How anti-vaxxers monetize misinformation

Substack provides a lucrative opportunity for grifting.

Supplements and telehealth services are two popular anti-vax revenue streams.

For example, The Wellness Company uses Peter McCullough’s megaphone to sell supplement subscriptions. Their persistent emails decry “Big Pharma” as the root of all evil while hawking $70 bottles of untested vitamins, using marketing copy like “inhibit spike viral effects” because they can’t outright say “buy this instead of getting a COVID vaccine.”

But the intention is clear.

Meanwhile, one of the main “frontline doctors,” Simone Gold, was recently released from prison (for being involved in the Jan 6 insurrection) to start up a “medical freedom” telehealth service after fleeing “communist” Beverly Hills for Naples, Florida. Considering she raked in millions from a similar service in 2021, this monetization move isn’t surprising.

How else might medical figures spread COVID misinformation for their own interests?

As it turns out: Substack.

The politics newsletter grift

As a working writer, I take no issue with people monetizing their craft. It’s not an easy profession. As I told Ben Cohen at the Banter earlier this week, I’m also wary of deplatforming anyone on this service. While Substack blurs the line between blog and social media, my interest lies in providing factual information and stoking rigorous debate, not taking down grifters, which often (though not always) has the adverse effect of making them more powerful.

I do, however, take great issue with monetizing misinformation. Putting people’s lives in danger while adding to the ever-increasing sense of paranoia around COVID conspiracies—and vaccine conspiracies in general—is not an admirable living. Sadly, a number of people are adding to their revenue streams by doing just that.

But as Substack’s politics leaderboard shows, four of the top 15 monetized Politics newsletters broker in anti-vax content. While Substack doesn’t list exact subscription numbers, their ballpark figures show that these figures make tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month by spreading anti-vax rhetoric.

Again, this is in the Politics category—we’ll touch upon Health & Wellness newsletters in a moment.

#4: Joseph Mercola

The Florida-based osteopath has received numerous FDA warning letters over the years. He’s marketed chlorella to “fight cancer” and stated that his tanning beds don’t cause cancer (for which he had to reimburse customers $2.59 million). Not too bad a slap for a man reportedly worth over $100 million.

With “tens of thousands of subscribers” on Substack, Mercola appears to be pulling in at least a million dollars every year (and possibly much higher) for his newsletter, which promotes the false idea that athletes are “dropping dead” from COVID vaccines and claims the US government’s vaccination campaign was deployed to “manipulate minds.”

#7: Alex Berenson

Despite being called the “pandemic’s wrongest man,” former NY Times reporter Alex Berenson is making a fortune “questioning” the COVID narrative, including linking journalist Grant Wahl’s untimely death to the vaccine.

Berenson was handpicked by Elon Musk to scour the vaccine section of the Twitter Files, which, while unsurprising, is disturbing since the man can’t even read a press release: he claimed that Pfizer’s bivalent COVID booster “raised the risk of stroke for people over 65,” when the actual release actually states:

Although the totality of the data currently suggests that it is very unlikely that the signal in VSD represents a true clinical risk, we believe it is important to share this information with the public, as we have in the past, when one of our safety monitoring systems detects a signal.

Even though Berenson links to that release, he’s betting his readers won’t click through to actually read it themselves. For that, he’s rewarded with tens of thousands of people paying $6/month.

#12: Robert Malone

When you start by claiming you invented mRNA vaccines, when in fact it took hundreds of people contributing to the technology, it’s all downhill from there.

Unlike others on this list, who at least attempt a veneer of professionalism, Malone, largely boosted by his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, now guests in “rap” videos and pumps out illegible copy like this:

Surprisingly <sarcasm> this new revelation is not being peddled by the Neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta, who (like some cardio-renal specialists) seems to have found a new career as an immunologist and vaccine expert. I guess that, compared to Big Bird and Grandma Big Bird, Dr. Gupta is a vaccine specialist! But apparently also a bird lover, and Crow is not in his diet… So, whats a failing private-public corporate media company that has been deeply enmeshed in the largest military-grade psy-ops campaign in modern history to do?

Don’t take my word for it—a molecular biologist debunks his grifting well enough.

#15: Steven Kirsch

My patience comes to an end when anyone would tweet something as vitriolic and hateful as this, especially when his feed is filled with “died suddenly” myths:

Kirsch’s Substack, also in the “tens of thousands of paid subscribers” category, is the most tabloid of the bunch—and that says a lot. Like Berenson, he’s claiming “proof” of strokes being caused by Pfizer’s bivalent vaccines, and even putting $1 million on the line. The link between the booster and stroke risk is currently under investigation (and should be investigated). Claiming certainty will drive subscriptions for his Substack, but do nothing for actual scientific findings—especially coming from a tech millionaire with a degree in electrical engineering.

Besides falsely claiming that COVID vaccines affect fertility, Kirsch relies on self-reported VAERS data as proof of whatever conspiracy he’s promoting at the moment. Even worse, he’s spiteful while doing it.

Meanwhile, in Health & Wellness…

Anti-vaxxers aren’t limited to Politics newsletters. In Health & Wellness, hematologist-oncologist Vinay Prasad was using social media to stoke controversies long before the pandemic, and was criticized for comparing COVID mandates to Nazi Germany. Unsurprisingly, his COVID claims don’t hold up. Still, thousands of subscribers pay $7/month for his “observations and thoughts” in the Health & Wellness category, while his “Sensible Medicine” Substack, which is much more COVID-focused in the Science category, has hundreds of people shelling out $8/month.

Most grifters avoid Science, where they would have to compete with actual scientists, so the more ambiguous “Health & Wellness” category is fitting. Naturopath and chiropractor Tyna Moore sells plenty of untested supplements on her website, and her “censorship-free” Substack has “hundreds of paid subscribers” at $19/month. She also seems to spend the bulk of her social media time retweeting Tucker Carlson, Aseem Malhotra, and RFK Jr.

Finally, the “medical establishment’s worst nightmare,” Dr Sam Bailey—after trying to find out what kind of doctor, all I could discover is “training and practicing within the medical system for two decades”—churns out YouTube videos (322k subscribers) that promote the wisdom of fevers (sounds very German New Medicine). On Substack, her hundreds of subscribers pay $5/month to read grammatically-challenged transmissions like this:

One of the "goals" of COVID-19 appears to be convincing the public to accept minimally-tested pharmaceutical products. Not only that, but to accept them whenever they are told… The medico-pharmaceutical industry and it's cronies are trying to keep you on the plantation by keeping their cardinal narratives intact...

Bonus points for avoiding Nazi talk, though I’m not sure poking at the shameful legacy of enslaving Black Americans is the way to go, doc.

The takeaway

If you really want to monetize your anti-vax grift, make sure your Substack is in the Politics category. Thousands a month to write grammar- and science-poor posts is not a bad gig if you choose Health & Wellness. But be warned, the real money is in Fauci-devil memes and laughable rap videos.

And the more you WRITE IN ALL BOLDED CAPS, the better.