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Understood the big bet. Find us on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Mary Harris. And it's Labor Day, which means the staff is closing out the summer with a day off. Hopefully you are too. But even though we're out, we wanted to still share something great with you. This is an episode of KCRW's Question Everything, hosted by Brian Reed. Earlier this summer, the folks over at Question Everything started seeing weird rumors online about how sunscreen actually causes skin cancer, which is obviously wild to say and not true. So the show investigated where these rumors came from. Turns out it involved Matt Gaetz's television show. So while you're at the beach, hopefully using sunscreen, please enjoy Question Everything.
And what next? We'll be back here tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming. There are these videos I saw last week on Instagram. A couple people I know told me they've been popping up in their feeds. And they seem innocuous enough. Mommy bloggers showing how they prep their kids for the summer sun. Happy music playing. One of them is using a makeup sponge to put sunscreen on her little kid. Caption, my favorite hack for applying sunscreen to my kids. Another is brushing sunscreen on her blonde toddler's head. Cute. But then in the comments of all these videos, something strange and kind of alarming.
People claiming that using sunscreen will give you cancer rather than prevent it. Do not put sunblock on your baby, says one commenter on one of these videos. It causes cancer. Another, recent scientific studies prove that there is a link between sunscreen use and cancer. Another commenter, no thank you, skipping that toxic crap. Another, sunscreen is harmful for humans. And as one person said, rather simply, sunscreen is cancer.
Sunscreen, for the record, is not cancer. It does not cause cancer. In fact, used properly, it can save you from cancer of the skin. So where the hell does this idea come from? And why is it gaining traction on the internet right now? Because it has taken off in just the last few weeks, according to experts who monitor online misinformation. It turns out this is not some naturally occurring viral delusion that has sprung up organically as people head to the beach. There are actually two specific guys who are behind it.
From Placement Theory and KCRW, I'm Brian Reed. This is Question Everything. We investigate how the truth gets buried, distorted, and denied, and the ways people are fighting to make it matter again. Today on the show, a little ditty about summer disinformation. We find out who's responsible for injecting this odd and dangerous lie into the social media bloodstream and the surprising scientific phenomenon they are weaponizing to do it. Stick around.
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Our teams have true end-to-end product ownership, shipping distributed systems at scale right here in downtown Toronto. That's technology at Capital One. Search technology at Capital One Canada. For most of the history of professional sports, there was a wall between the game and gambling. Then suddenly it was everywhere. But that wasn't supposed to include the players themselves. Understood the big bet. Find us on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Now and again on the show, we like to check in with the folks over at NewsGuard, a fact-checking company that each week chooses a false claim of the week and debunks it. When they do this, I like that you get to see where the false claims originate and how they grow online. The paths these things take often are telling.
And last week, I saw that the false claim of the week was a study found that sunscreen use increased your risk of skin cancer. This is John Gregory, a health editor at NewsGuard. He's worked there for eight years, debunking health misinformation online. John says this claim that using sunscreen can give you skin cancer started flashing on the NewsGuard radar screens about three weeks ago. Their team regularly monitors certain search terms. Skin cancer, cancer is one of those that we monitor. And these posts started popping up. More than 17,000 posts, to be exact, in seven languages across 44 countries, spreading this fabrication to millions of people.
And as someone who spends every day ingesting health misinformation, John says this claim stuck out. This kind of really out there health misinformation, one that is not focused on vaccines, not focused on kind of a core issue of RFK Jr. and the Maha crowd, is a special kind of circumstance. We usually don't see conservative media telling you, hey, don't wear sunscreen, it might cause skin cancer. And the risk involved. I mean, you're telling people to potentially adopt a dangerous behavior, go outside in the sun unprotected for hours on end. Right, like this could have real impacts on people.
