The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus
Misinformation Online
Researchers and regulators say Joseph Mercola, an
osteopathic physician, creates and profits from misleading claims about
Covid-19 vaccines.
Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician in Cape
Coral, Fla., is a key figure in the “Disinformation Dozen” spreading
anti-vaccine messaging, researchers said.
Sheera
Frenkel
By Sheera
Frenkel
July 24,
2021
Updated
11:06 a.m. ET
SAN
FRANCISCO — The article that appeared online on Feb. 9 began with a seemingly
innocuous question about the legal definition of vaccines. Then over its next
3,400 words, it declared coronavirus vaccines were “a medical fraud” and said
the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop
transmission of the disease.
Instead,
the article claimed, the shots “alter your genetic coding, turning you into a
viral protein factory that has no off-switch.”
Its
assertions were easily disprovable. No matter. Over the next few hours, the
article was translated from English into Spanish and Polish. It appeared on
dozens of blogs and was picked up by anti-vaccination activists, who repeated
the false claims online. The article also made its way to Facebook, where it
reached 400,000 people, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned
tool.
The entire
effort traced back to one person: Joseph Mercola.
Dr.
Mercola, 67, an osteopathic physician in Cape Coral, Fla., has long been a
subject of criticism and government regulatory actions for his promotion of
unproven or unapproved treatments. But most recently, he has become the chief
spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, according to researchers.
An
internet-savvy entrepreneur who employs dozens, Dr. Mercola has published over
600 articles on Facebook that cast doubt on Covid-19 vaccines since the
pandemic began, reaching a far larger audience than other vaccine skeptics, an
analysis by The New York Times found. His claims have been widely echoed on
Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
The
activity has earned Dr. Mercola, a natural health proponent with an Everyman
demeanor, the dubious distinction of the top spot in the “Disinformation
Dozen,” a list of 12 people responsible for sharing 65 percent of all
anti-vaccine messaging on social media, said the nonprofit Center for
Countering Digital Hate. Others on the list include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a
longtime anti-vaccine activist, and Erin Elizabeth, the founder of the website
Health Nut News, who is also Dr. Mercola’s girlfriend.
“Mercola is
the pioneer of the anti-vaccine movement,” said Kolina Koltai, a researcher at
the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories. “He’s a
master of capitalizing on periods of uncertainty, like the pandemic, to grow
his movement.”
Some
high-profile media figures have promoted skepticism of the vaccines, notably
Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News, though other Fox personalities
have urged viewers to get the shots. Now, Dr. Mercola and others in the
“Disinformation Dozen” are in the spotlight as vaccinations in the United
States slow, just as the highly infectious Delta variant has fueled a
resurgence in coronavirus cases. More than 97 percent of people hospitalized
for Covid-19 are unvaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
President
Biden has blamed online falsehoods for causing people to refrain from getting
the injections. But even as Mr. Biden has urged social media companies to “do
something about the misinformation,” Dr. Mercola shows the difficulty of that
task.
Over the
last decade, Dr. Mercola has built a vast operation to push natural health
cures, disseminate anti-vaccination content and profit from all of it, said
researchers who have studied his network. In 2017, he filed an affidavit
claiming his net worth was “in excess of $100 million.”
And rather
than directly stating online that vaccines don’t work, Dr. Mercola’s posts
often ask pointed questions about their safety and discuss studies that other
doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of his posts to
remain up with caution labels, and the companies have struggled to create rules
to pull down posts that have nuance.
“He has
been given new life by social media, which he exploits skillfully and
ruthlessly to bring people into his thrall,” said Imran Ahmed, director of the
Center for Countering Digital Hate, which studies misinformation and hate
speech. Its “Disinformation Dozen” report has been cited in congressional
hearings and by the White House.
In an
email, Dr. Mercola said it was “quite peculiar to me that I am named as the #1
superspreader of misinformation.” Some of his Facebook posts were only liked by
hundreds of people, he said, so he didn’t understand “how the relatively small
number of shares could possibly cause such calamity to Biden’s multibillion
dollar vaccination campaign.”
The efforts
against him are political, Dr. Mercola added, and he accused the White House of
“illegal censorship by colluding with social media companies.”
He did not
address whether his coronavirus claims were factual. “I am the lead author of a
peer reviewed publication regarding vitamin D and the risk of Covid-19 and I
have every right to inform the public by sharing my medical research,” he said.
He did not identify the publication, and The Times was unable to verify his
claim.
