Please, for the love of god, don't get your coronavirus advice from the Goop people
There is never a good time to be taking anything snake oil vendor Gwyneth Paltrow says about health seriously. It wasn’t a good time to listen to her or her company, Goop, back when they were selling $15,000 dildos, trying to offer Christmas present suggestions, running festivals asking serious questions about how birds fly, selling “body-healing stickers,” or paying out fines after telling customers to use jade and rose quartz vaginal eggs. It should be obvious by now, but just in case, let’s also go ahead and say it isn’t a good time to get health advice from Goop during a pandemic either.
Still, in fear that there are people out there who somehow still believe Paltrow and Co. are reliable information sources, we’re eager to show you an article from The Daily Beast examining how Goop contributor and psychiatrist-you-would-only-send-your-worst-enemies-to Kelly Brogan is approaching the delicate matter of coronavirus health counseling.
As it points out, Brogan isn’t exactly the most reputable source on basically any subject. When she’s not posting inspirational images of plant goatse, Brogan is telling people that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, mental illnesses are borne from what we eat, and, of course, that vaccines aren’t all that great either.
Naturally, then, her thoughts on the cornavirus are completely solid and well worth taking seriously. In a video bad enough that even Facebook and Instagram have since removed it, Brogan tells viewers that “there is potentially no such thing as the coronavirus.” She starts off gaining our trust by describing her work on depression (“There may be a more liberating approach” than traditional knowledge she says) then suggests taking the same instinctive viewpoint on spreading the virus. She goes on to tell viewers to doubt whatever they’re hearing from any official source, calls germ theory itself into doubt, and asks if her devotees think current preventative measures and scientific understanding of COVID-19 “suits [their] thought process, [their] belief system, and [their] lifestyle at this stage in [their] experience.” She also suggests that it’s not good to view others as dirty or contaminated.
The piece also describes other parts of the video, still available on Vimeo, which shows Brogan saying that the whole coronavirus thing might be the result of our “news media [being] controlled by an unnamed pro-vaccination group” and her “[speculation] the the U.S. government is planning ‘to link our passports with our vaccination records’ and gain ‘totalitarian governmental control not unlike the divide-and-conquer dehumanization agendas that preceded the Holocaust.’”
Cool!
As for what Brogan suggests for anyone who does manage to get sick despite her advice, well, apparently we all need to get our “spiritual psychology” right, do “the shadow work,” and stop “projecting badness outside of us.” If we’re too scared of COVID-19, Brogan says, that’s what’ll get us. She laughs when describing the accepted understanding of the disease, speculates that “the 5G rollout,” as part of a massive cover-up, is hurting us, and offers an additional conspiracy theory that the virus-caused “collapse of the economy is being orchestrated” in order to benefit manufacturers of vaccines and medical supplies.
The video keeps going and going, becoming more deranged as it rumbles on, but these points are probably enough to sum up why Brogan—an “expert” featured on Goop’s website and at its events—shouldn’t be listened to at all. If you want the total run-down of why Brogan and, by extension Goop, are dangerous horseshit, read the rest of the Daily Beast article.
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