'It's like a cult': How anti-vaccine "mumfluencers" are fuelling the Parliament occupation

Influencer mums posting selfies in the school hours are the front guard of the global anti-vaccine campaign. Kirsty Johnston reports.

Stuff, New Zealand/February 22, 2022

By Kirsty Johnston

Natalie Cutler-Welsh smiles widely, perching her over-sized tortoiseshell sunglasses on her head, and flicks her long auburn ponytail over her shoulder. “Hi guys, interesting times at the moment, right?” she says, gazing into the camera, wide-eyed. “And it’s only going to get more interesting.” She adjusts her seatbelt and launches into a three-minute monologue against vaccinating children, ending with her excitement about the coming convoy on Parliament that week. “There is going to be unity through truth,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “I’ll say it again: unity through truth.”

Cutler-Welsh is an Instagram entrepreneur from Auckland, posting under the handle @gotogirl. She runs business empowerment sessions and sells essential oils for the multi-level marketing company doTERRA. She has about 5000 followers. A year ago, her page was filled with pastel posts urging women to manifest “multiple six figures”, and how to use oils to banish negative energy. Now, Cutler-Welsh alleges New Zealand has been “tricked on multiple levels”, and hints she knows something secret about what’s to come. “Message me privately,” she says, and ends the clip.

“It’s exhausting to watch,” says doctor Morgan Edwards, as she drives across Auckland to work at a city hospital. “You follow these kinds of pages and you think it’s about kids or nutrition and the next minute they’re saying don’t get vaccinated, because they’ll sell you supplements to fight off the toxins instead.”

Pre-pandemic, it was easy to write off the influence of women like Cutler-Welsh. There are dozens like her, pushing oils or activewear or vitamins, their Instagram pages dripping in selfies and sunsets. They promote natural birth and holistic health and a kind of girl-boss variant of “you do you” spirituality. Mainly, they promote the idea that if you stick to their set of values (and buy the beige baby clothes their sponsors are selling), you can be more like them.

It has long been an open secret that, behind the language of light and love, many “wellness” influencers were also staunchly anti-vaccine. But until now, it was easy to ignore. Most would only post about their views in coded language about “natural immunity”, or “freedom to choose”, not wanting to scare away more skittish brands or fans. But as the Covid-19 pandemic has dragged on, more openly anti-vaccine posts have appeared across social media. And in the last two weeks, as the anti-vaccine mandate occupation at Parliament in Wellington ramped up, the veil has well and truly come off.

“Sending so much love to everyone in Wellington, standing up for their rights, standing up to make a change,” wrote entrepreneur Charlie de Haas, who is sponsored by activewear brand Aimn (@charliedehaas, 20,000 followers). “It’s not anti-vax, it’s PRO CHOICE… this segregation is not right.”

Life coach Nicky Clinch (@nicky_clinch, 22,000 followers), who tried to get to the protests but whose flight was turned back because of the storm, said she “couldn’t wait” to stand with the “courageous warriors in Wellington”.

“It hurts like hell that we aren’t welcome anywhere ‘in’ society,” Clinch said. “That we are spoken about as if we are dirty, that many family members & ‘friends’ are silent and it’s deafening...But we are NOT alone.”

Over on Facebook, beauty influencer Natalya Purchase (31,000 followers) - who previously compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust - wrote that while some people got vaccinated to protect their families “some chose NOT to be vaccinated for the very same reason”.

The threat of serious illness or death due to Covid-19 varies across the population, but for nearly everyone, the risk of vaccination is much smaller than the risk posed by an infection.

Iinfluencer and mum to two sets of twins Zoe Fuimano (@blessedindoubles, 51,000 followers) was livestreaming her journey to Wellington to join the protest with her husband and four children. Fuimano, a staunch Christian who previously “terminated” several partnerships after telling her followers not to get Covid tests if they didn’t want to, said she was “literally choosing her livelihood and income over what was right”.

