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'How many children will fall victim to this?' Brook Mitchell/Getty Images
If you were lucky enough to have a mother growing up, there are a few moments you’ll probably remember. In the middle of the night, stumping over from your bedroom to admit “I frew up”. The ceremonial bringing out of the sick bucket. A cold flannel on the forehead, Savlon on the grazed knee.
In those moments, your mother not only knows best, but becomes a sort of goddess. Against the fevers, blocked noses and nettle-stung shins of childhood, she wields a mystical healing power — the ability to kiss it better, to ordain that you’ll be “right as rain” in the morning (and you always are). This relationship rests on a limitless bank of trust, the ultimate vulnerability and the ultimate faith.
But what if your mother is not worthy of it? What if, having recently emerged from a global pandemic, she is now at odds with your family doctor, and mistrusts the mysterious adults who administer jabs at hospitals? What if she now represents a gatekeeper to things that might help, or even save you, from syrupy sweet Calpol to a vaccine preventing a bout of measles that might kill you?
This is life for the children of “crunchy mums”, so called because of the hippy, molar-cracking-granola world they emerged from. They congregate on anonymous forums, on Facebook, Reddit and Mumsnet, swapping advice on raising a child under the radar of mainstream medicine. One mother asks for tips on how to lie to doctors about her children not having had their vaccines. Another’s 17-year-old daughter begs her for the Covid jab; she is told to coax her out of her mainstream-media brainwashing and push “homeopathic prophylaxis” instead. “All the protection, none of the risk,” the comment says. Another woman asks how to treat her four-year-old with meningitis, whom she refuses to take to hospital. “Is this necessary?” she says of heading straight to A&E. “I am over Covid politics.”
On a different forum, a mother worries about the prevalence of measles in her son’s school; he is not vaccinated. “Stay confident in your decisions. Don’t let fear manipulate you,” comes the soothing reply. In one nannying forum, a woman tells of a mum who refuses to let her daughter carry an Epipen despite being fatally allergic to bananas. Instead, a “homeopathic salt” is kept in the house for emergencies. Another posts a picture of her three-year-old’s teeth — or what remains of them; they are all but completely decayed thanks to the misguidance of a “holistic dentist”. The mother now wants to do “what’s best” for her toddler, to relieve her pain, but it seems a little too late.
The Crunchy Mum phenomenon might appear, to most observers, as utter selfishness masquerading as care. This is certainly how I see one such “TikTok influencer” whose sister-in-law writes a warning post on Reddit exposing her for making videos about her “amazing and perfect” home births, assisted by an Amish midwife with “no official medical training”. Her fifth child, we are told, was delivered in a traumatic episode involving life-threatening pre-eclampsia and an admission to hospital — but the influencer “absolutely will not disclose” these facts to her followers, denying having had life-saving mainstream medical treatment to continue pushing her all-natural brand.
The trouble with conflating suspicion of COVID ‘vaccines’ with the full range of woo-woo homeopathic beliefs is that, for children and even teenagers getting injected was no more helpful than getting that actual disease, and came with risks that the medical establishment (not to mention the companies making substantial profits) were only too keen to cover up at the time, and about which the media were way too quiet, and have remained so.
COVID and the various policies, including those that grossly infringed on human and civil rights, was an episode that justly undermined trust in the medical profession who in many cases got it wrong, and certainly didn’t adhere to the ‘first, do no harm’ when engaging in guesswork, however well-intentioned, that had baleful consequences for individuals and the economy.
And don’t even get me started on the gender-affirming stuff.
Forums where contrary ideas to received opinion are discussed by people with a real stake in outcomes are to be welcomed, rather than airily dismissed as nutjob echo chambers, however nutty some of the opinions are that one might find there.
I agree, very poor article. The endless conflation is unworthy of unherd and goes against the ethos of the site. Its so bad it should be taken down
The author, I believe, is deliberately ignoring the gargantuan elephant in the room – the lies and misinformation pushed on parents during Covid. Children were utterly abused by the state. It should not be surprising then that parents mistrust the medical establishment that failed them so completely.
The author betrays her bias by implying that children should have been vaccinated. Unless a child had underlying health issues, getting vaccinated for Covid was a horrible idea. I’m shocked anyone could think otherwise now.
I don’t even know where to begin with my criticisms of this article, so I’ll just start somewhere in the middle and see where my typing fingers take me.
1) The real genesis of the crunchy mom movement lies not in any innate fault with these women, but with the systemic failings of Big Pharma, Big Food and the rampant government overrreach of modern society.
