accusations against Dr. gold of misappropriating AFLDS funds that Ms. Weber elaborates on:

In a November 2022 lawsuit, America’s Frontline Doctors accused Gold of using nonprofit money to fund her lifestyle. It alleged that Gold purchased a $3.6 million home in Naples, Fla., and a fleet of luxury cars, and hired a housekeeper and security officer. The lawsuit also alleged that she used the organization’s employees to work at her for-profit wellness company, GoldCare.

Ah, grift! And this grifter beat the rap:

A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, citing a lack of jurisdiction, in December 2022. U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell noted Gold’s previous comments that the group’s “most significant business operation is the creation of social media content” and said the location of the group’s headquarters was in dispute. “These vague descriptions of AFLDS’ purpose leaves the Court short of being able to define its ‘nerve center,’” the judge wrote.

Also, over at the FLCCC Alliance, even though Dr. Marik gave up his medical license, Dr. Kory has gone full quack:

Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance took in more than $8 million in contributions, grants and other revenue in 2022 — nearly 23 times as much as in 2020 — as it continued to tout the anti-parasitic ivermectin, which it also began promoting to prevent and treat flu and RSV. The CDC has said there is no clinical data to support the use of ivermectin for flu and RSV. Kory, the group’s president, said he and Marik frequently appear on shows run by Children’s Health Defense and Informed Consent Action Network. The latter group gave the FLCCC $210,000 in 2022, according to its tax filing.

Kory also used Twitter to encourage his hundreds of thousands of followers to visit his telehealth practice, which charges up to $2,350 for three video appointments.

Think of the FLCCC Alliance not just as a political advocacy organization, but as a promotional tool for Dr. Kory’s quack telehealth practice.

Of course, I always say that it’s always also about the grift. Every single one of these groups started out as true believers, but then their founders discovered how profitable their beliefs could be. This resulted in an ever expanding spiral of raising money, becoming more radical, and that increasing radicalness resulting in more money coming in, reinforcing ever more radical beliefs and quackery. With all that money coming in, it then becomes tempting for the founders of such organizations to reward themselves with more and more compensation. This trend predates the pandemic, but the pandemic turbocharged it. There’s no way that these four “nonprofits” would be raking in nearly as much cash as they are no. There’s no way the antivax grift would be as profitable.

It would be one thing if these groups were doing nothing more than selling quackery, but they have become politically influential:

Children’s Health Defense, which in 2020 had just two state chapters, in California and New York, has expanded to 19 states, as well as chapters focused on New England and the military. These chapters enable the organization to “spread misinformation” about vaccines in a more sophisticated way, with potential legislative consequences, said Becky Christensen, founder of the Safe Communities Coalition & Action Fund, which advocates for vaccines.

In January, the Tennessee chapter director of Children’s Health Defenseappeared at a routine legislative committee meeting that sets the procedural rules for the year, Christensen said.

“They’re a part of every step of the legislative process now,” she said.

Children’s Health Defense says its legal team works closely with state attorneys general to protect off-label use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to prevent or treat covid; attorneys general in six states have done so.

It’s very disturbing that these groups are now so embedded in the political process that they are “part of every step of the legislative process.” I note, however, that this is nothing more than the continuation and acceleration of a trend that started at least as far back as 2015, when the campaign against SB 277, the California law that eliminated nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, united disparate antivax groups with conservative political movements to produce a new era of antivax activism and by the year before the pandemic had resulted in fascist militia groups marching arm-in-arm with antivaxxers.

In the end, a disturbing confluence of radical antivax beliefs, misinformation, and grift has brought us to where we are now, with antivax groups that would have been considered fringe even among antivaxxers now being not just mainstream antivax, but almost mainstream political groups. Come for the antivax quackery, stay for the grift indeed. It’s going to be the death of public health in the US.