#2825: Ashley Everly

The vast majority of anti-vaccine ‘experts’ are, at best, people with some competence in areas far removed from anything related to vaccines. Ashley Everly, however, presents herself as “a toxicologist and a mother”, and since a toxicologist might actually possess some not irrelevant expertise, her anti-vaccine claims have been treated with some authority in antivaccine circles. Of course, Everly has no degree in toxicology beyond a BS. What she has, is the experience of being the mother of a child she has convinced herself is vaccine injured and a fear of toxins. (She is also – and nevertheless – ‘toxicology consultant’ to the anti-vaccine conspiracy group Health Freedom Idaho.) And her toxicology ‘research’, such as her conclusion that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause autism (it doesn’t) has not been published on anything but anti-vaccine websites and facebook.

 

If nothing else, her book and website The Vaccine Guide provides a good illustration of the nature of her ‘research’; it consists of collecting screenshots of cherry-picked studies, articles, and webpages, where Everly highlights passages that can be used to spin in an antivaccine manner or be used to look like they fit anti-vaccine conclusions if you don’t look too closely or know enough of the context to judge their validity. Do you, for instance, think she understands – or wants to help her readers understand – what ‘unavoidably unsafe’ means in legal contexts?

 

A major section of her website is the Vaccine Ingredients/Excipients/Contaminants section (discussed in some detail here), which tries to push several of the variants of toxins gambits that have been promoted by anti-vaccine activists over the years; and yes, it is indeed striking that someone calling themselves ‘toxicologist’ appears to be unaware that the dose makes the poison. Real and reliable information on vaccine ingredients paints a strikingly different picture than the one Everly is trying to paint.

 

She also has sections on (screenshots of) vaccine package inserts and on the most favored anti-vaccine trope of them all, shedding. Indeed, as Everly sees it, vaccines are not only unsafe (false), but ineffective (false), and she provides numerous links to non-relevant articles (like the one discussed here), to push her point. Her website also pushes various types of quackery, including naturopathy and chiropractic.

 

Diagnosis: A relatively typically clueless anti-vaccine activist who presents herself as – and may genuinely believe her position to be – science-based. But although Everly’s efforts are pretty incompetent, she seems to have managed to gain considerable influence among conspiracy-minded people in her parts of the US, and she is far from harmless.

#2824: Carol Everett

Carol Everett is a former director of a couple of abortion clinics in Texas in the early 1980s who has subsequently established herself as an anti-abortion activist and completely-off-the-rails conspiracy theorist, most famously through her colorful fantasies about Planned Parenthood. To Everett, Planned Parenthood isn’t only offering health services to women, but are the nexus of a vast, Satanic conspiracy to maximize the number of abortions carried out by any means possible.

 

So according to Everett, Planned Parenthood’s “agenda was to give women low-dose birth-control pills they knew [the women] would get pregnant on and to pass out defective condoms. I will go to my grave believing that their agenda was three to five abortions between the ages of 13 and 18 from every young woman they could find.” In an interview with Lee Ann McAdoo on InfoWars, she even claimed to have been involved in such practices herself back in the day to be able to “sell [a woman] an abortion on the telephone.” Indeed, according to Everett the whole idea of sex education is really only a vast ploy by the abortion industry to get teens pregnant so as to keep the industry profitable.

 

Of course, Everett’s story of how she went from being a director of abortion clinics to being an anti-abortion (and anti-sex) activist is used for all it’s worth as a rhetorical ploy in her presentations and interviews, and it has lent her some credibility both among the less well-hinged parts of the internet and among wingnut politicians, even though she obviously lies about her background, too. (And for the record, she had no affiliation with Planned Parenthood and has nothing resembling a background in medicine.) According to Everett, abortion is “unnatural” because it is an “interruption of the natural process” (so it’s unnatural in the sense that any medical procedure is unnatural) and “a terribly painful procedure.” The procedure is particularly harmful when performed “on a woman who is really not pregnant,” which she falsely (and insanely) alleges is “being done [today] on women who can be convinced they’re pregnant even though they aren’t.” And because it might be effective with certain audiences, Everett has also pushed the abortion-is-Black-genocide conspiracy theory: Planned Parenthood is, according to Everett, targeting Black communities and “until recently there was not a single abortion clinic located in a white, middle class area”, something that is stupendously and ridiculously false.

