A staple of anti-lockdown conspiracism in yoga/wellness is that public health measures are oppressive, authoritarian, and stifling what it means to be human. Masks suppress identity and speech. Vaccines assault the sovereign body. Influencers must rise up against tyranny! /1

Ironically, pandemic management in economies where yoga/wellness is lucrative has been a neoliberal, choose-your-own-adventure mess in which centre-right governments barter with public health to enact a patchwork of half-measures that punish the poor and marginalized. /2

The goal is not universal health rights, or protecting medical systems, or saving as many lives as possible. The goal is to return to business-as-usual, using public health as a pit stop on a productivity race off a cliff. The ice caps aren’t melting fast enough, I guess. /3

Right-leaning governments, like influencers, have assessed the COVID threat with the magical bias of limitless optimism. Then they work to normalize COVID casualties as a new cost of doing business. *This* is what alt-healthers and Qamoms call “socialist”, or “communist”. /4

Centre-right governments and wellness influencers share a goal: get back to the optimism of making productivity heroic and consumption virtuous, without any reflection on structural issues of injustice, or what universal health care funding and standards would look like. /5

JP Sears, Kelly Brogan, Sayer Ji, Christiane Northrup etc are living in a country managing the pandemic according to the same logic that has allowed them to grow their unregulated alt-health libertarian businesses: wellness is a private commodity built on entrepreneurial IP. /6

They present their COVID-trutherism as morality, but it is subservient to the money. We know this because they are careful to avoid being deplatformed. JP Sears posted a meme of Zuckerberg dressed up like Himmler. If he really believed that, he would leave Facebook. /7

But then he would have less access to the market for his bullshit supplements. As with most corporations, the money is the morality. The game is to gamble on how much labour and waste you can outsource as you convert sales. Push it right to the moving edge but don’t go over. /8

If they were in charge, their plans might be similar to the non-plans currently in play: laissez-faire protections that citizens could take advantage or be excluded from according to their means. They wouldn’t outright deny COVID: this would isolate them from their markets. /9

Instead, they would equivocate, compromise, listen to the money, game the virus like an algorithms, and generally see COVID at worst as a bump in the production road, at best a new way to monetize the collapse of the social commons. /end