This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As wildfires continue to burn across Los Angeles, influencers have emerged to promote sales of their own, highly specific solutions to the crisis. With smoke filling the air of many neighborhoods, the wellness machine kicked into gear, promoting tinctures, detox products, essential oils, parasite cleanses, and even raw milk as “treatments” for its effects.
The fires began in earnest on Tuesday, January 7. By Thursday, two days later, Mallory DeMille, a correspondent for the Conspirituality podcast, says she’s noticed an “immediate influx” of people promoting products on Instagram and TikTok, trying to tie them to the fires. The situation, DeMille says, is “heartbreaking and really irresponsible.”
In a recent Instagram video, DeMille detailed the ways wellness influencers are, as she put it, “trying to capitalize” on the wildfires and their potential negative health effects. Many focus on the impact of wildfire smoke on people’s lungs and suggest potential “treatments,” including supplements, powders, and essential oils, along with oft-cited “detox” tools like drinking apple cider vinegar or taking activated charcoal.
While activated charcoal is used in emergency situations to soften ingested toxins, there is no evidence that it can detoxify lungs or any other body part. It can also reduce the effectiveness of medication. In general, body organs do not need to be “detoxified” or “supported” with supplements, some of which may cause additional damage.
One particularly passionate detox influencer, Ginger DeClue—who hosts online detox seminars and describes herself as a “master healer”—suggested on Instagram that Los Angeles deserves its fate. “Everything that burns must burn,” she said in a video post promoting the idea that the city is riddled with toxic mold.
“Los Angeles was a den of evil, SA [sexual assault] and child abuse, musty overpriced apartments and buildings, with no HVAC maintenance. Crappy storefronts and hollyWEIRD since 1920,” she wrote. “God does not like ugly in the span of a night, He promises to destroy the evil, but RESTORE the RIGHTEOUS.”
Some of the advice promoted by influencers and doctors using social media includes common sense, low-risk strategies that public health departments also recommend: using an air purifier at home, a saline nasal spray to help with irritation and congestion, and wearing high-quality masks outside.
But many promote products they have financial incentives to recommend, DeMille says, and offer discount codes for products they already sold before the fires. “How do you know you can trust them with your health and well-being,” she asks, “if they’re financially driven to sell products and services?”
What is happening with the wildfires is similar to the bogus cures and “detoxes” offered throughout the Covid pandemic. Essential oils have been promoted as “immune support” for people trying to prevent Covid, and a large number of unproven products have emergedfor people who want to “detoxify” the effects of Covid vaccines or are close to people who have been vaccinated . (Vaccine detoxification was promoted by some in the alt-wellness world even before Covid.)
“Wellness influencers always use tragedies,” DeMille points out, “but usually they’re personal tragedies”—say, telling sick people to try their products while undergoing cancer treatments or chronic illnesses.
“Taking advantage of a community tragedy is not that far of a step,” she adds.
As climate disasters become more frequent—and the world faces a new potential pandemic in the form of bird flu—business is looking extremely good for wellness influencers skilled at turning disease and disaster into marketing hooks.