S2 E9: Drowning in the Conspira-Sea

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Previously, on the dream.

I had my first grandma seizure when I was almost 30 years old.

It came totally out of nowhere.

And of course, when it happened, my husband posted on Facebook to let all of my friends know what had happened to me because I had to be taken away in an ambulance and it was very scary.

When I came home from the hospital, I had no less than six messages from all of my friends who sold for Juterra, Young Living, Thrive, Plexis, all promising me that if I would just take their product, that they could help heal me from the epilepsy that I had been diagnosed with.

They figured that maybe since I hurt my brain, that all of a sudden I would want to buy their wellness products.

I didn't, but they still hit me up occasionally to ask me if I'd like to get off of my anti-seedor medicine and start taking their quote-unquote all-natural medicine.

Here in the U.S., we have a long and storied history of big pharma in the medical industrial complex and the government defrauding citizens.

Take this recent example.

So you know how when you go to the doctor nowadays, they take a seat at a computer and pull up your records?

Those programs you see on the screen always look kind of clunky to me, but someone designed them precisely for the purpose of tracking your health information for your doctor and insurance companies.

One of those companies that designs the software that keeps track of all your health data got busted by the U.S.

District Attorney's Office of Vermont for conspiring with an opioid manufacturer.

Here's how the scam played out.

Say you go in for back pain.

Your doctor can ask you to rate the pain, ask about other symptoms, etc.

Bleep, bleep, blorp.

They enter it into the computer program and the program spits out possible treatments.

Maybe physical therapy or ibuprofen, rest, heat packs, ice, or drugs.

Well, in this scheme, not only did the drug company offer kickbacks to the software company to list its opiates in the menu of choices, the software company also let the drug company come in and help them design the program.

You know, help them choose what ailments, what criteria would trigger a suggestion to prescribe their drug.

They were fined $145 million.

Or how about all the syphilis studies done on people without their permission, or radiation experiments carried out during the Cold War on poor folks and prisoners and children?

One government study by the U.S.

Atomic Energy Commission and Quaker Oats involved 73 mentally disabled kids who were told they were joining a science club, but in fact, were being poisoned by radioactive oatmeal.

Even though these incidents are few and far between, they're enough for conspiracy theorists to hang their hats on, for someone to say, well, this is just the stuff we know about.

Imagine what these bad actors are really hiding.

The wellness industry benefits from these seeds of doubt, plants them and sows them into fruitful fields of products and therapies and movements that too often end up causing more harm than the stories that inspired them.

My name is Anna Merlin and I'm an author and a senior reporter at Vice.

Anna wrote a book last year called Republic of Lies, American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.

She covers all kinds of conspiracies in the book, from the understandable to the way out there stuff.

And in it, she cites studies that show that half of us, half of Americans believe in at least one medical conspiracy.

Almost 20% believe in more than three medical conspiracy theories.

I write a lot about subcultures broadly, alternative religious movements, alternative beliefs.

And so as a subsection of that, a few years ago, I started writing really deeply about conspiracy theories, and I got especially involved in writing about the anti-vaccine movement and sort of its increasing social and political power.

Anna has spent a ton of time going to conferences and meetings and rallies held by people and organizations who believe that some scary bad actor is trying to fool us when it comes to our health.

One of those meetings she attended was on a boat.

So, the thing that got me writing about conspiracy theories in a concerted way is that I went on a cruise for conspiracy theorists called the Conspiracy

SEA.

It's a good pun, yeah.

Welcome to the Conspiracy Cruise.

I just want to tell you that conspiracy theorists are always right.

You're with me?

Give me an amen.

Here are some clips from a video Refinery 29 made while on the conspiracy cruise cruise in 2016.

This thing we call reality is just another form of dream.

When you look at what happened on 9-11, we cannot have been told the truth.

It's not who killed JFK, it's who did kill JFK.

Everybody was in on JFK.

This young lady, beautiful, beautiful lady, is a global alchemist, a cosmic mythologist, intuitive astrologist.

