FDA to coronavirus scammers: watch out!

The coronavirus pandemic has the whole world's attention. For now, there's no treatment and definitely no cure for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

That hasn't stopped charlatans and scammers to claim that they have treatments, and to offer them for sale. I often wonder (sometimes in this column) whether people selling bogus cures truly believe their own statements, or whether they are just liars who know they're selling nonsense. In the former case, they are merely misinformed or ignorant. In the latter case, they are con artists who deserve our scorn. In either case, though, we shouldn't be buying their products.

Let's look at a few marketers who have gotten the attention of regulators just this past week. In the U.S., the FTC and the FDA announced that they just took the following action:

"The FTC and FDA have jointly issued warning letters to seven sellers of unapproved and misbranded products, claiming they can treat or prevent the Coronavirus. The companies’ products include teas, essential oils, and colloidal silver."

That's right, scammers: you better clean up your acts, or else we're going to ... write you a letter!

To be fair, it's not the fault of the FTC or the FDA that their enforcement powers are so weak. Congress has severely limited the ability of the FDA to regulate businesses who sell supplements and other scams, as I've written before. The supplement industry is big business, and they've lobbied Congress–very successfully–to prevent any truly effective regulation.

So here are the seven scammers whose claims were so outrageous that the FDA and the FTC have already (in just a few weeks, record time for these agencies) notified them that they must stop their false advertising:

• Vital Silver (Colloidal Vitality LLC)
• Quinessence Aromatherapy Ltd.
• N-ergetics
• GuruNanda, LLC
• Vivify Holistic Clinic
• Herbal Amy LLC
• The Jim Bakker Show

The products offered by these dishonest marketers include essential oils, teas, and colloidal silver. None of them work at all against coronavirus. The FTC warning letters point to their websites, Twitter, and Facebook.

I checked them out to see if the claims are still there, and here's what I found.

Twitter suspended the Quinessence account for violating its rules, but the N-ergetics Twitter account is still live, and it features a claim that "Colloidal Silver Benefits against Antibiotic resistant ZIKA, Viruses, Superbugs, Flu." (That claim is false.)

Vivify Holistic was using Facebook to promote false claims (according to the FDA letter), and Facebook has apparently shut down that page. GuruNanda's FB and Twitter accounts are both active, but they seem to have removed their claims about coronavirus.

Vital Silver's FB page has a posting from March 9, apparently prompted by the FDA letter, stating that "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease." This is the standard disclaimer that all supplement makers use. But then they added this "The content of this page are based on my religious beliefs as protected by the First Amendment." That's a new one to me. Nonetheless, their product still can't cure coronavirus.

Herbal Amy promotes her products through Facebook and a website: the FDA told her to take down her "Coronavirus protocol" products (she had many of them), which she seems to have done. Her FB page is still active, and she explains there that "we have had a Coronavirus protocol for sale for the last 2.5 YEARS. This is not a new herbal formula or a new virus." Huh? So her argument is that she has been making a false claim for a long time now?

Jim Bakker is another story. For those too young to remember, Bakker was a popular televangelist in the 1970s and 1980s who was convicted of 24 counts of financial fraud. He served five years in prison and resumed his television preaching in 2003. One of the ways he makes money is selling colloidal silver (tiny silver particles suspended in liquid), which he recently claimed could cure coronavirus. This led the FDA, the FTC, and the NY Attorney General to order Bakker to stop his false advertising.

The state of Missouri has gone further than the feeble FDA: they are suing Jim Bakker to stop him from harming people. The Missouri attorney general charged that Bakker is

"falsely promising to consumers that Silver Solution can cure, eliminate, kill or deactivate coronavirus and/or boost elderly consumers' immune system and help keep them healthy when there is, in fact, no vaccine, pill, potion or other product available to treat or cure coronavirus disease 2019."

Good for the Missouri AG. Time will tell if all of these demands will change Bakker's behavior.

I should add that colloidal silver doesn't treat anything, and in fact it can be truly harmful. A JAMA Dermatology article a few years ago described it as "dangerous and readily available." Stay away from this stuff.

This article wouldn't be complete if I didn't add one more scam artist: the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has claimed, ridiculously, that he has a toothpaste that can “kills the whole SARS-corona family at point-blank range.” No such toothpaste exists, and the New York attorney general has ordered Jones to stop.

As I wrote at the beginning, I can't know for certain which of the people selling these products truly believe they have a treatment for COVID-19 and which of them are knowingly lying. But consumers should beware: false claims will continue to appear as long as there's money to be made.

No one has a treatment for coronavirus infection. The WHO has a site up now, which I recommend, that dispels many of the myths. I'll close with a quote from that site:

"To date, there is no specific medicine recommended to prevent or treat the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV)."

Conspiracy theories and snake oil, the perfect pair

Why on earth would people rely on a conspiracy theorist, someone with only a high school education, for medical or health advice? And yet, some people do.

Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracy theorist who runs the Infowars radio program and website, was temporarily suspended by Twitter this week, following bans by Apple, YouTube, and Facebook. These social media companies banned him for repeatedly violating their rules about hate speech and inciting violence. Among other notorious claims, Jones has falsely claimed that children murdered in the mass shooting in Sandy Hook were just actors and that their parents faked their deaths.

What many people don't know, though, is that Jones also runs a dietary supplement business from his Infowars site. Despite reports that Jones' supplements are little more than "overpriced, mundane vitamins," his supplement sales seem to be quite profitable–so much so, in fact, that Buzzfeed reported that the supplement business "largely funds Jones' highly controversial Infowars media empire."

I was curious to see what Jones was selling, so I looked at his Infowars web store. It features an array of products with names like:

• Brain Force Plus
• Super Male Vitality
• The Real Red Pill, DNA Force, and more

Each of these products is marketed with breathless claims for what it can do, including testimonials from Jones himself. For example, Brain Force Plus claims to "supercharge your state of mind," and Jones plugs it with this quote:

"This is what I take before a hard-hitting show. I absolutely love it, and the crew does too. This stuff is over the top powerful!"

Well then. Never mind that Brain Force is really just a collection of herbal extracts and vitamin B-12, none of them proven to "supercharge" your mind or any other body part.

In a similar vein, Jones hypes Super Male Vitality with this claim:

"This product works so well for me that I actually had to stop taking it before I go on air or else I would want to do hours and hours of overdrive with complete focus on the topics at hand."

From the name, you might guess that Super Male Vitality has something to do with testosterone, and the website does state that it "may help support normal testosterone levels in men." What's in it? A collection of plant extracts, none of them proven to maintain or increase testosterone or to have any actual medical benefit.

Of course, if you follow the asterisks on both of these pages and read further down, you'll see that

"These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."

This statement is the standard disclaimer that supplement manufacturers make in order to avoid FDA oversight. There's no actual scientific evidence (and Jones's Infowars pages don't attempt to cite any) that these products do what the text on the very same page says they do. You just have to take Jones' word for it.

This is pure snake oil. That shouldn't be surprising, not coming from a man who has accused grieving parents of faking their children's deaths, and who claims the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks. It's hard to understand why anyone believes any of the outrageous claims this guy makes, and especially bewildering that people who trust him to advise them on health and diet. His supplements aren't even a good buy, as Buzzfeed reported a year ago. All I can say is, caveat emptor.