And Ye Shall Bathe in Borax
Carrie Madej and the Menace of Covid Quackery
Until last week I hadn’t heard of Carrie Madej or the ‘vaccine detox’ phenomenon. I knew about antivaxxers and critics of the ‘scamdemic’, because it’s difficult not to know about them. Nowadays you find them all over social media handing out Magna Carta or copies of the ‘Nuremberg Code’ to doctors and nurses who have spent the last two years trying to save our lives, even at the risk of their own.
You see them clutching their pearls and wearing yellow stars at demonstrations against ‘Covid passports’, because it is just so Nazi, isn’t it, to vaccinate people during a pandemic and then ask for proof of vaccination? You see them brawling with the police in Australia and the UK, calling on doctors to be hanged, berating people for wearing masks or vaccinating their kids. You find them pompously tweeting ‘Hold. The. Line’ like Spartans awaiting the Persian army at Thermopylae.
Now even Tesco has incurred their wrath, because of an advert in which Santa Claus holds up a ‘Covid passport’ - a development that has now prompted a call for the antivaxxers to boycott Tesco. All this is infuriating and sickening enough, but I wasn’t aware that you could be vaccinated, and then ‘undo’ of the effects of the vaccine, by ‘detoxing the vaxx’.
This, among other things, is what the Tiktok ‘influencer’ and former osteopath Carrie Madej is offering to her followers who were ‘forced’ to take the vaccine. Madej has gained a reputation as a whistleblowing truthteller in American rightwing circles for her out-there opposition to vaccines, which she has variously described as a plot by Bill Gates to modify human DNA and turn us all into malleable ‘transhumans’ by injecting ‘nanotechnologies’ into our bodies
She also claims to have observed Covid-19 vaccines through a microscope, and detected ‘superconducting materials’, a ‘liquified computing system’, and a tentacled organism that she claims to have seen pointeing up at her.
Such claims are outlandish enough, but now Madej says that even if you have been ‘forced’ to take the vaccine, you can detoxify yourself by taking a long bath, and not just any bath. Madej recommends a long soak in a mixture of baking soda to suck out the ‘radiation’ created by the vaccine, Epsom salt for the ‘poisons’, and -wait for it – Borax household cleaner, in order to cleanse yourself of those pesky nanotechnologies.
Some readers may look askance at the idea of bathing in a detergent more commonly used to unclog drains and remove mildew from walls, but Madej insists that one or two glasses of Borax can remove the ‘liquid computerised systems’ that have been injected into your body in order to listen to your thoughts and even control them.
It may not surprise anyone to hear that these theories have been debunked, or that Madej’s videos have been removed from various social media platforms.
It’s easy to mock this dangerous and potentially harmful drivel, and the equally barking conspiracy theories that accompany it. But the last few years have repeatedly shown that laughter is an insufficient response to the new manifestations of political quackery that have accompanied the new age of authoritarian populism, and which have found new outlets during the Covid-19 pandemic.
On one hand Madej is another symptom of the intellectual and moral decadence that makes it possible for libertarian anti-vaxxers to compare themselves with victims of Auschwitz. We might well dismiss her as a charlatan, a fantasist, and an outright grifter, were it not for the fact that her dishonesty is part of a wider political phenomenon.
Divide and Conquer
A resident in the Dominican Republic, Madej describes herself as an osteopathic internal medicine doctor who is ‘practicing the truth in Jesus through medicine’. She is a QAnon supporter who has denounced the ‘global elite pedophile ring’ that ‘Q’ has supposedly revealed.
She spoke at the January 6 MAGA rally that preceded the assault on the Capitol. She is a regular interviewee on rightwing media platforms. Alex Jones - naturally - has interviewed her, and so has Jamie Glasov, the editor of the ultraconservative Frontpage Magazine.
The MyPatriotsNetwork (‘Uniting Patriots Worldwide’) website contains various full-length video interviews with her - in addition to videos featuring from a supposed child sex traffic survivor claiming that Biden and Barack Obama raped her, and an anti-vaccination video calling on America to ‘awake’, which compares Biden’s vaccination programmes to Nazi roundups of Jews, and ends with a clip from the Jewish resistance film Defiance, in which Daniel Craig advocates armed struggle.
Madej’s presence on these platforms is not due to her scientific and medical expertise. These outlets present her as a whistleblowing ‘expert’ telling the truth that the ‘fake media’ tries to conceal, and they do this not merely because they are as fake as she is, but because her opposition to the Biden government’s vaccine mandates is politically useful to them.
In their attempts to undermine the US government’s pandemic response, the antivaxxers and proponents of vaccine ‘detox’ are playing on the fears and vulnerabilities unleashed by the pandemic in order to undermine the Democrats and pave the way for the return of Trump – or for something even worse. In his study of the ‘supernatural history of the Third Reich’ Hitler’s Monsters, Eric Kurlander quotes a German critic during the last years of the Weimer Republic who observed how
Our contemporary distress elicits a growing desire for forecasts and predictions of the future. Prophets, wise men, and swindlers – driven either by spiritual calling or by the scent of money – compete against one another for a chance to console or strike fear into the multitude of troubled souls, for an opportunity to bring illumination or still more confusion to the confused many.
Kurlander also quotes the liberal journalist Rudolf Olden, who described the advent of the Nazis as a symbol of ‘the monstrous swing from rational to irrational,’ in which ‘our people have turned away from rationality and openly declared themselves for miracles.’
A similar process of irrationality, intellectual decay and anti-Enlightenment thinking now pervades our frantic social media technopolis. Pseudo-experts like Madej – and the platforms that amplify their quackery - are products of this phenomenon. With breathtaking cynicism, they fuel and feed off popular ignorance and paranoia, and seek to turn public health management into another wedge conspiracy issue for political gain.
This is why a Republican Party that has embraced authoritarianism and neo-fascism can compare antivaxxers to persecuted Jews one minute, and adopt Gwyneth Paltrow/wellness ‘detoxify’ gibberish the next. All this represents a clear and danger to public health, and it also poses a wider political threat, as this wilful, sociopathic quackery pushes society towards a new world where every opinion is equally valid, and the most absurd and nonsensical ideas are accepted and believed.
Democracy ultimately depends on at least the possibility of reaching a consensual truth, not to mention a basic notion of the common good that will put politics aside in the face of a common emergency. Fraudulent ideologues like Madej are one more symptom of how the American right has moved from these essential benchmarks, and it will take a lot more than Borax to remove the political toxins that they have pumped into the system, and undo the harm they have caused.