This is the Black Swan I Warned About.
The government is waging war on evidence by legitimizing pseudoscience inside America's health institutions.
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Hi everyone—If you’ve noticed, I haven’t been writing much lately.
Not because science slowed down.
Not because misinformation took a break.
And not because the wellness industry suddenly discovered evidence, humility, or basic biological constraints.
The past several months have been a convergence of life chaos—moving into a new house, work travel, and navigating my cat Maxwell’s cancer treatment—all when scientific institutions, and us scientists within them, are increasingly being targeted by the very federal agencies meant to uphold evidence-based public health guidance.
So ImmunoLogic paused briefly so I could focus on my full-time career in life sciences (as much as the MAHA movements wants to call me a shill, writing this newsletter doesn’t pay the bills) and all of those life priorities.
At the same time, the wellness ecosystem and its MAHA activists haven’t slowed. They continue to launder pseudoscience into legitimacy, all while people and ecosystems are placed at risk. Ironically, today happens to be kick-off grifter extraordinaire, Casey Means’ Senate Confirmation hearing for Surgeon General, a role she is woefully unqualified for.
And as I said during RFK Jr’s hearing, during Mehmet Oz’s hearing, during Marty Makary’s hearing… if our Senators confirm her, we will all be harmed, in the immediate future and for generations to come.
People will make health decisions based on falsehoods—because our government is legitimizing pseudoscience
Every January, POLITICO magazine publishes 15 Black Swan events they source from thought leaders across a wide array of fields: economists, scientists, historians, journalists, you name it. I was honored to contribute one for the 2026 edition.
At the same time, I am horrified but unsurprised, to see my prediction not just coming to fruition, but accelerating rapidly.
If you missed it, my 2026 Black Swan:
The FDA completely legitimizing wellness industry pseudoscience
BY ANDREA LOVE
Andrea Love is a biomedical scientist and science communicator.
I think the Black Swan for 2026 is already underway: the FDA completely legitimizing wellness industry pseudoscience.
Already, we’ve been seeing the FDA encouraging people to conflate pseudoscience for evidence-based medicine as FDA Commissioner Marty Makary erases the boundary between evidence-based medicine and the wellness industry under the guise of access, innovation and “repairing trust.” He and others are positioning the FDA not as a scientific safety guardrail, but a facilitator of “health choice.”
They frame evidence standards as elitist, favoring anecdotal claims to justify unscientific policy changes that will endanger the public.
There are early signals: enthusiasm to relax regulatory requirements for FDA approval; moving to fast-track direct-to-consumer health tests that lack clinical validation; and elevating supplements to quasi-therapeutics rather than unproven and potentially unsafe products immune from oversight thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. If FDA leadership erases the remaining guardrails that exist, expect a rapid expansion of FDA-adjacent products that appear legitimate to the public. People will not be empowered — they will be less healthy.
What makes this a Black Swan is that people will believe they are still following science as these claims come from our federal health agencies.
People will make health decisions based on falsehoods rather than validated evidence. Patients will delay or refuse effective care, opting instead for cleverly marketed products that carry a false sense of legitimacy. By the time these harms are apparent at a population level, these policy changes will be normalized — and potentially irreparable.
If you’ve been following me in any capacity, you’ll know this take shouldn’t come as a surprise. Often, when I would warn about these things—informed by decades of experience in Lyme disease research and the wellness industry pseudoscience that has targeted it—I was called hyperbolic.
But nothing about this is hyperbole. Institutional shifts across health leadership are making sure of that. But to be clear, my Black Swan was never merely “more misinformation online.” It’s not just another loud anti-vaccine figure, or social media influencers spreading factually incorrect claims for profit.
It is the full-throated legitimization of wellness industry pseudoscience—socially, culturally, and politically.
Not fringe content.
Not alternative lifestyle chatter.
But authority that is making policy and amplified by the media.
That is the shift. And tragically, we are fully inside it now.
Wellness Pseudoscience Harms Everyone—Even If You Don’t Realize It.
For decades, wellness misinformation lived in a space that was evidence-adjacent and problematic, but containable: the “outspoken minority” spreading lies about vaccine harms, influencer feeds, supplement marketing, detox culture, lifestyle blogs that could mostly be ignored. That era is over.