 

She is of course anti-contraception, too. According to Everett, emergency contraception is “destructive to a woman’s reproductive system” – it would “sterilize” them – and constitutes “a social experiment on children” (yes, she can just make things up whole cloth – those who bother to listen to her are not going to care). And as for her sex education conspiracy theories, they quickly veer into anti-LGBT land: sex education providers “break down” children’s “natural modesty” and teach them “perverse behavior”; now, apparently girls (who?) have been “telling me they were bisexual” because sex education has “broken down” children’s values. Indeed, sex education is a conspiracy to ensure that “the homosexual lifestyle is exploding” (she didn’t explain how that helps abortion providers “expand their market”). She has also alleged that Planned Parenthood has “a website that actually encourages sex with animals” designed for teens; when asked for an url, Everett supplied a link to an anti-abortion website that did not make the claim but which had published an excerpt from a 1981 study on sex in rural America that didn’t mention or have anything remotely to do with Planned Parenthood.

 

At the core of her views, is her hatred and fear of promiscuity; as Everett sees it, and as relayed to Rick Green at WallBuilders, it is “almost like rape when you’re having sex with two or three” different partners before getting married, because she herself cannot “imagine another woman who cares or respects herself who would” have sex with a man who has had other consenting partners before, and everyone should share her preferences; “the only thing that can help us recover is Jesus,” said Everett.

 

Everett is the founder and CEO of The Heidi Group, an anti-abortion organization that purports to give women health “advice”, but which is not a medical provider and can accordingly not perform any actual healthcare services. That didn’t prevent the Texas legislature from awarding them $1.65 million in taxpayer money in 2016 for their “health care services”, which the organization – to repeat ourselves – does not provide. (According to themselves, “The Heidi Group exists to ensure that all Texas women have access to quality health care by coordinating services in a statewide network of full-service medical providers,” though what that involves is not explained). Everett admitted that much of the grant would be given to so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’, which is the preferred US euphemism for religious anti-abortion activist groups. The Heidi group’s efforts ran into the ground in 2018, when the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, after Texas had ‘inexplicably’ renewed their contract twice, were forced to conclude that there were “substantial deficiencies in the areas of contract compliance, service administration, and financial and administrative management of both contracts” – predictably, since the group was never in the business of (or had any competence to or inclination to be) offering the health care services or coordinating services they promised to deliver (“it’s not as easy as it looks”, admitted Everett, who is not the first to make that observation). Everett concluded that there was a conspiracy led by nefarious forces (Planned Parenthood) afoot, and dismissed the HHSC report as “lies” (she didn’t provide any further explanation or documentation).

 

The Heidi Group has partnered with anti-abortion groups like the Center of Medical Progress, and has helped spread CMP’s discredited conspiracy theories. Everett has also served as an “integral partner” to Operation Rescue, having herself recruited women who were “willing to go into the abortion clinics and be very aggressive” to secretly film inside and expose manufactured incidents that Everett alleged represented the “way women were being mistreated even today in the abortion clinics”

 

As a political actor, Everett and her group is nevertheless a force to be reckoned with in Texas. She has worked tirelessly to shut down funding to Planned Parenthood and direct money to anti-abortion activist groups She was for instance involved in the Texas push for requiring women to either bury or cremate the remains of an aborted fetus, testifying that if fetuses were flushed down toilets (not the relevant alternative, needless to say), we could face a public health disaster and that people could be afflicted with STDs or even HIV due to fetuses flooding the sewer systems. “What if one day something horrible escaped into the sewer system?” asked Everett [Please. Just. Pause. For. A. Moment. And. Assess. That. Piece. Of. Reasoning.]. In 2013, she similarly tried to argue, using one of the dumbest ‘what-if’s in the history of what-ifs, that abortion clinics needed to be regulated because of Ebola: “with the Ebola scare, … what [germs] would we be transferring [at clinics]?”

