The anti-vaxxer behind the Meghan McCain-endorsed Covid shot ‘detox'
In several posts on X, some of which have been deleted, McCain — who previously criticized pop star Nicki Minaj for promoting vaccine hesitancy — announced the partnership, promoted the supplements and took aim at the mRNA jabs, demanding they be pulled off the market.
'If you regret taking the shot, there's hope,' McCain wrote. 'Dr. Peter McCullough's all-natural Ultimate Spike Detox is helping people worldwide. Use code MCCAIN for 10% off + FREE shipping on all orders,' she wrote in a now-deleted post. It's unclear exactly what McCain has to offer to a supplements company beyond her Republican pedigree that has bought her a media presence — but that is probably enough.
The Wellness Company, which has also paid Donald Trump Jr. for promotion of its emergency medical kit, which includes the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, is an anti-vaccine moneymaking venture from Foster Coulson. Its chief scientific officer is former cardiologist Peter McCullough — who is infamous for peddling misinformation and conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 vaccines and for pushing unproven 'early treatments' for the disease like the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. He has become popular with the audiences of 'The Joe Rogan Experience' and other like-minded podcasts, and his supposed expertise has been cited repeatedly in efforts to discredit the Covid vaccines. (MSNBC reached out to McCain and McCullough for comment, but received no response.)
The company's 'Ultimate Spike Detox,' billed as an 'extra-strength formula…the only one designed and used by Dr. Peter McCullough, the world's leading pandemic expert and developer of the McCullough Base Spike Detoxification Protocol,' is available for $89.99.
Like other supplements, of course, the detox is not approved by the FDA for safety and efficacy. There is also evidence that it does not work — unlike the mRNA vaccines, which have prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths and offer protection against long Covid.
The Wellness Company is part of a burgeoning wellness industry that has exploded in recent years since the pandemic. The U.S. dietary supplements industry alone, which represents just a fraction of this larger sector, has an estimated value of around $60 billion currently and is projected to grow to nearly $80 billion in the next five years, according to the National Sanitation Foundation, which certifies supplements. Fostering this growth is the fact that it is also largely unregulated.
Perhaps that fact helps explain the growing alignment between wellness influencers and the business-aligned political right, embodied most prominently in the so-called 'Make America Healthy Again' movement launched by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist turned Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
For McCullough, supplements are the perfect game, allowing him to profit off of the vaccine fear he has encouraged for years now. Before the pandemic, the Texas-based cardiologist held senior positions at Baylor University Medical Center and Texas A&M University.
The Covid pandemic changed the incentives. With widespread confusion and fear, there was a huge market for information — and misinformation. Mainstream doctors were a dime a dozen. Contrarians and fringe voices, however, could readily get attention from media — and alternative media — leveraging their credentials to build their brands and capture sizable audiences. Much of this attention came from the political right as right-wing groups and politicians were working to restore economic normalcy quickly and without burdensome new restrictions on business.
McCullough was already no stranger to controversy, having served as the editor of a cardiac journal that came under fire for publishing articles plagued by conflicts of interest. He latched onto hydroxychloroquine in 2020, which Donald Trump had called a 'miracle cure' in March of that year, encouraging its use outside of clinical trials.
'My own conclusion from a review of the literature is that HCQ has not failed the randomized trials, but researchers have failed HCQ,' he wrote in an August 2020 op-ed for The Hill titled, 'Why doctors and researchers need access to hydroxychloroquine.'
McCullough's name also appears in a 2022 House report detailing a pressure campaign by Trump allies in the summer of 2020 against the Food and Drug Administration over its revocation of the drug's emergency use authorization. The FDA granted the EUA in March 2020 after Donald Trump's public endorsement — an apparent quick fix to the public health crisis hanging over his re-election bid. The FDA's decision to restrict use of the drug, following a large-scale study in June 2020 showing that the drug was ineffective against Covid, rankled the president's allies.
That November, after hydroxychloroquine's efficacy as a Covid treatment had been thoroughly discredited through repeat study, McCullough testified at a Senate hearing organized by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., on Covid 'outpatient treatments' where he promoted the drug. Three months later, in early 2021, Baylor Scott & White Health and McCullough entered into a confidential separation agreement. Several months after that, the Baylor health care system took out a temporary restraining order against the doctor for continuing to claim affiliation with the institution while spreading misinformation about vaccines and the pandemic. At the time, McCullough's attorney said that the affiliations were 'said/printed by a third party with no encouragement from Dr. McCullough,' who 'does not and cannot control third parties.'