Wellness ideology is now:
Driving health narratives in mainstream media
Informing political platforms and public policy proposals
Framing regulatory oversight as oppression
Rebranding ideology as “medical freedom”
This isn’t accidental. It’s strategic. And it’s been going on for decades. And it involves things you probably don’t even realize are connected. USDA’s Organic Certification? Yep. The anti-vaccine movement? You bet. The revocation of FDA oversight over dietary supplements? Yes. Anti-GMO rhetoric and lobbying? Absolutely. The “non-toxic” and “all-natural” consumer product markets? 100%.
The wellness industry is not based on scientific evidence, safety, or environmental concern. It is anti-regulation, anti-institution, and hostile to evidence that threatens its ability to make as much money with as little oversight as possible.
What’s changed today is that those values are now being positioned as “legitimate critiques” of regulated scientific innovation, safety oversight, and evidence-based public health measures because our government officials have allowed that to happen.
RFK Jr. Is a Symptom, Not the Cause
RFK Jr. gets a lot of attention, and all of that is for good reason. He has made a multi-million dollar empire over the last forty years spreading objective lies about everything from vaccines, food, basic chemistry and physics, and more. And now as head of HHS, he wields a lot of authority and a lot of power that is actively dangerous.
His messaging has directly contributed to declining vaccine rates across the US and globally, leading to preventable resurgences of measles, whooping cough, pediatric influenza.
But RFK Jr. is a delivery mechanism, chosen for his notoriety (he’s a Kennedy, technically) and his organization, Children’s Health Defense, that has already proven itself an effective tool at propagating pseudoscience and health lies.
RFK Jr. didn’t invent vaccine refusal. He didn’t conjure “toxin” panic. He didn’t invent the myth that “natural immunity” is superior to vaccination. He didn’t fabricate the claim that cell phones cause cancer or that public water fluoridation is neurotoxic. What he promotes—vaccine fear, toxin panic, immunity myths, distrust of public health—are long-standing wellness industry talking points. He has brought them out of yoga studios, Erewhon aisles, and Instagram slideshows into political discourse.
He successfully packaged pseudoscience into a political identity that crossed ideological lines and delivered it to an audience primed by wellness culture, institutional distrust, and grievance-based politics, all fueled by a clickbait media ecosystem.
If it weren’t RFK Jr, it would be someone else. Conveniently, his buddy, good ol’ Andrew Wakefield, Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia, and a myriad of other grifters all happen to live in Austin, TX. The groundwork has been laid for years. That’s what makes this moment particularly dangerous.
The Same Lies, Repeated Ad Nauseum
Once you start paying attention, you can’t ignore the repetition. The “alternative health” industry repeat the same tired talking points:
Chronic disease is “exploding” because of modern life
Vaccines prevent the body from developing “real” immunity
Environmental exposures explain nearly all negative health outcomes
Regulatory agencies are captured, incompetent, or malicious
Anyone pushing back is anti-science, anti-freedom, or anti-curiosity
These claims are rarely supported by data, but they don’t need to be. The goal of the wellness industry is to stoke fear, alarm, and disgust—so that people will no longer listen to logic or use critical thinking. If you’re bombarded with messages about how [chemicals] are poisoning your kids, and some company or personality swoops in and promises to help you—that is very appealing.
Since these individuals don’t have complex biology or even factual reality on their side, they leverage emotions and stories (even if the stories aren’t true) to persuade their customer base. Yes, that’s all you are to them—a customer.
They do not want to improve health. They do not want to increase knowledge. They want to profit—at your expense. That’s it.
Stoke fear. Make parents believe they are harming their kids. Convince people that scientific advances are dangerous and we should instead, go back to the old days when our life expectancy was in the forties, we died prematurely from acute illnesses and injury, and we had limited medical diagnostic tools and interventions. All the while claiming they have the solutions that scientists and physicians are ‘hiding’ to keep you unwell.
The wellness industry makes trillions of dollars every year off this marketing strategy.
The Chronic Disease Panic (Still)
One of the loudest talking points on repeat is the false claim that chronic illness is “skyrocketing,” especially in children, and that this must be because of vaccines, environmental toxins, “synthetic chemicals,” and fluoridated water.
