This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As wildfires continue to burn all around Los Angeles, influencers have emerged to promote sales of their own, highly specific solutions to the crisis. With smoke filling the air of many neighborhoods, the wellness machine has sprung into action, promoting tinctures, detox products, essential oils, parasite cleanses, and even raw milk as “treatments” for its effects.
The fires began in earnest on Tuesday, January 7. By Thursday, two days later, Mallory DeMille, a correspondent for the Conspirituality podcast, says she noted an “immediate influx” of people promoting products on Instagram and TikTok by trying to tie them to the fires. The situation, DeMille says, is “heartbreaking and really irresponsible.”
In a recent Instagram video, DeMille outlined the ways that wellness influencers are, as she put it, “trying to capitalize” on the wildfires and their potential negative health effects. Many focus on the impact of wildfire smoke on people’s lungs, and suggest potential “treatments,” including supplements, powders, and essential oils, alongside often-cited “detox” tools like drinking apple cider vinegar or taking activated charcoal.
While activated charcoal is used in emergency settings to mitigate swallowed poisons, there is no evidence it can “detox” lungs or any other body part. It can also decrease the effectiveness of medication. In general, bodily organs do not need to be “detoxed” or “supported” with supplements, some of which can cause additional harm.
One particularly impassioned detox influencer, Ginger DeClue—who offers online detoxing seminars and describes herself as a “master healer”—suggested on Instagram that Los Angeles deserved its fate. “Everything that’s burning needs to burn,” she said in a video post that pushed the notion the city is suffused with toxic mold.
“Los Angeles has been a den of evil, SA [sexual assault] and child abuse, moldy overpriced apartments and buildings, with no HVAC maintenance. Crappy store fronts and hollyWEIRD since 1920,” she wrote. “God don’t like ugly in the span of a night he promises to destroy evil: but RESTORE the RIGHTEOUS.”
Some of the advice promoted by influencers and doctors who use social media have included commonsense, low-risk strategies that public health departments also recommend: using an air purifier at home, a saline nasal spray to help with irritation and congestion, and wearing high-quality masks outdoors.
But many are promoting products they have financial incentives to recommend, DeMille says, offering discount codes for products they already sold before the fires. “How do you know you can trust them with your health and wellness,” she asks, “if they’re financially driven to sell products and services?”
What’s happening with the wildfires is similar to the bogus cures and “detoxes” that have been offered throughout the Covid pandemic. Essential oils have been promoted as “immune support” for people trying to prevent Covid, and a huge body of evidence-less products have sprung up for people who want to “detox” from the effects of Covid vaccines or being near people who have been vaccinated. (Vaccine detox was promoted by some in the alt-wellness world even before Covid.)
“Wellness influencers are always leveraging tragedies,” DeMille points out, “but typically they’re personal tragedies”—say, telling sick people to try their products while undergoing cancer treatments or chronic illness.
“Leveraging a community tragedy isn’t that long of a walk,” she adds.
As climate disasters continue to happen more frequently—and the world faces a new potential pandemic in the form of bird flu—business looks extremely good for wellness influencers adept at turning disease and disasters into marketing hooks.