2) The concern for autism stems from the fact that rates of autism have skyrocketed. Given that official, institutional medicine is as reluctant to confront this problem as Ms Sowerby herself, it is normal that mothers would seek explanations themselves. Any mother would DOESN’T get crunchy on autism is guilty of child neglect.
3) The Covid vaccine for a 17 year old? Is Ms Sowerby serious? I almost thought I was reading a spoof at this point. The data is in on both the dangerousity of SARS-2 and the efficacy of the ‘vaccines’. For anyone under 50, the mortality stats tell a clear tale: there is more costs than benefits. For the under 20s, it’s not even close. These medical novelties fail any reasonable test, and all I can say is shame on any parent who would allow their child to take one of this ‘vaccines’.
4) Covid opened my eyes, and the eyes of a great many, to how thin the evidence base is for the current childhood vaccine schedule. In not one single case has a post 1980s addition to the schedule met reasonable safety standards for the approval of a new medicine – i.e. a large-scale, double blinded randomised control trial conducted by researchers who are independent of the company promoting the product. Therefore not a single one of these vaccine products can be considered ‘safe’!
5) Are these unsafe vaccines the cause of skyrocketing rates of autism, inflammation and autoimmune dysfunction in today’s young people? Honestly, I don’t know, but certainly neither does Ms Sowerby. As a concerned mother, though, I would be very reluctant to expose my child to these unsafe products, given the likely risks.
6) What about efficacy of vaccines? Have they really prolonged life the way Ms Sowerby suggests? The truth is, no one really knows, because no long-term studies were ever done, and population level data is massively confounded by the general improvements in living standards that ran concurrent with the rollout of vaccines. The best guess, though, is that the effects of even tried and true vaccines on population health are marginal at best.
7) At some wild point in Ms Sowerby’s nonsense article, she references ‘distrust in Big Pharma’. Here I nearly spit my coffee. For how could anyone in their right mind NOT distrust Big Pharma? They are convicted criminals, repeat offenders. They have bought the regulators (FDA, EMA…) who are supposed to regulate them. They own the media through advertising, and clearly used this leverage to steer the narrative on Covid. From a former job, I have first-hand experience with how they bully governments on pricing decisions for medicines and the design of HTAs around new medicine approvals. You have to be either a complete fool or a shill not to be distrustful of these companies.
‘The best guess, though, is that the effects of even tried and true vaccines on population health are marginal at best.‘
So it was solely improvements in living standards that resulted in the complete eradication of deaths by Polio and Measles I have witnessed in my lifetime here in the UK?
High living standards in western countries have patently not prevented recent measles outbreaks amongst the children of those who chose not to immunise them.
Conversely, low living standards in poor countries did not get in the way of a vaccination programme that removed smallpox, a vile disease, from the face of the earth….
The issue isn’t whether vaccination prevents ‘outbreak’ as defined by whatever tests are used to detect the presence of the pathogen in a predefined population. It’s whether the outbreak is all that dangerous to begin with.
To wit, when I look for evidence, I inevitably hit the wall of published BS and circular references. A prime example is this peer-reviewed ‘review’ article on a measles outbreak in the US and Canada which states that “Lack of vaccination against the measles virus is the leading cause of preventable deaths in children worldwide.”
The reference it gives leads to this generic page on the Canadian public health website. No trace of a source on this bold statement.
Interestingly, this review of the 2018 measles outbreak says nothing about what actually happened to the children infected under the reviewed studies. Did any die? If so, were they already sick and immunocompromised?
The study does tell us that 41.8% of unvaccinated children are so, due to ‘non-medical exemptions’. This of course means that over half are unvaccinated because of a medical exemption. In other words, the unvaccinated children whose outcomes are being used to justify continued use of this medical product ARE ALREADY SICK.
My feeling on the measles vaccine is that it is probably a good idea for children with some pre-existing condition, but otherwise healthy children’s (selfish) interests are better served by being exposed to the virus and surviving it.
This then leads to an honest national conversation about how much an individual (healthy) child/family should be forced to risk a potential vaccine related injury or side effect, in order to create sufficient vaccine-induced herd immunity in order to protect the sick and weak.
Uhhh, what? You do realize smallpox is alive and well right
Bravo!