Around the time of the Baylor suit, Texas A&M cut ties with him, and another medical school removed him from its faculty page as well. Their reasons were not reported at the time. Earlier this year, it was reported that McCullough's board certifications were finally revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine, which told MedPage Today that it 'doesn't comment on individual physicians.'
But professional disgrace has done little to damage to McCullough, whose enterprises not only include his supplements business, but a nonprofit as well. The McCullough Foundation brought in $660,000 in 2023, according to public records. Although he did not take a salary from the group, it promotes his anti-vax work.
Key to his success has been consistent amplification by right-wing allies. A December 2021 interview with podcast host Joe Rogan blasted McCullough into the MAGA media stratosphere — and he's still a recurring guest on Fox News and a feted speaker at numerous MAGA events. He has also found willing collaborators in various dark money groups like the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the anti-vaccine Unity Project. Just recently, Johnson brought McCullough back to testify at a Senate hearing about an alleged cover-up of vaccine harms.
Now, even Meghan McCain is hopping on board, lending her ostensibly 'moderate' conservative celebrity to a lucrative business model. It all signals one thing: Anti-vax activism is now the mainstream Republican position.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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7 minutes ago
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Dougie Bedinger using autism journey to inspire others after parents told he'd never play sports
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28 minutes ago
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A Tennessee teen lifeguard saved a man. How the rescue led to a new start for them both
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"You did great," she told Williams. "You did a good job." About 48 hours later, Williams gingerly walked into Austin's hospital room and hugged him. She cried harder than she ever had. The embrace unleashed a flood of emotions she had suppressed for eight years. The lifeguard: Dancing with her dad Williams' two favorite pictures in her bedroom are of her and her dad. In one, she is 9 and they're performing at one of her dance recitals to the "Twilight" movie soundtrack song "A Thousand Years." In another, she's 7 and posing in a floral-patterned dress during a daddy-daughter outing to a restaurant. "No special occasion," she said, "but I was really excited that Dad carved out time just for me." Williams sighed and paused. "Looking at those two pictures," she said, "it's more sad than anything. Every time I talk about my dad, I end up crying or something." Months before Williams was born, her father joined the Virginia State Police. Within a year, he responded to the deadliest school shooting in modern U.S. history, trying to save some of the 30 people killed in Norris Hall at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. It was the first of several violent crime scenes Trooper Thomas Andrew "Andy" Williams faced in his 11-year career. He suffered post traumatic stress, but never sought or received mental health treatment, Williams and her mother said. The survivor: Why the Y felt like home Billy Austin boasts, 45 years later, that he once was the youngest waterfront director ever to work at Camp Minikani. He was 19 then, a year older than Williams is now. Sure, he loved canoeing, swimming and building fires there as a kid just outside his hometown of Milwaukee. But that YMCA camp was more than a summer hang, especially after his parents divorced when he was 13. "I came from a home that was not a very functional home," he said. "I didn't really have a feeling of family growing up, but I had that feeling at the Y camps. I lived for summers for that reason. The YMCA felt like family and I always felt at home at the Y." In his teen years there, counselors taught Austin how to play guitar, and he wrote his first songs. Austin, strumming a guitar, sang one of them, "Thinking of You," in front of a bonfire for 250 campers and staffers. "When I got done with the song," he said, "the kids screamed so loud, I turned around because I thought the fire was falling on top of me. But they were screaming for the song." The lifeguard: 'She told me my dad was in heaven' A decade after the Virginia Tech shooting, Williams, on an overnight visit at her grandparents' house, was tossing and turning in bed. She finally drifted off to sleep but woke an hour later. Her mom was sitting at the foot of her bed. "She told me my dad was in heaven," Williams said. "I started crying. Then I heard other family members screaming and crying." Her father died by suicide on April 16, 2017. 