Absolutely. That risk of harm also factors into how we pick the false claim of the week. As they look at the activity on social media boosting this claim, John and his team saw that many of the posts were resharing or referencing this one clip from cable news. One America News Network featured it on Matt Gaethje's show, former congressman Matt Gaethje, who was at one point set to be President Trump's attorney general. He has a show now on One America. He's an anchor. Yeah, he does have a show on OAN.
If you don't know it, One American News Network is like a more extreme and less factual network than Fox News. And Matt Gaetz, you might recall, is a former Florida congressman who eventually withdrew himself from the running to be attorney general because a House ethics committee found evidence that he paid women for sex and had sex with a 17-year-old, which is statutory rape in Florida. He said these findings are untruthful and defamatory. Now he's a news anchor. The guest Gaetz had on to talk about sunscreen. A anti-vaccine epidemiologist by the name of Nicholas Holzer.
Gates asked Holzer, Have I been lied to as a Florida man about sunscreen protecting me from cancer? Holzer responded, Yes, it appears we've all been lied to, unfortunately. The claim that was being spread was based around a November 2023 study done in the UK. This massive study of over 470,000 people confirms it. When they compared sunscreen users to non-sunscreen users, the sunscreen users faced increased risks of all the major skin cancers. We'll dig into that study in a bit. But that interview happened on June 26th. The guest, Nick Holzer.
posted a clip of it on X, and got 2.9 million views in four days. He also went on other shows, like comedian Jimmy Dore's podcast, which has nearly 2 million subscribers on YouTube. Nicoletra was out there pushing this claim. And did you know who that guy was? Oh, yes. He's a very frequent purveyor of health misinformation, often in the anti-vaccine space. He's also a big promoter of ivermectin as not only a treatment for COVID-19, but also as a cancer treatment. Ivermectin, used to deworm horses, also used to treat some conditions in humans, not supposed to be used to treat COVID-19 or cancer. But since the pandemic, it's become gospel amongst the people on the right that it's a go-to cure for just about everything.
John says Holster got his master's in public health from the University of Michigan. And on paper, he's sort of unremarkable. When you Google him, he seems like a relatively normal researcher. He has a whole profile on a research website listing scientific journals he's published in. But it's who he works with that's noteworthy. He's one of the writers on a substack called The Focal Points. It has about 138,000 subscribers. The more famous author on that substack is someone that Holster has worked for for a number of years named Dr. Peter McAuliffe, who's one of the big sources of misinformation from the COVID pandemic.
If I was not listing them off, he'd be in the top five in terms of like sources of bad information, particularly about COVID vaccines. If you look at Nick Hulsher, the sunscreen guy's resume, John says his entire professional career as an epidemiologist since graduating just a few years ago is working with Peter McCullough, who is a real doctor. He's a cardiologist. He had affiliations with major institutions like Baylor University prior to becoming this big misinformation purveyor. He left in early 2021 and Baylor later had to sue him in order to get him to stop mentioning his affiliation with them as if it were current because they didn't want to be associated with the claims he was starting to make about COVID vaccines.
Together, Dr. McCullough, Nick Hulsher, write this prolific newsletter on Substack. Focal points. This Substack alone is responsible for, you know, dozens of false health claims. I'm probably being conservative with that. It's not 100% in line with RFK Jr. They've had some articles that are a little critical of RFK Jr. for basically not moving fast enough on issues they, I mean, these are people that want to see.
COVID vaccines 100% pulled off the market because in their eyes and their claims, it's killed millions of people. That's what they claim on this sub stack. Yeah. They have actually claimed that it's killed more people than World War I, World War II, and Vietnam combined, at least for the U.S. death toll.
