This time Jessica appears to be promoting the idea of buying LOTS and LOTS of supplements.
Nobody should be encouraging people on supplements as a covid precaution and or treatment, She’s well-aware it’s problematic and maybe not safe because toward the end of the piece, (if anyone ever really reads that far in her blog posts), she says: “Do I think it’s sustainable to take high amounts of supplements all year long to ward off all kinds of airborne diseases, for the rest of our lives? Not really.” She makes brief passing reference to actual proven mitigations for covid, but then lists a bunch of studies that are supposedly about supplements as covid remedies and we have no idea if they actually prove anything at all or if so, what, but assures everyone that her family is using a load of supplements and asserts that “we can up our supplement game”.
Do I think you should take medical advice from a pseudonymous financially successful influencer, who you don’t know what country they live in or who they are, or who is paying them for what, but they tell you they have a phd in english? I’d say no. Go to a doctor who at least has a legal responsibility to give you expert individualized advice, don’t just listen to some rando blogger saying “looks like it works”.
“Let’s get into it” is a phrase that is used by a lot of science influencers when they’re going to explain something. There are a few things to understand about this coming from a non-scientist influencer when speaking about medical treatments they think you should consider, such as that even if the scientist influencer is talking within their purview, that’s still not a guarantee that everything they say is going to be trustworthy. Just last year science skepticism youtuber Rebecca Watson last year complained that her “favorite science influencer” was pushing propaganda from the propane industry. Additionally a lot of scientist influencers are most interested in promoting their work, no matter who gets had in the hype process, and sometimes they’re so focused on clout chasing those algorithm rewards that they cast aside any attempt at good science messaging.
A non-expert or someone speaking outside their field of expertise mimicking popular content creators who speak about things within their purview. Think about that for a moment. It’s a popular transition cue, creating a type of relationship with a conversational communication tool. Mimicking the ways these people communicate, in ways you’re already familiar with, can evoke the mere exposure effect, where things that are familiar naturally spark feelings of trust, desirability or at least believability. The halo effect means that if you’ve already heard that cue from a very trustworthy source, it’s going to ping that feeling of trust to manifest again, if you’re not stopping to think things through — which most people are not, since we largely live our lives on autopilot making system 1 errors lots. And hijacking these cognitive biases is also related to “The Yes Set” sales tactic, described by The International Retail Academy as “creating a pattern of positive answers by asking questions or making statements with which the other person is extremely likely to agree.”
Compounding all this when it comes to covid prevention or treatment is that researchers actually found that the same type I errors that predisposed people to use bogus preventative stuff, also predisposed people to be more likely to engage in any prevention at all, including the evidence-baed proven practices. So unfortunately if someone tends to already be “covid cautious” it may actually put one at higher risk of feeling urged to engage also in unproven practices and possibly inclined to buy pointless or even harmful products. And as Dr. Jeremy Dean wrote: “Once grifters know what people want, even if it doesn’t exist, they are in a position to manipulate them. They will play on people’s desperation; unfortunately the more desperate people are, the easier they are to con.” And there are, justifiably and naturally, a lot of people desperate to avoid covid in the face of so little in the ways of community level public health measures, or even infection control in hospital settings.
A disturbing aspect of this is that almost everything Jessica mentions for supposed covid remedies are a lot of things that are straight out of “covid protocols” from early in the pandemic — documents passed around Qanon circles on social media in 2020, many have been long documented as pseudoscience pandemic myths. Some of this stuff has been repurposed and target marketed for lefties it seems. A lot of progressives and liberals are now also unwittingly going to notoriously anti-vax right-wing covid contrarian doctors for long covid treatments.
All this is simply cringe inducing.
But just when I think it can’t get worse…
Obviously influencers are successful if they can make you come back for more, make you feel like a million bucks, give satisfaction, and telling you that you’re special, the way Jessica does to her audience, is often called love bombing when it happens in actual cults, rather than online ones.
Here’s the problem.
“YOU are smart. You have sentinel intelligence. You’re more aware than other people. You’re conscious. You’re aware. You’ve educated yourself. You’re going to survive because you’re smarter than other people. You’re going to win the zombie apocalypse by your natural talent and wits… Your good breeding puts you above other people…”
This is where this you’re special with intelligence stuff leads unfortunately. Really, this influencer really has no business talking about eugenics, frankly.
And not just because she can’t seem to provide proper citation or even a reference to evidence for truthy sounding factoids like stories about people lobbying for marriage prohibition for people who wear spectacles in the New York state legislature. Maybe there’s more to that story, but you won’t find it via Jessica — she just drops it in as an opening line like she thinks the Imperial March is being played when she enters the room. I’m not saying that didn’t happen in 1912, because it’s pretty well-known that a lot of otherwise well regarded people openly bought into eugenics pseudoscience in the olden days, I’ve written about Pennsylvania’s own Gifford Pinchot myself, a delegate to the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912. But Ms. Pants on Fire has misrepresented history before, so I think I have grounds for curiosity.
Seriously, if you can come up with links to questionable covid remedy studies that may someday wind up on Retraction Watch list, at least give us a link to or describe the documentation of a story like that! And note that it took 4 years after “expression of concern” to retract a problematic paper on Vitamin D as a covid treatment. This is why preliminary studies shouldn’t really be informing clinical decisions.
So I’m not really buying anything Jessica’s selling, but I’m just sad and uncomfortable watching other people being fed misinformation on products, politics, and the civil rights movement, being riled up to fight ableism with ableism, and are being encouraged to overdose on social media, and now supplements too?
If you know anyone consuming this type of content, make sure they know that black cumin (nigella sativa) is in fact a SPICE. Not everyone realizes that some of these home remedies are in fact food, sometimes that they don’t even like or have a sensitivity to. I heard of someone who wound up at the emergency room after using a nasal spray wrongly recommended as a covid prophylactic that actually contained capsaicin, not realizing they were putting chili pepper up their nose! Black cumin has had a lot of unproven claims made about it, but apparently many of the conditions it supposedly treats are contradictory, as Steven Novella pointed out: “It does not make sense that one substance would simultaneously be antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory.” Turmeric is also a spice with a lot of unproven medical claims, and also isn’t a proven medicine. It didn’t take much for me to look up some expert opinions on this stuff, you would think that a fancy long-time blogger with so many studies to cite could’ve too, but somehow, for some reason, chose not to.