She's the amazing Laura Eisenhower, grandmother Michael Archer.

I was recruited to go off planet in 2006,

and I learned a lot about what's going on behind the scenes because of that.

So, I share theories, but I also share things that are about as close to fact as I can get as far as what I've seen and experienced.

You twist those knobs and you tune it to a particular frequency or a rate that helps you quantify what you want and then manifest it.

They don't want you to know that they're using HARP to control the weather.

They don't want you to know what's in Area 51.

They don't want you to know that there is a small cartel of about 750 people that own everything.

While I was there, another person who was on the boat with me was Andrew Wakefield, who is the person who authored the now debunked study claiming that there was a causal link between the MMR vaccine and what he called regressive autism.

Okay, let's pause here and back up for a minute.

For those of you who've never heard of Andrew Wakefield, you're lucky.

He's the guy at the root of the decades-long public panic around vaccines, perhaps the most widespread and dangerous health conspiracy out there.

In 1998, he published a quote-unquote study where he claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, MMR for short, caused autism.

The story of how he got there and how he was eventually kicked out of the mainstream medical community is fascinating and cruel in a lot of ways.

Back in the 90s, Wakefield was a gastroenterologist, someone who studies how our guts function.

and he was doing research at the Royal Free Hospital in London, a legit hospital.

The story goes, at least according to him and his devotees, that he witnessed a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

And so he held this big press conference to tell people that he could no longer morally support giving that vaccine to children.

What he didn't say was far scarier.

Earlier in the 90s, in other papers, he claimed that the same vaccine caused irritable bowel syndrome.

No, wait.

In another paper, he said it caused Crohn's disease.

It caused something, according to Wakefield.

It must, because he had just filed a patent for a single shot measles vaccine.

And what's the easiest way to switch people from a triple threat vaccine to your regressive, seeming single-threat one?

Tell them it'll hurt their kids.

The way Wakefield did this is some evil genius shit.

Not only did he get funding for this MMR slash autism study from parents of autistic children who were planning to sue vaccine makers, he recruited only 12 kids for the study, eight of whom already showed symptoms.

That is not a scientific study.

Nevertheless, his research appeared in the Lancet Medical Journal.

Parents read it and everyone freaked out for a number of years until finally his theory was disproven enough times that the Lancet published a retraction and Wakefield lost his medical license.

Andrew Wakefield himself, however, never made a public apology or anything like that.

To the contrary, he played the victim, stating that his study was just too revolutionary.

What happened next is not that surprising, but pretty annoying and dangerous.

Wakefield decided that he still wanted to make a lot of money, and that's how he ended up on this cruise for self-identifying conspiracy theorists.

You'd think that a doctor who takes himself seriously wouldn't be caught dead in that sort of environment.

But Wakefield came up with some new bullshit to sell, so he's got to go wherever people are buying.

His latest theory is that, okay, now stick with me because this gets really convoluted.

He found a new opportunity in the emerging field of gut health, the idea that the flora in your stomach contributes to things like serotonin production.

He's taken this pretty mainstream research and used it to claim that there's a link between gut health and autism, as evidenced by the improved behavior of autistic children put on restrictive diets.

But remember, correlation does not equal causation.

What he's seizing on broadly is that nonverbal autistic kids, when they're in pain, they can't express it verbally.

And often like the way that they express it nonverbally is extremely, you know, alarming for them and their parents because they're obviously hurting and it's hard to figure out why.

And so you'll find that a lot of parents with autistic kids who go down the anti-vaccine road start by restrictive diets,

no gluten diet, a no-casein diet, something that they think will aid their kids' gastrointestinal symptoms and like make them feel better.

So it's, you know, it is a, again, it is a totally understandable thing to want to cut something out of your kid's diet that you think might be hurting them.

And it is sort of a gateway towards some of these other claims.

Preaching this new gospel, one centered around diet, in addition to his persistent anti-vax stance, has been quite lucrative for Wakefield.

And it's helped him maintain the attention of one of the world's money-hungriest leaders.