A native of
Chicago, Dr. Mercola started a small private practice in 1985 in Schaumburg, Ill. In the 1990s, he
began shifting to natural health medicine and opened his main website,
Mercola.com, to share his treatments, cures and advice. The site urges people
to “take control of your health.”
In 2003, he
published a book, “The No-Grain Diet,” which became a New York Times best
seller. He has since published books almost yearly. In 2015, he moved to
Florida.
As his
popularity grew, Dr. Mercola began a cycle. It starts with making unproven and
sometimes far-fetched health claims, such as that spring mattresses amplify
harmful radiation, and then selling products online — from vitamin supplements
to organic yogurt — that he promotes as alternative treatments.
To buttress
the operation, he set up companies like Mercola.com Health Resources and
Mercola Consulting Services. These entities have offices in Florida and the
Philippines with teams of employees. Using this infrastructure, Dr. Mercola has
seized on news moments to rapidly publish blog posts, newsletters and videos in
nearly a dozen languages to a network of websites and social media.
His
audience is substantial. Dr. Mercola’s official English-language Facebook page
has over 1.7 million followers, while his Spanish-language page has 1 million
followers. The Times also found 17 other Facebook pages that appeared to be run
by him or were closely connected to his businesses. On Twitter, he has nearly
300,000 followers, plus nearly 400,000 on YouTube.
Dr. Mercola
has a keen understanding of what makes something go viral online, said two
former employees, who declined to be identified because they had signed
nondisclosure agreements. He routinely does A/B testing, they said, in which
many versions of the same content are published to see what spreads fastest
online.
In his
email, Dr. Mercola said, “Translation and a variety of media positions are
standard for most content oriented websites.”
Facebook
said it has labeled many of Dr. Mercola’s posts as false, banned advertising on
his main page and removed some of his pages after they violated its policies.
Twitter said it has also taken down some of Dr. Mercola’s posts and labeled
others. YouTube said Dr. Mercola was not part of a program from which he can
make money from ads on his videos.
In 2012,
Dr. Mercola began writing about the virtues of tanning beds. He argued that
they reduced the chances of getting cancer, while also selling tanning beds
with names like Vitality and D-lite for $1,200 to $4,000 each. Many of the
articles were based on discredited studies.
The Federal
Trade Commission brought false-advertising claims against Dr. Mercola in 2017
based on the health claims about tanning beds. He settled and sent $2.95
million in refunds to customers who bought the tanning beds.
The Food
and Drug Administration has also issued warning letters to Dr. Mercola for
selling unapproved health products in 2005, 2006 and 2011 and has fined him
millions of dollars.
Many of Dr.
Mercola’s claims have been amplified by other vaccine skeptics, including Ms.
Elizabeth. She worked for Mercola.com from 2009 to 2011, according to her
LinkedIn page.
But while
Ms. Elizabeth and others are overtly anti-vaccine, Dr. Mercola has appeared
more approachable because he takes less radical positions than his peers, Ms.
Koltai said. “He takes away from the idea that an anti-vaccination activist is
a fringe person,” she said.
In an
email, Ms. Elizabeth said she was “shocked to have been targeted as one of the
12” in the “Disinformation Dozen” and called it a “witch hunt.”
When the
coronavirus hit last year, Dr. Mercola jumped on the news, with posts
questioning the origins of the disease. In December, he used a study that
examined mask-wearing by doctors to argue that masks did not stop the spread of
the virus.
He also
began promoting vitamin supplements as a way to ward off the coronavirus. In a
warning letter on Feb. 18, the F.D.A. said Dr. Mercola had “misleadingly
represented” what were “unapproved and misbranded products” on Mercola.com as
established Covid-19 treatments.
In May, Dr.
Mercola took down many of his own Facebook posts to evade the social network’s
crackdown on anti-vaccine content. Facebook also recently removed his Feb. 9
article.
But Dr.
Mercola has continued to raise vaccine questions. In a Facebook post on Friday,
he used another study to mull how useful the Pfizer vaccine was against
Covid-19 variants. One headline in the post said the vaccine was only 39
percent effective, but it did not cite another statistic from the study that
said the vaccine was 91 percent effective against serious illness.
“Is this
possible? We were told 95 percent effectiveness,” he wrote.
Within a
few hours, the post had been shared more than 220 times.
Davey Alba,
Karen Weise, Erin Woo and Daisuke Wakabayashi contributed reporting. Ben Decker
and Jacob Silver contributed research.
Sheera
Frenkel is a prize-winning technology reporter based in San Francisco. In 2021,
she and Cecilia Kang published, “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for
Domination.” @sheeraf
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