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The band, the only one to play original songs, hoisted the trophy that night. Afterward, the judges asked who wrote those amazing songs. The guys all pointed to Austin. "Well," one of the judges said, "you need to go to Nashville." When he got to Music City in 1990, Austin looked for a gym. Although other places were far less expensive, he chose the YMCA. "I was here as a starving songwriter," he said, "and I could barely afford a Y membership, but I kept loyal because of my summer camp experiences in Wisconsin." Austin also felt safer there because he knew firsthand of the rigorous first aid training lifeguards and other staffers received. "If anything ever happened to me," he thought, "I'd rather be at a YMCA." The lifeguard: Anger, then understanding At first, Williams was angry at her father for killing himself. "I was 10, and I didn't understand why he would choose to leave us," she said. "Now I have a better understanding of mental health. Him not getting the help he needed put him into a hole he couldn't get out of," she said. "It really wasn't his fault; it was the chemicals in his brain." Some of her friends' dads tried to fill the void, as did her stepdad when her mother remarried a few years later. "I didn't want anyone but my father," Williams said. "I didn't see anyone the same as him." The family moved three times in her teen years, ending up in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in the summer of 2022 because of her stepfather's work. He and Williams' mom split since then. A few weeks later, Williams started at the brand-new Liberty Creek High School in neighboring Gallatin, Tennessee. She made new friends. She really got into her health care classes. Last year, she was sitting at lunch at Jose's Mexican Restaurant with her family one Sunday after church when Williams decided she needed a part-time job. She Googled "jobs for teens" and, right there on her phone, applied for an opening at an ice cream shop. Her mom, who worked for the Hendersonville Chamber of Commerce, suggested Williams reach out to her friend at the YMCA. Within days, Williams had offers to interview for both jobs. The ice cream shop paid $2 more an hour, plus tips. "But I kind of thought lifeguarding would be exciting. I'd already been CPR certified in my health classes," she said, "and I like helping people." In her first nine months on the job, Williams had only one encounter with first aid. "Someone came up to me: 'Hey, ma'am, do you have a Band-Aid?' That's literally the only thing." Until 8:10 p.m. Feb. 10. The survivor: 'I had pneumonia, but I didn't know' In Nashville, Austin found some success as a songwriter, scoring a No. 1 country hit, "Leave the Pieces," with duo the Wreckers in 2006. He started investing in Nashville properties and eventually became a successful real estate developer. A lifelong exerciser, Austin resolved at the beginning of this year to get into better shape. He decided to crank up his cardio workouts to five days a week at the Sumner County YMCA in Hendersonville. Each visit to the gym included at least 20 minutes each on the treadmill, rower, stair-climber and stationary bike. After that regimen Feb. 10, Austin went into the locker room to check text messages and emails. "I felt no pain; it was just a little harder to breathe," he said. "I had pneumonia, but I didn't know." Austin remembers nothing after that — until he woke up two days later in the cardiac intensive care unit at TriStar Hendersonville Medical Center with a tube down his throat. Compressions and cracked ribs Williams remembers every moment with clarity. She ran into the locker room and told the men crowded around to move. Austin lay on his back, motionless. He face was white. His lips were blue. "I just knew that he had no pulse," Williams said. "And I knew that he had been there for a while." Williams counted loudly as she started the first round of chest compressions. One, two, three, four. ... Paula Carney, the nurse who happened to be at the Y that day, came in and gave the man two breaths when Williams reached 30. Williams voice started shaking. "You're doing an amazing job," Carney reassured her. During the second round of compressions, they heard Austin's ribs crack. Carney and another nurse in the building rolled up Austin's shirt, engaged the defibrillator and shocked his heart twice. His eyes opened, but only for a second. He took a few ragged breaths, but only a few. Each flicker of life spurred Williams to keep going. She fought back tears. "I was looking at him ... and I knew that his family cared about him deeply, and I wanted to be that person that gave him another chance at life," she said. "So I gave it my 100%. I wanted to do everything in my power to save him." By the time first responders arrived, Austin had a faint pulse. Some color had returned to his face. As firefighters wheeled him out on the gurney, Williams and Carney stood, embraced and cried. The nurse prayed aloud that the man would survive. Carney and another nurse who'd helped, McKay Muhlenstein, both told Williams what a great job she did. When they left, Williams called her boss, YMCA aquatic director Carson Perry. "Hey, um, so, um, like, I just had to give CPR," she said. "Are you serious?" Perry said. Williams started crying again, and Perry told her he was coming to the Y. Williams looked around, started scrubbing the pool deck and came to a decision. After graduation, she would start training to be an emergency room nurse. What if he has brain damage? That night, Williams couldn't stop replaying the incident in her head, couldn't stop wondering if Billy Austin was going to be OK. The next day at volleyball team practice, Williams broke down in tears. Williams went back to the YMCA and looked up Austin's emergency contact in the computer system. She called the name listed, Austin's longtime friend and his business partner's wife, Tiffany Friedmann. Friedmann said Austin was on a ventilator at TriStar Hendersonville Medical Center. The next morning, Friedmann called back with good