And we've had so many instances, people that worked for me just the other day, two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.

So using the president's endorsement and these new and varying theories, he's turned to other ways of making money, like promoting alternative therapies at tons of different conferences, doing speaking engagements and all that jazz at conferences not only like the Conspiracy, but places like...

Autism One is the big one.

And it does bill itself as, you know, for families with autism.

But when you get there, there's all kinds of other panels about all kinds of other things.

I would characterize it as pseudo-scientific lectures on a variety of topics that to me sometimes don't seem directly related to autism.

Here's a clip from a speech made at Autism One's 2018 conference by Dr.

Billy DeMoss, a chiropractor from Orange County, California.

But we've all been brainwashed by that tool that sits in your T, in your family room, which is the TV set.

Take take that piece of shit and throw it out the friggin' window.

It'll be the best thing that you ever did.

If you want to have more success in life, get rid of it because it's just a soul sucker is what it is.

You know what I'm talking about?

Soul suckers.

And what it does is it brainwashes you.

Read the book 1984.

Read the book straight a brave new world.

It's all right there.

It's all prophecy to where this is all going, you know?

And I don't have a cell phone yet either, folks, okay?

Plus, you know, I'm just not sure that holding one of these to your head all day i mean you guys could be part of that guinea pig experiment you know they said cigarettes were safe too

the health freedom movement broadly anti-vaxxers they all say that the government is hiding the cure for cancer or autism or what have you because uh they make more money off of us when we're sick

right you know that there is no money in a cure there's only money in endless ongoing treatment for disease.

I do tend to point out that at all these conferences, they leave the lecture hall and they literally enter a marketplace immediately.

That's how all of them are set up so that you are funneled directly into the place where you buy things.

You will hear people with, you know, a scientific specialty in one field claiming expertise in another.

You know, like one of the people at the Autism One conference who now claims that pesticides cause autism, like that's not her background.

She's a computer scientist, but she's very smart.

She's clearly very smart, but she doesn't actually know what she's talking about here.

But nonetheless, it invests her words with like a level of authority.

I think that they have a sense that the people selling things to them there are easier to connect with on an individual level than, you know, this

concept of big pharma.

Because one thing that happens at these conferences like Autism One is that these anti-vaccine doctors come and give these parents as much time as they need.

They make a literal direct personal connection with them and then they try to sell them something.

That's very effective, especially if you're somebody who maybe your kid got a really difficult diagnosis, you haven't had enough time with a specialist, you don't really feel like you have a safety net because our safety net in this country in general is very bad and especially for health is incredibly bad.

So if you come up against someone who is claiming to really be able to give you something and provide you with care and time and what feels like compassion, then you're

much more likely to buy what they're selling.

A short list of what they're selling.

Hyperbaric oxygen chambers, but not the kind you'd find in a hospital, more like the DIY ones I saw at the colonic clinic.

Dangerous drugs that remove heavy metals from the blood.

Neurofeedback machines.

And a bleach drinking regimen, seriously.

And then less scary sounding, but still dangerous products like this one.

that Bonnie Patton of Truth and Advertising went after.

One of them is actually the first case that we brought and it was against a supplement called speak.

And

this supplement was really incredible.

You give it to your autistic child and within, you know, a very small amount of time, your child will start being able to speak again, you know, and tell mom and dad that, you know, they love

you and so on and so forth.

So that was actually the first case that we ever brought.

And,

you know, I'm happy to say that

not only did the

FTC go after them, but we also complained to the European counterpart where they were selling in Portugal.

And they had to take down those claims there too.

So.

What was SPEAK?

So it is a supplement, a liquid supplement.

And,

you know, wow, that you would give to your children, it's mostly made up of vitamins, but it has a really high dose of vitamin E that we consulted with an expert on that could actually be harmful to children.

A lot of times, you know, we see this with very susceptible populations, right?

People

that have been given very, you know, scary and terrifying diagnosis, whether it be cancer or fibromyalgia or ADHD, you know, the, you know, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's.

