The company of celebrity chef, Pete Evans has been hit with almost $80,000 fines for alleged false advertising of wellness products.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration fined Evans’ company for alleged false advertising of therapeutic goods, including the Bio-Charger lamp, hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers and two medicines.
The TGA also issued a directions notice to the company and its sole Director, Evans, for removal of alleged non-compliant advertising.
Therapeutic goods, including medical devices and medicines, must be entered in the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods before they can be legally advertised in Australia.
A quick peek into Evans’ website reveals the products that drew the wrath of the TGA have been removed. There is no sign of the Bio Charger lamp that in April 2020, Evans claimed had recipes that could cure “the Wuhan coronavirus.”
At the time, the manufacturers of the Bio Charger distanced themselves from Evans’ claims, stressing it was “not a medical device” and “not intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of diseases or any other conditions.”
You can still buy some wellness pills made from sustainably sourced red marine algae, turmeric and organic agaricus bisporus (mushroom powder) of which no medical or health claims are made and bench top water filters that start at $869. Gotta get rid of that fluoride somehow.
I keep a fairly close eye on Evans, not from a consumer advocate point of view but because his claims are invariably weird and often inadvertently funny.
His latest obsession is the old, tortured conspiracy of chemtrails where condensation trails that appear from planes flying at high altitude are not condensation at all, but biological or chemical agents designed to… Well, you know, we’re all being crop dusted by the deep state for some reason.
Evans, who said in his podcast he was able to trace air traffic in his part of the world (you guessed it, Byron Bay and its environs), made the fanciful claim that there were more aircraft in the skies during a pandemic when international borders were closed and the states themselves closed their borders.
Get a new conspiracy theory, Pete. This one’s got very old.
Is Evans a harmless idiot or a dangerous influencer?
What we have seen is that in the space of a few years, Evans has gone from promoting various diets – paleo, more recently keto, not of themselves harmful when consumed by adults — to reposting neo-Nazi memes. That is a big shift in thought and belief, a quick fire veer to the fringes but it is actually commonplace among many people in the wellness industry.
We saw it last week when a beautician on the Gold Coast declared (with a massive publicity free kick from the media) she was banning customers from her shop who had been vaccinated for Covid-19.
She’s not the first and she won’t be the last. There was a massage business that did the same in NSW’s Northern Rivers and several weeks ago, a NDIS service provider emailed her clients (some with intellectual disabilities) telling them she would no longer offer her services if they have been vaccinated for Covid-19.
In all three cases, the rationale was more or less the same. Each business spouted nonsense about viral shedding. None of the Covid-19 vaccines in use around the world are “live viral” vaccines. Viral shedding is bunk, a lie put about by anti-vaxxers.
The businesses also claimed their public liability insurance would not cover them for viral outbreaks. It’s hard to know where to begin with this. There is no conceivable instance where a business could be subject to legal action for a viral outbreak and given viral shedding is an anti-vax fantasy, an outbreak could only come from either a) community infection or, b) a quarantine break-out where any legally claimable act of negligence would be directed elsewhere if it exists at all.
The other claim made by the massage business and the beautician is that the Covid-19 vaccines could render the vaccinated, women especially, infertile.
There is no basis for any of this but what is interesting is the consistency of messaging. They are singing from the same song sheet.
Who is the composer? Well, most of it comes from what the Centre for Digital Hate described as the Anti-Vax Dirty Dozen. A statistical analysis of social media posts reveals just 12 people disseminate two-thirds of the misinformation around Covid-19 vaccination. Most are grifters flogging their own cures and treatments for Covid-19 as well as a long list of other illnesses.
The target audience for the viral spread of misinformation is broadly speaking, the wellness community both in Australia and overseas.
I’ve come across yoga instructors who’ve been pressured out of the business because they could not be persuaded to engage in QAnon conspiracies and “scamdemic” tropes.
I interviewed a Vancouver-based Brazilian jiu jitsu instructor, Steven Kesting, considered one of the most highly skilled practitioners of the grappling martial art and a well-worn pathway to UFC fighting.
Kesting is also a qualified microbiologist. He was dismayed that many in the instruction of mixed martial arts in North America had fallen into a similar mindset to that adopted by Evans – Covid-19 was fake, wearing masks was a sign of servitude to the deep state and receiving a vaccination was more about deep state surveillance than controlling a global pandemic.
He took on the spread of misinformation with his own social media campaign. As a result, his business suffered. He received death threats. To his considerable credit he remained unwavering, asking but not telling people to be properly informed on the science of the pandemic.
One might think it odd that many of those in the wellness industry are now active spruikers for all manner of conspiracy theories, but people who obsess about diet, exercise and healthy living are predisposed to adopt conspiracy theories. They reject science and often see scientific reason as the enemy, or a direct competitor to the wares they are hawking. They carry not just a healthy scepticism of government but an outright distrust. So, when it comes to what should be a Himalayan leap of logic that say, claims the deep state is poisoning our minds and bodies by chemtrails, for the wellness folk, it is little more than a quick step to the right.
And that is why this group has been successfully targeted by people like the anti-vax Dirty Dozen. It’s not just anti-vax falsehoods, it’s the messaging from QAnon cultism, anti-lockdown hysterics, sovcits, and drooling deep state paranoids.
The wellness industry is a gaping, salivating maw gobbling it all up.
Evans, who had almost 1.5 million Facebook followers and a quarter million followers on Instagram before he was deplatformed for repeatedly spreading misinformation, is just another traveller along that dark road.
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