 

Diagnosis: Yes, she is demonstrably lying through her teeth and making things up as she goes, and seems to consider herself justified in doing that because Jesus. But despite being a wild-eyed and morally corrupt conspiracy theorist, Everett maintains significant political influence, especially in Texas. People listen to her, since she says what they want to hear, regardless of the obvious fact that she is clearly just making it up.

 

Hat-tip: Mediamatters

#2823: Irene Estores

The infiltration of pseudoscience into academic medicine – in the form of fellowships, research and clinical trials studying nonsense, or even large centers – is a significant threat to health and wellbeing in the US. It is driven by the fact that there is a certain level of public demand for such things, that there is money in it, and that it is often easy to market in appealing-sounding ways (“care for the whole person”, “wellness”, “we offer every means available”); and since decisions are made at administrative – not scientific – levels, the temptation is often too big for these academic institutions. The University of Florida in Gainesville, for instance, launched their New UF Health program in 2013, with press releases full of market-tailored nonsense about blending “holistic therapies and modern medicine”, the “best of both worlds” and so on; according to the program’s “first fellowship-trained integrative medicine physician” and director, Dr. Irene Estores, “[i]ntegrative medicine addresses the needs of the whole person – mind, body, spirit – in the context of community. We’re coming back to our roots and honoring what was effective in other healing traditions and using that to be able to be more effective in caring for our patients.” Of course, there is nothing holistic about the treatments offered by so-called ‘holistic’ medicine (rather, ‘holistic’ is at best a line in a defense when confronted with the fact that the purported benefits don’t show up in tests caring for rigor, accuracy and accountability), treating the “whole person” – which ordinary doctors certainly do – doesn’t require embracing pseudoscience, and integrating science with pseudoscience – or medicine with fake medicine – doesn’t make for better science or medicine. (Those are indeed the crucial false dilemmas at the heart of all woo.)

 

At least the services provided by the program, such as guided imagery, medical acupuncture and yoga, are themselves mostly harmless. But the thing is: embracing these, too, requires deemphasizing or even jettisoning values like accountability and being guided by evidence – indeed, the whole point of such programs is to weaken or eliminate standards of care, which is certainly not a healthy thing to do. And indeed, looking beyond the press releases, you’ll see that the program’s recommendations may also include “referrals to practitioners of other healing systems such as Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda (a holistic medicine system from India), or homeopathy.” Oh, yes, they do.

 

Estores herself is a trainee of Andrew Weil’s integrative medicine program at the University of Arizona, as well as a Bravewell fellow and an acupuncturist. According to herself, her “interest in integrative medicine grew out of self-exploration of other healing and belief systems, the deepening of her spiritual practice of prayer, self-reflection and meditation, and a mindful experience of both the good and bad things that have happened in her life as an individual and as a physician. She considers her practice of medicine as a vocation and a spiritual path.” Needless to say, this is not the kind of practitioner you should trust if you want reality-based care – note the conspicuous absence of ‘evidence’, ‘reality’, ‘facts’ or ‘science’. According to herself, however, Estores does not practice ‘alternative medicine’ – “[h]ere at UF, we do not have alternative medicine. We do not have complementary medicine. We have integrative medicine” – which is, of course, an attempt at pure semantics for marketing purposes; what she does practice, is woo based on pseudoscience

 

Diagnosis: Slick, smarmy, arrogant and completely devoid of any sense of care that reality matters. Though Estores does have a medical degree, she has done her best (worst) to cure herself of the notion that evidence and facts trump her gut feelings (‘spiritual’) or feel-good PR blather (‘coming back to our roots and honoring what was effective in other healing traditions’).