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And they're being told these hard, cold facts by medical health care professionals.

And consumers, I think, are desperate to find something that will help

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Alternative therapies are being sold to cure or prevent a whole host of ailments, and they're sold at conferences all over the world, including one called Conscious Life here in Los Angeles, which Anna attended.

It's a big sort of new age conference that has sort of an equal focus on wellness and also sort of like more esoteric claims about angels and afterlives and UFOs.

Sometimes people like George Norrie speak, who's like a big figure in the UFO movement.

It's really fun, actually.

But so while I was there, the last time I was there, there was a group that leads cancer tours to Mexico to clinics that traffic in non-FDA approved cancer treatments.

And there were several people selling colloidal silver, which is obviously like a big, sort of long-time feature of the wellness natural health movement.

I, me, Jane, I'm personally acquainted with colloidal silver because my grandmother loves it.

It's just tiny pieces of silver suspended in a liquid, usually water.

And according to old texts and what I'd call folklore, it's an antimicrobial and antiviral agent.

It's seriously dangerous to ingest, but that doesn't stop Grammar Ruth.

People will claim that you can put it on skin to heal cuts and stuff, and that's probably harmless somewhat, but there's a lot of evidence that taking it internally can cause like liver and vision problems and turn you blue.

There's like a, there's a guy who famously was extremely blue who appeared on TV a lot.

From that?

Yeah.

What the fuck was his name?

This is Paul Carazon, son, who was 14 years ago, an ordinary-looking man with fair skin and freckles.

Now when he walks down the street, people stare in disbelief because he is blue.

So how did this happen?

Well, it all started when I saw an ad in a magazine.

It was for a colloidal silver generator.

Because you thought it was going to do what for you?

I had no idea.

Let me stop you right here.

Dr.

Oz, what is he talking about?

This ailment that makes you, and I'm going to call it that because you're through and through blue, it's not just on the surface, is called Argyria.

And what ends up happening is the blue gets into your cells, the silver, you basically tattooed your entire body with this silver.

Well, it's going to save me a lot of money at the tattoo parlor, I think.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Paul Carasson died in 2013 of a stroke about five years after that appearance on Oprah.

And though it seemed like she and Dr.

Oz were not endorsing his use of colloidal silver, Dr.

Oz did go on a few years later to have Gwyneth Paltrow on his show promoting this stuff.

So who knows what to believe?

It's important to point out that like the sort of natural health and supplement industry is a big feature on both the right and the left.

So like Alex Jones started selling supplements and that is how he made his money.

You know, so like this is not just a right or left thing.

This is a seems to be a particular mania that kind of engulfs all of us.

Yeah.

Something that I think about a lot when I listen to Alex Jones is that he talks all the time about being under threat by these sort of malign outside influences.

And seen in that context, the supplements are a way to sort of shore up your body and prevent it from being as susceptible to these malign outside influences, right?

Talking about Ebola, what everybody's talking about internally is what to do in case it spreads in the United States, and that's have a plan to get out of a well-populated area, you know, have some land somewhere.

You know, they were worried that possibly the borders would be closed, which I don't know if that's really going to happen if they want it to spread.

What are you doing specifically for yourself?

What I'm doing is I have a place to go that's, you know, kind of close to a national forest where I can just get out of there.

I have clean water over there, I have clean food, I have clean seeds to grow my own stuff.

I mean, I have masks that I can use, but I have a good supply of iodine, I have a good supply of silver over there.

You know, I've got the DNA force to protect my cells, to protect against free radical damage.

I think for a lot of people who

feel a sense of persistent like sickness or disorder, it's because they feel like they are, you know, under attack by these large institutions that they don't have a lot of control over like big pharma.

And so it's sort of natural to me, first of all, that they're constantly trying to fix it, but secondly, that they're also constantly finding like new things.

that are wrong.

You know, because when you talk about sort of an enemy as big and overarching as big pharma, like it's not surprising surprising that you'll feel like it's eating into every aspect of your life.

