Tips for perfecting your downward-facing dog, aligning your chakras, and the dangers of life-saving vaccinations. These are the conversations Naomi Klein claims are taking places at classes in yoga studios on both sides of the Atlantic, which have turned into “hotbeds” for conspiracy theories.
The Canadian author and commentator, famed for her best-selling 1999 book No Logo, has turned her attention to the latest threat to public health: Fitness and wellbeing gurus.
Vaccination hesitation has seen a surge in recent years in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it has posed an issue for decades.
Cases of measles in the UK shot up from 735 cases in 2022 to 1,603 in 2023, with the NHS urging parents to vaccinate their children from the deadly disease. The escalation comes as the number of young school children who have had both doses of the MMR vaccine lies about ten per cent below WHO targets.
Klein has warned it is no longer the fringes of society that succumb to the dangerous, outlandish speculation spreading fear in developed Western economies.
Far from the dark corners of the internet, she claims it is now the affluent, educated and seemingly ‘normal’ members of society that subscribe to these ideas.
Klein writes in her book latest book Doppelganger that “this is where the white, wealthy, libertarian streak in the wellness industry can become lethal”.
She goes on the say that it is gym and yoga classes that are primarily playing into conspiracy theories - bolstered by fitness influencer’s glamorous social media platforms preaching to millions of ordinary people vying to lead a healthier life.
“So many of those fit and beautiful influencers stopped merely offering encouraging words to motivate our workouts and green juicing,” she writes, “and started whispering to us alarmingly about dark forces coming to poison us, and eventually to gag, jab and dominate us.”
She was also unsurprised by figures showing the uptake in the measles vaccine were lowest in wealthier, more affluent postcodes where boutique gyms and yoga studios are more common
In March the House of Commons library revealed that the local authorities with the lowest rates of MMR vaccines were the London boroughs of Westminster and Kensington of Chelsea.
Klein herself turned to yoga several years ago and “grew obsessive” with the practice as she was treated for thyroid cancer.
She told The Times how her own experience spoke to how the community can fall victim to unfounded teachings from teachers with unchallenged authority.
“Yoga became a carrier,” she told the paper. “Not all yoga, but I think there’s a reason why yoga studios were very much a hotbed for conspiracy culture.”
“These figures positioned themselves as having access to a higher form of knowledge because they had taken a six-week yoga teacher training class, or maybe even been to India once,” she added. “That got us into a world of trouble.”
Online, these messages translate as truth to audiences wanted to ‘level-up’ their lives with beautiful fitness and wellbeing gurus.
She told the paper that the phenomenon of the masses turning away from top-down narratives and towards social media sources has spread misinformation like wildfire - with theories around the Covid vaccine pulling people further away from trusting vaccines.
“We need major public education about childhood vaccinations, I think we are almost back to zero, after so many years of so much misinformation,” she said. “Even someone like Robert Kennedy Jr, now running for president, this is his main issue. We need to take it extremely seriously.”