“[We have got to] stand up for rights and freedoms because they are being stripped away and if we don’t do something now it’s going to get worse and worse,” she said in a video filmed in her bedroom on Monday night, as she prepared for their drive south. “And if you don’t like it you can be on your way.”

(When contacted, none of the women quoted above agreed to be interviewed for this story. Cutler-Welsh initially agreed, but then decided it wasn’t a “good fit” but that she would participate if there was a more “empowering” article in future.)

On some level, the influencers’ vocal support for the protest at Parliament was the predictable end to the wellness community’s increasing convergence with the far-right, the two groups coalescing in support of “freedom” and body autonomy. It highlighted once again just how easy it is to become radicalised online, slipping through the algorithm from one set of ideas to the next.

But it also drew attention to a more insidious facet of the anti-vaccine campaign: that the primary targets of both the influencers - and therefore the vaccine misinformation - are mums.

“This is because when it comes to children’s health generally - and vaccinations specifically - mothers tend to be perceived as the primary caregivers,” wrote researchers in a study into anti-vax influencer behaviour released on Tuesday.

In other words, mums are making the vaccine decisions. To convince them not to vaccinate, the study found, influencers used “a combination of idealism and guilt”. For example, one of the most common tropes was an image of a mum cradling a baby, combined with a post about state intervention or warning about the “damage” vaccines could do.

“Seeing another mum on Instagram saying ‘I would never put those toxic chemicals in my baby’ immediately made me worry for my children, and made me feel like a bad mum for considering doing it for my kids,” says Lizzy*, a mother-of-two from Manawatū. “It’s easy to judge mothers, but our job is to protect our children, and something that people miss is that for us there’s a lot of fear-mongering, which plays on our minds and worries us.”

The Covid-19 vaccine has been administered to millions of children worldwide and has proven to be safe and effective.

Lizzy, who was raised in a Christian family that didn’t believe in vaccination, said for her, the pressure felt intense – although she had chosen to get the vaccine, it had been a hard decision.

“I go from being like, ‘I’ve made the right decision’ to ‘oh my God, have I been swept away?’” she said. “Motherhood is a very judgmental space. Even if you make what you think is a good choice it doesn’t feel better because there's always someone who is going to make the wrong decision - especially on Instagram.”

Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw, a science communicator from The Workshop, said her research had found that negative interaction with the mainstream health system was often what pushed people to look for alternative information. For mums - and particularly Māori and Pasifika mums, who are more likely to have negative experiences - that often happened when they were first pregnant.

“Maybe their doctor dismissed their concern about their baby, and they feel like the only people listening to them are these women in these Facebook groups,” she says. “And what they’re saying plays into your fears, and so your brain shuts down, and you say ‘no’ to the vaccine.”

Once you’re in that space, Berentson-Shaw says, the brain begins to seek out information to support your decision - leaving the perfect vacuum for a kind, relatable, healthy influencer to step into.

“They’re much better storytellers than people who are pro-vaccination,” says Berentson-Shaw. “They’re more empathetic and better listeners and have time.”

Critically, studies have found influencers are also more trusted than mainstream media or public health authorities, particularly accounts with under 50,000 followers, because they appear so authentic.

Ironically, they can also have excellent recruiting and community-building skills learned in things like multi-level marketing, which easily applies to spreading anti-vaccine messages.

“It’s similar to a cult dynamic,” says Andrew Mackie, a spokesperson from FACT Aotearoa, a grassroots group pushing back against misinformation. “They detach people from their other sources of information, including their family, by undermining it and saying everyone else is wrong. Then they love bomb them a bit, to create a sense of community, then tell them the community is under threat, and they’re duty- bound to tell the world about it.That's why they’re out there on social media.”

On the surface, the anti-vaxxers’ values seem pure and wholesome. It also feels righteous. Who doesn’t want to advocate for “choice” and “autonomy” and “freedom”?