This argument ignores well-documented historical, epidemiological, and complex scientific realities, like:
Drastic improvements in survival of premature and medically complex infants. Infants born at 22 weeks have a 10-20% chance of survival today, compared to a 0% survival chance in 1990.
Changes in diagnostic criteria, diagnostic tools, and access to care. Breast cancer didn’t “skyrocket” with the development of mammograms—we were able to finally detect early cancers. Apply that logic to every technological advancement.
Better recognition of conditions that were previously misclassified or fatal. Are autism rates increasing because more people are actually developing autism or because we have refined the sensitivity of criteria? Decades ago, only schizophrenic children would be diagnosed with autism based on the criteria at the time.
Demographic shifts and aging populations. 80% of cancers occur in people over the age of 60. If we—as a population—live longer than ever, then more people in our population will get cancer. That’s just statistics.
The wellness industry presents a simplified before-and-after story that has zero facts to support it, but it sounds compelling when they pair it with fear-based imagery and manufactured anecdotes. That is their entire business model.
The worst part? They are doing all of this while dismantling critical science and health infrastructure—none of which will be repaired within our generation.
Selective Trust In Science Drives Pseudoscience
The same people who trust biomedical science for cancer treatment, rely on modern diagnostics, imaging, and pharmaceuticals, or expect evidence-based care when a family member has a medical emergency will dismiss immunology, epidemiology, or toxicology when they don’t like the conclusions.
Refuse COVID-19 vaccines, yet demand every pharmaceutical intervention when they become severely ill.
Support modern immunotherapies for cancer and autoimmune disorders, yet claim GMO food crops are dangerous, while they are developed using the EXACT SAME scientific principles and technologies.
Demonize medicines developed and tested through randomized controlled trials, yet enthusiastically promote (and in many cases, sell) unregulated, unproven, and unsafe “health interventions.”
Science is now being treated as opinion, not as a standardized framework, and “vibes” are being treated as ground truth.
Once misinformation is part of an identity, fact-checking isn’t enough.
Health misinformation has always existed. But now we are watching:
Wellness ideology merge with anti-regulatory politics
Public health framed as authoritarian overreach
Expertise recast as coercion
Institutions dismantled under the guise of “freedom”
This is my Black Swan. When the discussion is no longer about evidence, but about power, legitimacy, and profit over public health. Not a sudden collapse. A slow, grinding halt of the systems that used to keep people alive.
In the words of T.S. Eliot:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
We all must join in the fight for science.
We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines any longer. I’ll be here, explaining how biology works, providing historical context to health misinformation and wellness industry lies, call out bad actors across all political ideologies (yep, the OG anti-vaccine activists were left-leaning), and help equip you all with tools to combat it.
But everyone has a job to do. Call your elected officials. Demand accountability. Don’t give your money to organizations that are part of the wellness industry ecosystem. Challenge yourself when you notice your own selective trust in science.
Society is only as strong as the weakest link, and right now, we are all at risk of going down with the ship. Science does not defend itself. Institutions do not protect themselves. People do.
Thank you for supporting evidence-based science communication. With outbreaks of preventable diseases, refusal of evidence-based medical interventions, propagation of pseudoscience by prominent public “personalities”, it’s needed now more than ever.
Stay skeptical,
Andrea
“ImmunoLogic” is written by Dr. Andrea Love, PhD - immunologist and microbiologist. She works full-time in life sciences biotech and has had a lifelong passion for closing the science literacy gap and combating pseudoscience and health misinformation as far back as her childhood. This newsletter and her science communication on her social media pages are born from that passion. Follow on Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and Facebook, or support the newsletter by subscribing below:
This could well be how the world ends. But thanks for reminding us to not give up! I consider myself lucky because I have physicians and doctoral-level scientists in my family. I consider myself lucky because I have a doctorate - albeit it in a different field - so understand scientific method and can do an adequate job of ferreting out bullshit. I consider myself lucky because I am curious and driven and wish to live my life in an intelligent and informed way. But…we should NOT have to rely on good fortune. Everyone should have access to high-quality, data-driven information and care. We are getting farther away from that goal.
It’s good having your voice of alarm and reason back on the platform.