This is the kind of nothing article typical of the Guardian not UnHerd. It is so smug and condescending. There are very good reasons to doubt the efficacy of much mainstream medicine. Can some people throw the baby out with the bath water? Sure. But we don’t solve that problem by retreating into naïveté about big Pharma. It would not be hard to do a similarly patronising piece about damage done to children by mothers who blithely hand over their kids to the medical industrial complex. But that article wouldn’t do any good either. To think otherwise is pure hubris and frankly ignorant.
My favorite sort of article, a libfem overdose of internalized misogyny from a woman that has no children.
Dear Poppy,
You wouldn’t write an article about how “some” people of color are not performing their culture right….so don’t write an article how “some” women aren’t performing their sex right. And don’t write an article at all about parenting if you aren’t one.
Regards,
Not a Trump voter, not far-right, not conservative, not an anti-vaxxer.
My grandmother used to say that when you don’t have anything kind to say, don’t say it at all.
For this article, I am going to heed her advice. Have a nice day everybody.
A good illustration of how for some, a genuine shift in perception i.e. the integrity of the pharma and health systems can then lead down a rabbit hole of “and this, and this too”. Once you realise the MHRA is prepared to bury significant numbers of adverse vax reactions for their Pharma funders (80% industry funded) and zero effectiveness on kids – who do you turn to for advice?
A more nuanced article would look at some of the parenting dilemmas around this betrayal as well as the extreme examples.
It would be interesting to compare with post Thalidomide era – I expect though no one bothered to record what mothers did/felt after that betrayal.
There is maybe a parallel with some African countries where brutally damaging “live trial” approaches to new vaccines have entered folklore and feed resistance to Western medicines.
In the end this highlights a curious phenomenon with an easy rummage through Mum’s Net.
But what are the middle ground doing? Not the Crunchy but maybe the Bit Crispy Mums?
This – to my mind – is a story about the near impossibility, in the digital age, of separating the wheat from the chaff in its huge ‘information’ silo. On the tomb of our post-digitised Western civilization might eventually be written “Too much information”.
My personal view is that the efficacy of vaccines is much overstated and unevidenced. In effect they are a religion. We have modern plumbing, clean water and nutrition to thank for the decline of disease, which began way before mass vaccination.
Like most people, I believed the religion, but the entire Covid shambles with its appeals to credentialism for what were blatantly idiotic policies opened my eyes, and spurred me to do some research. Perhaps Ms Sowerby might consider doing some.
Astonishing. Measles outbreaks occur frequently, because stupid people like you believe that washing your hands stops the spread of airborne microbes. Rubella, polio, scarlet fever, disease after disease is NOT seen due to vaccines. I realize that ignorance is the preferred state of many, but vaccine efficacy is not in doubt. The only ones that are probabilistic are for rapidly mutating diseases (influenza, COVID)
Actually, recent outbreaks of Polio have been caused by vaccines. There’s very little evidence for your claims because proper trials have never been done for vaccines. Why do vaccines exist in this special paradigm where proof is not required?
Show me the outbreaks of smallpox. The outbreaks of polio occurred 60 years ago when the vaccines were being developed. Idiots like you encourage vaccine hesitancy which promotes disease, because it encourages other stupid people to forgo vaccination. The outbreaks of polio are mostly in Muslim countries, because Muslim ignorance blames vaccination for all kinds of false problems. In some Muslim countries, vaccinators are killed in rural areas. This is the kind of massive stupidity that is found on the left, but not so often on the right.
This cites a WHO report. Perhaps they’re idiots too? People really don’t like their religion questioned, do they?
https://nationalpost.com/health/more-polio-cases-currently-caused-by-vaccines-than-the-wild-virus-who-report
“Vaccine-derived poliovirus is moving across Africa, with vaccine-derived Type 2 poliovirus spreading uncontrolled in West Africa, bursting geographical boundaries and raising fundamental questions and challenges for the whole eradication process,” writes a report by WHO’s Independent Monitoring Board.
They congregate on anonymous forums, on Facebook, Reddit and Mumsnet,
And then only exist on those sites. Are they telling the truth, are they pretending, are they even real? Poppy has decided she’s going to report from the front line of social change. But reporting on signs of life on these sites gives them an odd sort of credibility. How many mothers/women (because we don’t know how many are actually mothers) are there actually behaving like this out of the total population? And why does every sub group have to be categorised like insects in a museum with names like “Crunchy Mums”, which is about as infantile as you can get. The internet is not real, but stories like this contribute to the delusion and then become a “source” that others then use in their story. Where is the evidence from the other end, where the medical services see the results of “crunchy mum’s” so called practices? How many “crunchy mums” does it take to make a movement?