But, critics say, if you follow their logic far enough, it doesn’t end in “love and light”. Although wellness influencers push the idea that good health is attainable for everyone through exercise, diet and self-belief, they never acknowledge that being healthy is usually a fate of privilege. Pushing reliance on “your own immunity” leaves no room for the disabled or auto-immune, and in fact starts to sound like eugenics - the immoral theory of “racial improvement” by breeding out the weak.

Equally, assuming good health is an individual pursuit completely ignores poverty - that people can’t afford organic vegetables. They don’t have time to homeschool their kids or do an hour of meditation a day. Even getting enough sleep is a luxury for some families, particularly those hit worst by the Covid-19 crisis – Māori and Pasifika, low-income families, and women.

“There is a lot of individualism in it,” says Berentson-Shaw. “And that’s why you see the coalescing of extremely politically opposed groups like the alt right and the alternative left, because they share that values set.”

Views on the motivations of anti-vax influencers range, even within their critics. Some cast them as the modern-day equivalents of snake oil merchants, radicalising an army of anti-science wellness warriors online. Others say they seem to genuinely believe what they’re peddling, but are ultimately misinformed.

“Are they victims or perpetrators? Believers or grifters?” Mackie says. “Some of them are just doing it for likes. To be popular. Most of them believe it. But for some of them there’s a deeply held political agenda.”

Mackie says the largest (and most well-resourced) anti-vaccine group in New Zealand, the female-led Voices For Freedom, deliberately set out to target mums more than a year ago, before vaccines for children were even on the radar. It formed after the dissolution of the Advance NZ political party in 2020, and is led by former Advance candidate and food blogger Claire Deeks, knitter Libby Jonson, and crochet designer Alia Bland.

“I think the point is to get their politics supported, the vaccine isn’t the point. It’s just the pathway,” he says. “But it poses real danger - we’ve seen a rise in threatening behaviour and we worry that could escalate further; and then there’s the danger to public health and the vaccine rollout; and the fact that will put people - children - in harm’s way.”

What to do about influencers peddling misinformation? Ideally they would be held accountable for their views, Mackie said, rather than being discounted because they’re “just mums”.

But while Facebook (which owns Instagram) has taken down large accounts known for spreading anti-vaccine messages, it seems unable to police thousands of smaller accounts that might have the odd anti-vax post amid their usual content.

Berenston-Shaw argues the hard core anti-vaxxers are not worth focusing on. The bigger issue for her is how to capture the people who are vaccine hesitant before it’s too late.

“We need people in the health profession who are good storytellers,” she said. “Lots of people either lead with facts or spend time negating what anti-vaxxers are saying, which is a waste of time. They need to say “this is about caring for people’.”

Edwards, who set up her Instagram account (@morgancedwards; 51,000 followers) before Covid because she saw such a lack of good health information online, now posts almost exclusively about the pandemic. She usually tries to talk people through the facts, gently, but recently she filmed her son getting his vaccine, to highlight how important it is - even though she got a lot of criticism for it.

“But he could explain in his own words, personalise it,” she said. “He just said that it didn’t hurt.”

Last year, Emily, 31, had a miscarriage. Afterwards, blaming herself, wondering what went wrong, she began searching for information online.

“I was struggling. I kept seeing things saying the vaccine causes infertility and it made me so worried about getting it.”

The pages in Emily’s feed were from Voices For Freedom. She assumed they were fed to her by the algorithm. She spent a few weeks reading their pages, Googling more, before talking to her doctor.

“What made me doubt them was they money. They had all these huge billboards. Where was it coming from?” she said. “It seemed weird.”

Research shows that contracting Covid-19 can affect fertility, but the vaccine against it cannot.

Emily is now fully vaccinated, and 18 weeks pregnant again.

“They prey on the vulnerable. I was in such a hard place, and it was really easy to latch on to their ideas,” she says. “The thing I really worry about is people I know getting sucked into it.”

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