There is, finally, good news from the anti-vaccine beat.
It’s wrapped in some bad news.
The good: Mandates are working. Anti-vaxxers are exhausted, giving in and getting the shot.
The bad: They’re running home to “detox” in weird ways, hoping to “undo” it.
Antivaxxers on Facebook/TikTok are begging for advice on how to “detox” loved ones who got the shot.
They caved to mandates and want help from influencers.
Some say they’re doomed to death, infertility, or government tracking.
But others have “remedies.”
Like this:
On TikTok, anti-vaxxers have rallied around influencer Carrie Madej, who claims she can “detoxx the vaxx.”
Her solution? A bath with baking soda for “radiation” and epsom salt for “poisons.”
Then, she says, add Borax to clean out “nanotechnologies.”
(Don’t do this.)
When Madej talks about “nanotechnologies,” she’s referencing the “liquified computing systems” she falsely believes are in the vaccines.
Most people on TikTok don’t know who she is, but they do see “Dr.” next to her name, so some are pouring themselves a borax bath.
Borax is banned in foods by the FDA and generally by the EU. It’s a pretty harsh cleaning agent, a potential skin and eye irritant. If you’ve used it to kill pests in your basement before, you’d know.
But TikTok is littered with people taking borax baths to “undo” the vaccine.
Obviously, taking a bath in borax to “undo” the vaccine doesn’t work.
But people are trying.
“Once you’re injected, the lifesaving vaccination process has already begun," virologist Angela Rasmussen told me.
"You can’t unring a bell. It’s just not physically possible."
Some antivaxxers who are caving to mandates are immediately racing back to their houses to try to “uninject” the vaccine. Some are using syringes or snakebite kits.
Others are slicing the injection site and then self-administering cupping therapy.
This also does not work.
There's been a shift among online antivaxx communities in the last few weeks.
Almost 80 percent of eligible Americans have received one dose.
On social media, antivaxx influencers realize they’re losing.
They’re trying to hold onto followers who are increasingly giving in.
That’s where the good news comes in: Antivaxxers realize that they’re losing the war.
They’re attempting to adapt to a largely vaccinated world with ludicrous post-shot remedies.
But the outcome is not terrible: more vaccinated people, taking very itchy borax baths.
Here’s my full story on how anti-vaxxers are giving in and getting the shot, then trying to “undo” it with chemical baths and, basically, new age bloodletting.
It would be impossible to draw up a more stereotypical antivaxxer argument than the one being outlined by Aaron Rodgers today.
For someone who believes he's a "critical thinker," he sounds identical to every old lady in my Ivermectin Facebook groups and Q Telegram channels.
The only real difference between Aaron Rodgers and the Ivermectin Facebook groups is that he sounds... behind.
The IVM groups have largely moved on, adding a litany of other "cures" because Ivermectin, to them, doesn't fully "work" on Delta. The Joe Rogan Battery is old now.
Also, the "vaccines will make you infertile" thing is not new, but it has kicked up recently, in part because people aren't dropping dead en masse as they projected.
Most people have the shot, and there hasn't been a mass death event.
It’s hard to explain just how radicalized ivermectin and antivax Facebook groups have become in the last few weeks.
They’re now telling people who get COVID to avoid the ICU and treat themselves, often by nebulizing hydrogen peroxide.
So, how did we get here?
Facebook bans explicit antivaxx groups, but they don't ban groups for quack "cures" that antivaxxers push instead.
So in the last couple of months, Ivermectin groups have become the new hubs for antivaxx messaging.
But there's a problem: Ivermectin, by itself, isn’t working.
The number of people in these ivermectin groups have exploded.
So has the number of people in the groups who have contracted COVID, since the groups are largely filled with unvaccinated people seeking "alternative therapies."
Here's the deal about this much hyped Saturday's "Justice for January 6" rally.
Users on the extremist forums that hyped the rally-turned-riot on January 6 are not so hot on this one.
They're telling each other not to go, fearing it's a honeypot from the feds.
In the days before January 6th, sites like TheDonald and 4chan were littered with pictures of people boarding planes, posting pictures of guns, their hotel rooms, even maps of the tunnels beneath the Capitol.
They're calling 9/18 an "FBI rally." You mostly see posts like this:
Pro-Trump extremist boards have basically conspiracy theory'd themselves into inactivity.
Everything is "glowing," their word for a setup. Everything's a "false flag" or "honeypot."
They realize now their own rhetoric has put them in a bit of a bind.
Can't stress how wild the ivermectin Facebook groups have become. So many people insisting to each other to never go to an ER, in part because they might not get ivermectin, but sometimes because they fear nurses are killing them on purpose "for the insurance money."
The ivermectin Facebook groups are becoming fully anti-western medicine spaces, replete with the concept that ERs are killing you, maybe intentionally.
It's just a constant stream of DIY vitamin therapies and new, seemingly random antiviral drugs every day — but not the vaccine.
The ivermectin Facebook groups also offer a window into how pervasive antivaxx COVID "treatment" videos are on TikTok.
The groups serve as a de facto aggregator for antivaxx TikTok, a space that is enormous but inherently unquantifiable to researchers.