The Conspirituality Report
Anti-Vax Reverse Contagion Anxiety
Influencers Say that the Vaccinated Are Making Them Sick
Conspirituality influencers are now turning the laws of epidemiology inside out. It wasn’t enough for them to ignore or contradict public health officials with COVID-denialism dogwhistles. It wasn’t enough to claim that Dr. Fauci or Bill Gates are pursuing a “depopulation agenda” through lockdown measures and vaccine development.
Now conspirituality influencers are turning the vaccine into a virus. They are evidently abandoning the dictum to “refuse to live in fear”, as they express terror of people who are vaccinated. I’ll call this brain-flip “Reverse Contagion Anxiety”.
Below is a panic-sermon from @selfhealingmama, known as “Chloe Angeline” on Instagram. She advertises herself as an entrepreneur in “Conscious Pregnancy+Birth+Motherhood,” and a “Cosmic Doula Through the Portal of Motherhood.”
“I’m here to birth a new earth ,” writes Angeline, whose podcast focuses on becoming your “Highest Self”.
In the video, Angeline presents herself as an heroic truth-teller offering love and validation to women who she says are reporting menstrual abnormalities related to the COVID-19 vaccine. Not from getting vaccinated, but from being close to those who have. Angeline deploys the same logic used by Christiane Northrup two days ago, who falsely claimed that the mRNA vaccines “shed virus” through sweat glands, and suggested that her followers withhold sex from partners who were considering being vaccinated.
As much as Angeline says she’s telling the truth, she also says she is withholding an even darker revelation, referring to a conspiracy going on “behind the scenes” five times in the six-minute video.
Dr. Jennifer Gunter addresses the emerging science on anecdotal reports of post-vaccination menstrual irregularities here. Gunter also debunks Angeline and Northrup’s claim that the vaccine can affect another person’s menstrual cycle or fertility by proxy.
On Instagram, this video now has 357K views.
Angeline’s account ticks all the boxes for “Pastel QAnon”, a term coined by disinformation researcher Marc-André Argentino who writes that it consists of the “community of female influencers initially found on Instagram, but now present across multiple platforms (MeWe, Telegram, Parler, Gab, etc.). Many began as lifestyle bloggers, fitness instructors, diet influencers, esoteric spiritualists or promoters of alternative healing.”
Angeline’s Pastel points are earned with gorgeous interiors, woven dream-catchers, high-end furniture, and tasteful motherhood nudes. The aesthetics conceal a terrifying message.
“Disconnect from the system,” Angeline says, “because I’m telling you there’s something going on behind the scenes that is so much more horrific than we could ever wrap our heads around. I don’t share this to scare you. But I do share it with deep concern for my fellow sisters and soon-to-be hopefully mothers.”
Angeline’s pseudoscience builds on layer upon layer of previous anti-vax claims and panics:
- Claim that the mRNA vaccine changes your DNA. It does not.
- Claim that the mRNA vaccine is live, and so it can “shed virus”. Wrong. (But if it did shed live virus, the proponent of this believe would have to forget prior denials of minimizations of the virus.)
- Claim that the shed virus is secreting from sweat glands and pheromones. Wrong, see #2.
- Connect social-media-collected anecdotes — the person is a little nauseous, sweaty, anxious, has a bad period — to being increasingly surrounded by vaccinated people. Do not consider that the symptoms are the psychosomatic effects of cognitive dissonance, or the social isolation of being an anti-vaxxer. It can’t be the stress of the pandemic, either.
- Invent an escalation of the “vaccine agenda”: even if you are exercising your right to not be vaccinated, you are still at the mercy of the medical state, and your fellow citizens. There’s no escape. This is where spiritual solutions will be very attractive.
- Tie all of it to the hottest-button issue available in women’s wellness spaces: reproductive health. Use a bunch of pseudo-feminist language of choice and “believing women”, as though anti-vax women are being raped by the vaccine miasma.
Takeaway: Angeline’s disinformation is extremely self-isolating and socially polarizing. Vaccine hesitancy is usually framed as a question of how a population relates to the state through public health. With Reverse Contagion Anxiety we’re now talking about horizontal violence between parents — especially women.
For more on how some women are leaving the anti-vax movement, download Ep. 46 of Conspirituality Podcast, where I interview Heather Simpson and Lydia Greene of Back to the Vax.