So, back to the sunscreen. A few weeks before he went on Matt Gaetz's show, on June 9th, amid all these other Focal Points articles about vaccines killing people and the government doing bio-warfare experiments with ticks and vaccines causing autism, Nick Hulsher published a Substack post about sunscreen. The headline is Study Find Sunscreen Use Linked to Higher Risk of Multiple Skin Cancers. And then further down, he's got this graphic that says sunscreen use linked up to a 292% higher risk of multiple skin cancers. There's an image of a man and a woman in their bathing suits slathering sunscreen on their skin, oblivious to the danger. Next to them are dermatological sketches of the layers of skin with cancer in it. The Substack post centers on a study of more than 470,000 people in the UK. And what did it find? So it did find that people who reported using sunscreen more frequently did also report having higher rates of skin cancers. What was that? It's not what it sounds like. We'll get into it after a quick break.
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So this epidemiologist, Nick Hulsher, who's spreading the claim about sunscreen causing skin cancer, he's basing his claim on a 2023 study in the UK, which was investigating a very technical scientific question related to skin cancer. But as part of the research, looked at the correlation between people who self-report using sunscreen and the occurrence they have of skin cancer. This is a real scientific study conducted by real doctors and published in a peer-reviewed journal called Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention. But did find that people who reported using sunscreen more frequently did also report having higher rates of skin cancers. But the study was very clear.
right as they made that finding, that this was a paradoxical finding. That's the exact terminology they use. It had been seen in similar studies because people who report using sunscreen more regularly also might tan more regularly and or a lack of reapplication of sunscreen throughout the day, this so-called sunscreen paradox. Wait, this is a thing? Like in science, the sunscreen paradox? Yeah. Apparently, this is a recognized phenomenon that scientists have seen in multiple dermatological studies, not just this one. Just want to make sure I'm getting this right. Basically, the sunscreen paradox is people who report higher use of sunscreen tend to have higher instances of skin cancer.
But the understanding of scientists doing this research is that that might be happening because people who report a lot of sunscreen use might just go in the sun more. And so they have skin cancer for that reason, or they think they're using it properly. They're staying in the sun a long time, feeling they're safe, and they don't reapply it. And so they do have higher instances of skin cancer, but it's not because of the use of the sunscreen. Right. They've given themselves kind of a false sense of protection by just saying, oh, well, I use it. But like, you know, they're applying it once and then staying out for hours and hours on end and spend more time out in the sun without really using the sunscreen properly for the amount of time they're in the sunlight.
John says in other studies, where instead of simply asking people to say how regularly they use sunscreen, researchers are following people over time and checking that they're using it properly, applying enough, reapplying it over the course of the day, the sunscreen paradox goes away. And in fact, the results show that sunscreen used properly decreases instances of skin cancer. A study in Australia showed daily use of sunscreen reduced the incidence of melanoma by 50%. A Norwegian study found using SPF-15 lotion reduced melanoma risk by about 30%. There are similar findings for other skin cancers too. But Nick Hulcher's Substack post concluded the exact opposite, that sunscreen use can cause skin cancer.
John and his team at NewsGuard contacted one of the authors of the UK study, Dr. Ivan Lipinoff at McGill University, who told them Holster's take was a misrepresentation of their findings. He said, quote, the proper use of sunscreen combined with other sun protection measures reduces the risk of skin cancer. But again, he and his co-authors also said this in the study itself, the very study that Nick Holster is supposedly reading and summarizing on the Focal Point Substack and later on One American News. Does he ever report in this Substack post that the authors of the study have said that their study should not be interpreted this way? No. And should not be interpreted to link skin cancer to use of sunscreen?
No, he never provides that countervailing information. There's no mention of what's in the study about the paradoxical finding or the comments they made since then. He cherry-picked and just worked around that. So Nicholas Holzer, do you have a sense, like, does he believe that sunscreen causes cancer? It's hard to discount with any single health misinformation source whether or not they believe this stuff.
His motivation seems to be railing against vaccine and mainstream medical opinion. Whether he actually believes in it or not, I think someone would have to be inside his head to really get into it. The explanation here is he either didn't read the whole study or he did and specifically left out the really important information that the authors of the study said the opposite thing is true than what he's saying. Right. Yeah. And it's just, you know, only he would know whether he deliberately cherry picked or he just stopped reading at a certain point when he felt like he had his narrative set in stone.
