Bookieboo LLC claims to be the largest wellness consulting firm targeting moms on social media in the world. There is no basis provided for that claim,  and when you see the kind of anti-science conspiracy gibberish they promote, you have to wonder if anything they say is true.

Their beliefs about science sure aren't. When you see posts like that a dishwashing detergent can affect your microbiome, you know the target demographic is not just the anti-science left, but the anti-science left that is also wealthy and female.

Nothing shows that to be valid like their other content. Prior to Republicans losing their minds about the COVID-19 vaccine, anti-vax wackos were firmly on the left. And groups catering to wealthy elites did their part to sell them alternatives.


Money must be the goal, which means claims about dishwashing detergent are going to be for the benefit of someone selling competing detergents, or unvalidated 'testing' kits, or a trial lawyer hoping to convince a jury science is evil and get a big check.

The sleazy companies paying Bookieboo and offshoots like Mamavation are not large brands like Procter  &  Gamble or Colgate-Palmolive, they are far too ethical to engage in that sort of thing, they are instead companies that claim to be green and holistic and ethical and pure and whatever else sells.It isn't just dishwashing detergent. Their list of targets is so predictable to the science community you have to wonder if they weren't created by a law firm using an academic ally as a veneer of science, the way U.C. San Francisco's Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH, works with sue-and-settle attorney Raphael Metzger, and the nonprofit he created to look independent, Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT), fronted by hand-picked Berkeley activist Martyn Smith, whenever there is a desire to scare juries about risk of homeopathic levels of chemicals for pregnant women and negotiate a nuisance settlement.

It works because the money involved is huge. Activist groups like to claim the pro-science community is part of a Vast Corporate Conspiracy but their side has 3000X the revenue.

That means a lot more groups wanting to line up at the trough. So if you want an insinuation that there are toxic chemicals damaging the reproductive organs of women who buy a product you want to compete against, like a tampon, Mamavation will be right there on social media, mobilizing paid influencers for a fee.

They even brag that their claim about "toxic chemicals" was endorsed by one of the weirdest kooks to ever inhabit the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, organic industry activist Linda Birnbaum, PhD. And yet despite claiming five different times they sent these products to an "EPA-certified" lab, they never name the lab. They show no lab data. It is just a blog post they say was peer-reviewed by ... a nurse they know.

You know who else is "EPA-certified"? Just about everyone. The HVAC guy who comes to your house is EPA-certified like the mystery lab Mamavation claims found scary science in your hoohoo. Maybe he will write the paper next time too.

Did they use the lab owned by Yogic Flying Instructor-adjacent guru John Fagan? HRI Labs is the darling of anti-science shills because, for a fee, it will detect anything in anything you want. Then they will even write a paper using the information you paid them to manufacture, without disclosing the conflict of interest.(1)


Bold mine, obviously. After the blowback we created due to his not disclosing his conflict of interest, JAMA was forced to issue a correction, but they buried it in a tab and certainly did not draw attention to it using bold fonts.

Fagan probably wouldn't even need to lie in this case, since a microwave repairperson is EPA-certified, which means even someone who bought a degree from Maharishi Institute should be literate enough to pass the test.

To round out our Woo roundtable, Environmental Health News, owned by progressive anti-science activist Pete Meyers, paid Bookieboo / Mamavation to publish it. 

So they are not only getting paid to publish it but after listing a bunch of products they claim are ruining your organs they - surprise, surprise - provide a list of alternatives with a special discount code for all the women too smart to be duped by big business into buying tampons made with glyphosate, or whatever other unhinged thing they suggest in their conspiracy tome.

Which means they are getting paid to smear companies and then double-dipping and selling you their competitors.


I'd like to do what anti-science activists do and make everything a Big Tobacco-type conspiracy but even Big Tobacco does not do what these grifters engage in. What is sad is that a once-promising epidemiologist like Birnbaum got so caught up in her belief that progressive statisticians were the Supreme Court over science and that biologists, toxicologists, and chemists, and everyone else just needed to find what she claimed after data dredging. She burned her personal brand, and that of the now-ill-reputed National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, to the ground. The only group happy that the modern NIEHS has sent so many cranks out into the broader world is the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, because they are no longer at the bottom when it comes to being trusted by Americans and the science community.

NOTE:

(1) We revealed he lies about being CLIA-certified, when the CDC never heard of his company, so perhaps he will lie about anything for a fee.


A hint someone may be lying; they claim to be CLIA-certified but never list the CLIA number that every reputable lab lists.