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2822: Rebecca Estepp

Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) is an anti-vaccine group known for blaming vaccines for autism like it was 2003 and for being devoted to promoting various kinds of potentially dangerous woo and quackery and pseudoscience as potential cures for autism. (Though they seemed to have tried to tone down the conspiracy theories a bit after changing their name to The Autism Community in Action in 2018.) The group was founded by Lisa Ackerman, and its national manager, at least during the group’s antivaccine heydays, Rebecca Estepp, has made a bit a name for herself in antivaccine circles.

 

Indeed, Estepp – the mother of an autistic child she incorrectly believes is vaccine injured – was one of the claimants in the 2007 Autism Omnibus trials, and was predictably disappointed with the (obvious) outcome, rhetorically asking “When does anecdotal evidence become enough?”, the scientific answer to which is, of course, “never”. Estepp also asserted (this time representing the anti-vaccine) Coalition for Vaccine Safety that “[t]he deck is stacked against families in vaccine court. Government attorneys defend a government program, using government-funded science, before government judges” – a fair system would presumably rather rely on anecdotes interpreted by anti-vaccine activists and bloggers. In 2010, when the medical journal The Lancet issued a full retraction of Andrew Wakefield’s paper linking vaccines and autism, Estepp – speaking for TACA –  insisted that she still trusted Wakefield’s research.

 

As a matter of fact, Estepp seems to be claiming not only that vaccines are dangerous (false) and fail to prevent disease (false), but that vaccines might make you more likely to contract vaccine-preventable disease. But then, Estepp’s ability to determine safety and effectiveness is demonstrably subpar; Estepp recommends e.g. chelation therapy as a cure for autism and was dumbfounded when the government declined to fund a study on chelation therapies and autism “with no explanation”; of course, the government did explain: it isn’t safe; it just wasn’t the explanation Estepp wanted to hear.

 

As communications director for the anti-vaccine group Health Choice, Estepp was also heavily involved in the 2015 protests against California’s SB277, which restricted the use of non-medical exemptions to vaccine requirements in public schools (something Estepp herself had made use of for her children). She was also affiliated with the antivaccine Canary Party.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, evidence, accuracy and science is a conspiracy against concerned antivaccine parents – same as always, though at least Estepp is, as opposed to many anti-vaccine activists, more or less clear that this is exactly what she’s claiming.

#2821: John Esseff

John Esseff is a Scranton-based Catholic monsignor, President of Board of Pope Leo XIII Institute and local (though possibly retired) exorcist. As an exorcist, Esseff has met plenty of demons and demon-possessed people, growling and shrieking and slithering up against the wall – The Exorcist was apparently a pretty accurate documentary, and Esseff’s main criticism of the movie’s depictions is its tacit suggestion that the devil can just fly in and possess anyone when in reality “the devil is afraid of you” as long as you stay faithful and virtuous. Apparently you may also get help from your ”guardian angels”, whom you can invoke through prayer to “make a perimeter” around the area in which you find yourself.

 

In 2018, Esseff even managed to get himself in the national spotlight for his criticism of Celine Dion’s (gender neutral) children’s clothing line as being occult and demonic. “The devil is going after children by confusing gender. When a child is born, what is the first things we say about that child? It’s a boy, or it’s a girl. That is the most natural thing in the world to say. But to say that there is no difference is satanic,” said Esseff, who also accused the clothes of displaying occult imagery that no one else were able to see. Satan’s hand at work was also clearly visible: “People behind this are influencing children to disorder. This is definitely satanic. There is a mind behind it – an organized mindset. The devil is a liar and there are huge lies being told. This is being done for money, and there is divisiveness that comes from this [he didn’t reflect too long on who is doing the divisiveness here] – marks of the devil.” Esseff’s criticisms and warnings were published by the National Catholic Register, which has made it its business model to see demonic forces at work more or less everywhere.

