An unfounded far-right fever dream meets unfounded far-out fever treatments.
Wellness influencers have been having a field day over the coronavirus, with some taking advantage of people’s fears to hawk unproven supplements and drive traffic to their sites. A few have even touted forsythia as a natural treatment, stealing a plot point verbatim from Contagion, the prescient 2011 Hollywood film that warned about the danger of medical misinformation in a pandemic.
Some have fused wellness hoaxes and pseudoscientific homeopathic treatments with QAnon and other far-right conspiracies. One such notable influencer is Joseph Arena, a chiropractor who uses the title “Dr.” and has more than 40,000 followers. Arena has pushed explicit QAnon theories about massive pedophile rings run by the deep state on his Instagram account and has directed his followers to pro-QAnon pages to find “the truth.”
“All of the FEMA camps and hospital beds that are being created to take in the millions of people who we are about to save. Get ready, it is about to start,” Arena said in a Instagram story last Tuesday, regurgitating a modified version of a conspiracy theory that first surfaced in the 1970s about Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to put people in concentration camps under the pretense of martial law. (Arena responded to a request for comment by threatening legal action if his name was included in this story…)
To read the entire article from Mother Jones, click https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/wellness-qanon-coronavirus/