news: Austin was conscious, off the ventilator and talking. Williams had to see for herself. In her health care class scrubs, Williams grabbed two of her teachers and headed to the hospital, her stomach roiling. What if he has brain damage? He was unresponsive for at least four minutes. What if he can't speak to me? "Oh, my God, I can't thank you enough!" Friedmann told Williams in the hall outside. Already teary, Williams entered the room and bent down to hug the man she saved. "She just kind of collapsed on my hospital bed and threw her arms around me, started raining tears down," Austin said, "She was sobbing uncontrollably, which was so sweet." Williams said she felt in that moment that she and Austin would always be connected. "'God knew I needed you," she told him. "That's why he let me save you." A lifelong bond Williams and Austin stayed in touch. She told him about her dad. "It was just an instant bond that you can't describe," Austin said. Williams asked Austin to come by her house and see her off on prom night. Then she invited him to her high school graduation. Yes, and yes, he said with no hesitation. "All my friends, ... we knew at that moment that she was a daughter to me, that she was family, that this is a lifelong bond." Williams and Austin have talked or texted with each other every day since the Feb. 12 hospital visit. He took Williams, her boyfriend, and her mom to dinner the night of her prom. And he cheered her on in May when she got her high school diploma. When Williams got accepted to Galen College of Nursing in Nashville, Austin pledged to help with tuition and her other education expenses. And Austin hopes his biological daughter, Katie Austin, a physician's assistant in Wisconsin, can mentor Williams as she goes through nursing classes. At a one-on-one dinner in June, Williams asked Austin to legally adopt her. Austin, deeply moved, said he's considering it. Williams' mother, Maggie Panter, celebrates her daughter's relationship with Austin. 'He's another family member to us," Panter said. "I think it's a beautiful thing, and I think her dad would support that.' Austin and Williams talk often with each other about how blessed they feel that they were connected so deeply, albeit by such a traumatic event. Austin summed it up in words that are now tattooed on Williams' left forearm. "Too good to not be God." Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@ or 615-259-8384. This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: A TN Teen YMCA lifeguard finds father figure in man who she saved Solve the daily Crossword
Washington Post
37 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Allergies seem nearly impossible to avoid — unless you're Amish
Whether triggered by pollen, pet dander or peanuts, allergies in this day and age seem nearly impossible to avoid. But one group appears virtually immune, a mystery to experts who study allergies. Despite the increasing rate of allergic diseases, both in industrialized and in developing countries, the Amish remain exceptionally — and bafflingly — resistant. Only 7 percent of Amish children had a positive response to one or more common allergens in a skin prick test, compared with more than half of the general U.S. population. Even children from other traditional farming families, who still have lower rates of allergic disease than nonfarm children, are more allergic than the Amish. In fact, one Amish community living in northern Indiana is considered one of the least allergic populations ever measured in the developed world. 'Generally, across the country, about 8 to 10 percent of kids have asthma. In the Amish kids, it's probably 1 to 2 percent,' said Carole Ober, chair of human genetics at the University of Chicago. 'A few of them do have allergies, but at much, much lower rates compared to the general population.' Now, Ober and other researchers are trying to discover what makes Amish and other traditional farming communities unique, in the hopes of developing a protective treatment that could be given to young children. For instance, a probiotic or essential oil that contains substances found in farm dust, such as microbes and the molecules they produce, could stimulate children's immune systems in a way that prevents allergic disease. 'Certain kinds of farming practices, particularly the very traditional ones, have this extraordinary protective effect in the sense that, in these communities, asthma and allergies are virtually unknown,' said Donata Vercelli, a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of Arizona. 'The studies that have been done in these farming populations are critical because they tell us that protection is an attainable goal.' The Amish are members of a Christian group who practice traditional farming — many live on single-family dairy farms — and use horses for fieldwork and transportation. As of 2024, around 395,000 Amish live in the United States, concentrated mostly in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Over the past century, the incidence of allergic diseases — including hay fever (allergic rhinitis), asthma, food allergies and eczema — has increased dramatically. Hay fever, or an allergic reaction to tree, grass and weed pollens, emerged as the first recognized allergic disease in the early 1800s, climbing to epidemic levels in Europe and North America by 1900. The 1960s saw a sharp increase in the prevalence of pediatric asthma, a condition in which the airways tighten when breathing in an allergen. From