We emailed Hulsher and McCullough to ask if they believed it or were purposely deceiving people. They didn't answer us. There is a profit motive behind a bunch of the disinformation Hulsher and McCullough push on focal points. For one, they have subscribers to the newsletter, nearly 140,000 of them, some portion of those paid. But more important, McCullough and Hulsher are involved in a for-profit company called The Wellness Company, which sells certain prescription drugs and other medical products online. And on the sub-stack, they're like encouraging people to go buy stuff from The Wellness Company.
They do talk about their products, provide links to it, and they have put up stuff that we would consider, frankly, just advertising for the wellness company. It might be kind of couched in an article that's about like, you know, if they're talking about ivermectin, they probably will insert, by the way, you can go buy it here and link out to the wellness company site. Which, of course, sells ivermectin. Any sense of how much money they're making? For them, no. We don't know exactly how much money they pull in. But, you know, you can look at their website and see they're selling.
drugs that are, you know, generic drugs that probably cost, you know, cents to produce at this point, things like ivermectin, and they're selling them for hundreds of dollars. So I would imagine, well, I can't put a round number on it. Their margins are extremely high. But here's the interesting thing about the shoddy sunscreen claim. Holger and McCullough don't appear to be leveraging that to sell any specific product. It's not like ivermectin, where they're claiming falsely that it cures cancer and then directing people to go buy it from their website.
I didn't see any skin cancer or sun-related products that they might be trying to trick people into paying them for. They're not selling hats or rash guards. In fact, Hulsher doesn't tell people to swear off sunscreen totally. He writes, He suggests mineral sunscreens for long sun exposure. Quote, The takeaway is not to fear sunlight, but to respect it. John says, in his near decade covering health disinformation, this actually tracks.
I think there's sometimes a misconception that health misinformation like this always has to be based on, for one, a consistent agenda that doesn't contradict itself or that it's selling something. And in this case, it's not doing either of those things. It's really just about seems to be just about contrarianism, that whatever mainstream medical science says, whatever health authorities say, people like Nicholas Holzer have to have a counter narrative. They have to say, no, they're lying to you. And this is the real secret truth that you're being let in on.
They are trying to keep that audience engaged with them that is expecting to hear an alternative view on everything that comes out of mainstream medicine and mainstream news. The misinformation itself is the product. That's John Gregory at NewsGuard. Since we're on the topic, a few quick tips for proper sunscreen application from the American Academy of Dermatology. For adults, use a broad-spectrum formula, at least SPF 30, on all exposed skin 15 minutes before you head into the sun. Most adults need to use at least one ounce, a shot glass, for all skin that's not covered by clothing. Not as much as I thought, but that's why I'm not a dermatologist. The American Academy of Dermatology also says make sure to reapply every two hours or after swimming or sweating.
If you found this episode edifying, please send it to a friend. And if you're new here, go check out our recent episodes about chatbots and conspiracy theorists, Ashley St. Clair, Meta, and also our two-parter from earlier this year about deported journalist Mario Guevara. Another request, please follow Question Everything wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us reach more people who should hear the reporting we're doing. And follow us on Instagram at questioneverything.podcast.
Today's show was produced by Sam Egan and edited by Jen Kinney. Robin Semien and I are the executive producers of Question Everything. Our team also includes producer Zach St. Louis, managing editor Kevin Sullivan, contributing editor Neil Drumming, and associate producer Kevin Shepard. This episode was fact-checked by Annika Robbins, mixing and sound design by Brendan Baker. Our music is by Matt McGinley. Abby Kwong manages our social media. Special thanks to Dana Chivas. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seipel, Tejal Ajamera, Natalie Hill, and Jennifer Farrow. We'll see you next time. I finished a 5K in 94th place, right after a man wearing jeans. Then a volunteer gave me a medal. But I don't want participation trophies, unless they're from Bet365.
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