One thing I think a lot about with conspiracy communities in general is that, and you know, alternative communities of any kind is that they give people shape and meaning and purpose and community where they didn't maybe previously feel like they had it.

And I think, especially with wellness and health claims,

having a diagnosis gives your life a narrative.

And, you know, seeking out wellness, pursuing health gives you a way to

organize your life.

I do not think that people want to be sick by any means, but I think that maybe in some ways the pursuit of wellness or the feeling of perpetual disorder that you're trying to fix gives people

a sense of meaning.

You are going to get sick and die.

Or you're going to have illnesses and they they

you don't get to decide for example there's some illnesses that are more prevalent in women than men.

Right.

You don't decide which genes you're born with.

Right.

Um, and so you might just have just the luck of the draw that you're gonna yeah, and that's terrifying, isn't it?

Like the sense of sickness as being fundamentally random and something as devastating as cancer.

It's not as terrifying as thinking I have any control over it.

Yeah.

If I thought I had control over it, then I would be walking around in terror because I would would know that there's an endless list of things I should be doing.

You were supposed to do,

you know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean, I think you're tapping into a feeling that a lot of people have every day of their lives.

And I think that there is a vast industry that draws on these things.

There is a market in telling people that you might be sick and that constant vigilance of your physical body is the only thing standing between you and the gaping maw of the grave.

Right.

Yeah.

I'm recording this on my phone from

the hospital.

I came into the hospital last night.

Four days ago, I started getting a rash on my face and my chest.

And then...

Speaking of the gaping maw of the grave, I never expected that during the course of our reporting, I'd stare into it because of the anti-vex movement.

Let me explain.

In October of last year, 2019, I got sick.

It started with a rash on my chest, which spread to my legs and arms.

Then I got a fever, then aches and chills.

And then my skin started to feel like it was burning off of my body.

I went to my regular doctor, where they guessed I was having an allergic reaction to something, sent me across the street to the pharmacy, where I threw up while waiting for them to fill a prescription for a steroid to calm the rash.

Later that day, lying in bed with ice packs covering my body, I truly thought I was dying and finally went to the ER, where they diagnosed me with a severe case of influenza B in addition to the rash and admitted me overnight.

The next morning a doctor came in to examine me and because of my fever and the rash he told me I'd be moving into a negative airflow room because, get this, it looked like I might have the measles.

I shit you not.

It turns out you can't test for measles if you've ever been vaccinated against it because the test looks for measles antibodies in your blood, which look the same whether they're a result of the vaccine or from the active virus.

Also, the measles vaccine isn't 100% effective.

In fact, even if you've been inoculated, you still have a 1 in 30 chance of contracting the disease if you're exposed to it, which is why we all need to be vaccinated.

The doctor asked if I'd traveled recently and I said, yeah, just two weeks prior, I'd flown through LAX.

That sealed my fate.

I spent three days in the hospital while we waited for the symptoms to either get worse and confirm that I had the measles or get better, which they eventually did.

I spent three days without my daughter and was billed over $20,000 by the hospital.

But this isn't about me, it's about a larger issue that the anti-vax movement has created and that we didn't used to have.

According to the CDC, we eradicated measles in the year 2000, right around the same time the anti-vax movement was really getting its footing.

Last year, there were almost 1,300 cases in 31 states.

Before 1963, when the measles vaccine came out, it was a thing that everyone got, and it killed around 500 people and hospitalized about 50,000 every year.

Imagine that coming back.

50,000 people being hospitalized and quarantined from their families because they might have a disease that we eradicated decades ago, except for a few extremist groups decided that they'd prefer that to the slight chance that their child is born Autistic.

Which, by the way, I'll say for the thousandth time, has nothing to do with vaccines.

Nor is it curable.

Nor is it worse than death.

Next time on The Dream, it's our season finale.

You won't want to miss it.

The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher, written and reported by me and Dan Gallucci.

Editing by Peter Clowney and Tracy Samuelson.

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