 

Diagnosis: Doddering moron, though probably not himself particularly harmful (he’s got to be close to 100 by now) even though his delusions are frighteningly widespread.

#2820: Paul Esprante (?)

Paul Esprante is a self-proclaimed ‘researcher’ from California; indeed, Esprante seems to consistently refer to himself as “Professor Paul Esprante”, though he gives little indication of what his putative field of expertise might be or what sort of institution has hired him in that position. In any case, Esprante has ostensibly, and like many before him, found Noah’s Ark, or at least found wooden structures that clearly stem from said vessel on Mount Ararat. And he has enthusiastically presented his findings e.g. at the International Symposium of Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark, which was ostensibly attended by “over 100 scientists” and where Esprante said that “The result of my findings will be published in books, publications and journals, but at this point it is too early to know what we are going to find. Once the scientific community knows about the existence of Noah’s Ark in Mount Ararat, we can make it available to the general public.” This was in 2017, so there has evidently been some delays in the peer review processes at distinguished journals since then.

 

Diagnosis: We have, admittedly, not managed to find any information about Paul Esprante from any resource not directly related to the 2017 story, and those sources are hardly reliable. We can, in other words, not quite dismiss the suspicion that Paul Esprante is a fictional character produced by some fake news factory – hence the question mark in the headline. But that there are plenty of people sharing his delusions is undeniable. 

#2819: Maria Espinoza

The Remembrance Project is an anti-immigration organization founded by Texas couple Maria Espinoza and Tim Lyng in 2009 and devoted to “[e]ducating and raising awareness about the epidemic of killing of Americans by illegal aliens” through promoting harrowing anecdotes of crimes committed by illegal such. Espinoza had, by 2009, already made a name for herself as president of the Houston chapter of the Eagle Forum, which should give you an indication of what kind of group TRP actually is. To Espinoza, there is conspiracy afoot: immigration isn’t just a threat; it is a manufactured threat and a deliberate attempt by the powers that be to ruin America: “This Biden-Harris administration, I believe, just hates America. To your point with the border, this is intentional, it's for a reason, and the reason is to destroy our country. And we have to get a hold of it”. And it’s not like she didn’t warn you; prior to the 2020 election, Espinoza claimed that the US is “at risk of invasion under a Biden Adm[in]!”

 

And even before QAnon, Espinoza had determined that “Child molestation and rape are very numerous in this illegal alien demographic!”; indeed “unsecured communities, human trafficking, molestations of our children, are all part of the vernacular of this disease that illegal immigration speaks”. The TPR has also promoted conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and that Trump’s reelection was stolen from him – “Trump Won! STILL My President! Cheaters never win...wait and see!” tweeted Espinoza in February, 2021. Of course, Espinoza’s respect for the democratic processes she claims to champion is not unequivocal; in 2018 she suggested that anti-immigration actvists should find some kind of “little loophole” to remove officials who disagree with her on immigration from public office before the next election.

 

TRP is, however, at the forefront of the anti-sanctuary-cities movement and has had some serious impact, especially with the Trump administration, and it enjoys the support of a number of members Congress. TRP is also closely connected to people central to the white nationalist movement, like Paul Nehlen.

 

Indeed, Espinoza has herself tried to run for Congress, both in 2016 and in 2020, on a platform of “work[ing] to stop Socialism and the Democrats' liberal agenda, and work to peel-away the indoctrinating tentacles of education that has encroached upon parental rights and the privacy of our children.” Her 2016 platform also included e.g. a moratorium on Muslim immigration, prohibiting same-sex marriage, drug-testing welfare beneficiaries, and building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

 

Diagnosis: It’s hard to motivate much more than an exasperated sigh here, but yeah, Espinoza is yet another conspiracy theorist in a position of somewhat significant influence and power.

 

Hat-tip: SPLCenter