Some evidence, pre-dating Covid, exists in the statistics which governments keep on rates of childhood vaccination for measles and so on. These are frequently lower than several years ago. In Australia, one of the lowest rates is around the area which includes Byron Bay and other locations, which have attracted hippies and their later equivalents for decades. That area was also notable a few years back for the disproportionately high number of morons who demonstrated against the construction of mobile phone towers on the basis that they gave you cancer or curdled the milk in the cows or faded the curtains or something.
On most of these issues, I’m with David Baddiel, who said that a conspiracy theory is how idiots get to feel like intellectuals.
What the COVID incident showed us is that we CANNOT trust our government, the medical establishment, and that predatory Capitalist Big Pharma will kill us to make a profit. I will also add that the once highly credible LANCET has lost all credibility.
This article is nothing more than a propaganda hit piece.
An interesting article and I’m glad that Poppy spends her time rooting out all this information and spending time on the various forums so I don’t have to.
It appears to me that these Crunchy Mums exist on the long continuum between mainstream mumming (whatever that is…) and actual abuse. From the article, I guess there might be a couple of things that hover very close to the latter and justify some kind of external intervention.
But was it not ever thus? Is it not just things which have gone on since the year dot behind closed doors just manifesting themselves in the virtual world?
As a childless person, I absolutely stay away from commenting on the way people raise their kids or giving advice on it. I prefer to ask questions, try to sound like I’m interested (which mostly I’m not because I don’t like kids) and go away thinking “well, you learn something new every day. I’m so glad I’m not a mum.”
Would your forbearance extend to a mother (or father) who refused to vaccinate their child against a disease from which the child subsequently suffered and died? Or to a woman whose child died at birth because she refused traditional medical assistance?
The strawman is strong with this one.
Vaccine reluctance by a few people has been with us for a while. It was the Covid czars’ mandating this specific vaccine for everyone and enforcing it with everything from social ostracism to the literal force of law that turbocharged the movement.
perhaps instead of scapegoating these mothers, it would be useful to see what is behind their thought processes. Surely, it has nothing to do with the serial lying from public health authorities over vaccine efficacy during Covid. Surely, it has nothing to do with the millions injured by the jabs and the ongoing excess deaths. On a broader front, surely it has nothing to do with a vaccination schedule that has grown from fewer than ten shots just 50 years ago to more than 70 today.
Are they extreme? Perhaps, because when the pendulum shifts away from one extreme, it typically stops at or near the same point on the other side of scale. People were lied to. By politicians, by public health officials, by their own doctors, by pharma, and by the media. To date, not a single person from a single one of these groups has even hinted at being wrong, let alone been contrite. None. When poor Andrew Bridgen brings up data, it’s usually to an empty chamber in Parliament, which may be the sorriest spectacle of this entire sorry episode.
The key modern trend in Anglo parenthood seems to be home schooling to avoid left-liberal indoctrination i.e. domination of the school system by Democrat-voting Millenials and Zoomers in North America.
“If you were lucky enough to have a mother growing up …”
Whaaat? Most people have mothers! This sort of ‘eyegrabbing headline’ style is a complete turn-off!
I love this piece, thanks Poppy. I know women who followed this exact same trajectory, from homeopathy to flax seed to message board hell and then anti-vax etc. It is more common than it ought to be, and as usual, the internet gives all these fringe ideologies a place to gather and amplify the noise to all the corners of the world.
“Human rationality is not an ideal tool for truth seeking. Our patterns of perception and reasoning fall constant victim to an array of biases and shortcomings. … this does not mean that human rationality is poorly adapted to its purpose. That conclusion would follow only if the evolved purpose of reason were to arrive at objective truth. Instead, … reason evolved for another purpose. Human reason is the way it is–“flawed” if seen as a tool for classical logic in the privacy of your mind–because it is a social tool. Reason evolved for convincing and persuading other people, winning arguments with other people, defending and justifying actions and decisions to other people. These functions may be achieved regardless of whether the content of a proposition is true. I can benefit from convincing someone of something even when that thing is false.” — from Language vs Reality, by N.J. Enfield.
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5472/Language-vs-RealityWhy-Language-Is-Good-for#:~:text=In%20Language%20vs.,it%20deserves%20our%20deepest%20respect.
I have never heard the term “crunchy mums” before, but I guess it kind of works.
This is an excellent article