Dear friends,
Welcome back to Office Hours, my occasional newsletter.
Follow me for a moment down an Internet rabbit hole:
The year is 2012, and Donny Osmond wants you to know heās found the fountain of youth. Turns out itās a little yellow pill called Protandim.
Itās made by a company called LifeVantage, based in Utahāa multi-level marketing operation that uses an army of 54,000 distributors to sell this pill, which the company claims is essentially a souped-up antioxidant, and other products. Over the past decade, these distributors have pitched the companyās products as helping with everything from gluten intolerance to cancer. They do none of that.
I spoke to the scientist who developed Protandim for LifeVantage. He told me he quit in 2013 because the company cared more about marketing products than researching them.
LifeVantage agreed to have its distributors stop making false claims related to products. But they didnāt. And during the height of Covid-19, things went sideways.
Another ex-scientist for the company told me that when distributors made their pitches, her āhair was standing up ā¦ Weād have to go and stop them, and say āyou cannot say that.āā
In fact, in 2017, the FDA told LifeVantage to knock it off; as a supplement company in an industry rife with skeezy claims, itās hard to actually rise above the fray enough to get in troubleābut they did.
LifeVantage agreed to have its distributors stop making false claims related to products. But they didnāt. And during the height of Covid-19, things went sideways.
Distributors started pitching the pills as a āgolden bulletā at online gatherings for activists in the āhealth-freedomā movement, which has been a reportorial focus of mine, and refers to groups that reject mainstream health guidance (including vaccinesābut also: they want access to risky procedures and alternative, unproven treatments).
They went so far as to suggest Protandim could protect against Covid-19, or undo what they characterized as ādamageā from the vaccines. (Nope.)
Meanwhile, not only is LifeVantage publicly traded, with blue-chip investorsāits executives rang the Nasdaq closing bell a few weeks ago. Erin Brockovich sits on its board.
Speaking of its stock, the company bragged on Instagram during the early months of the pandemic that the virus had given it a boost. (It was a short-lived bump.)
In a truly strange mashup of mainstream and fringe, the company touts the āscienceā that supposedly backs its products, but science deniers in its ranks stand to profit. (And, maybe, Donny Osmond?)
Read my full story in STAT News here.
I hope youāll check it out, and that youāll let me know what you think.
Linds