the 1990s onward, there has been an upswing in the developed world in food allergies, including cow's milk, peanut and egg allergies. Urbanization, air pollution, dietary changes and an indoor lifestyle are often cited as possible factors. The 'hygiene hypothesis' — first proposed in a 1989 study by American immunologist David Strachan — suggests that early childhood exposure to microbes protects against allergic diseases by contributing to the development of a healthy immune system. The study found that hay fever and eczema were less common among children born into larger families. Strachan wondered whether unhygienic contact with older siblings served as a protection against allergies. Subsequent findings have given support to the hygiene hypothesis, such as that children who grow up with more household pets are less likely to develop asthma, hay fever or eczema. Perhaps even more beneficial than having older siblings or pets, however, is growing up on a farm. (More than 150 years ago, hay fever was known as an 'aristocratic disease,' almost wholly confined to the upper classes of society. Farmers appeared relatively immune.) This 'farm effect' has been confirmed by studies on agricultural populations around the world, including in the United States, Europe, Asia and South America. But even among farming communities, the most pronounced effect appears to be in the Amish. In a study of 60 schoolchildren by Ober, Vercelli and their colleagues, the prevalence of asthma was four times lower in the Amish as compared with the Hutterites, another U.S. farming community with a similar genetic ancestry and lifestyle. The prevalence of allergic sensitization — the development of antibodies to allergens and the first step to developing an allergy — was six times higher in the Hutterites. The researchers first ruled out a genetic cause; in fact, an analysis showed that the Amish and Hutterite children were remarkably similar in their ancestral roots. Instead, the main difference between these two populations seemed to be the amount of exposure as young children to farm animals or barns. 'The Hutterite kids and pregnant moms don't go into the animal barns. Kids aren't really exposed to the animal barns until they're like 12 or so, when they start learning how to do the work on the farm,' Ober said. 'The Amish kids are in and out of the cow barns all day long from an early age.' When analyzing samples of Amish and Hutterite house dust, they found a microbial load almost seven times higher in Amish homes. Later experiments showed that the airways of mice that inhaled Amish dust had dramatically reduced asthmalike symptoms when exposed to allergens. Mice that inhaled Hutterite dust did not receive the same benefit. Now, Ober and Vercelli are beginning to identify the protective agents in Amish dust that prevent allergic asthma. In 2023, their analysis of farm dust found proteins that act like delivery trucks, loaded with molecules produced by microbes and plants. When these transport proteins deliver their cargo to the mucus that lines the respiratory tract, it creates a protective environment that regulates airway responses and prevents inflammation. 'We don't really talk about the hygiene hypothesis as much anymore because we now understand that it's not really about how hygienic you're living,' said Kirsi Järvinen-Seppo, director of the Center for Food Allergy at the University of Rochester Medical Center. 'It's more like a microbial hypothesis, since beneficial bacteria that colonize the gut and other mucosal surfaces play a significant role.' During the first year or two of life, a baby's immune system is rapidly developing and highly malleable by environmental stimuli, such as bacteria. Some experts believe that exposing young children to certain types of beneficial bacteria can engage and shape the growing immune system in a way that reduces the risk of allergic diseases later in life. Farm dust contains a hodgepodge of bacteria shed from livestock and animal feed that isn't harmful enough to cause illness, but does effectively train the immune system to become less responsive to allergens later in life. In 2021, Järvinen-Seppo and her colleagues compared the gut microbiomes of 65 Old Order Mennonite infants from a rural community in New York with 39 urban/suburban infants from nearby Rochester. Like the Amish, the Old Order Mennonites follow a traditional agrarian lifestyle. Almost three-fourths of Mennonite infants in the study were colonized with B. infantis, a bacterium associated with lower rates of allergic diseases, in contrast to 21 percent of Rochester infants. 'The colonization rate is very low in the United States and other Western countries, compared to very high rates in Mennonite communities, similar to some developing countries,' Järvinen-Seppo said. 'This mirrors the rates of autoimmune and allergic diseases.' These clues about the origin of the farm effect represent a step toward the prevention of allergic diseases, Järvinen-Seppo says. Whatever form the treatment takes, the impact on prevention of allergic diseases, which affect millions of people worldwide and reduce quality of life, could be enormous, experts say. 'I don't know that we can give every family a cow. … But we are learning from these time-honored and very stable environments what type of substances and exposures are needed,' Vercelli said. 'Once we know that, I don't think there will be any impediment to creating protective strategies along these lines.'
