Larry Cook, a prominent anti-vax activist who was banned from numerous social media platforms including Facebook for spreading QAnon conspiracy theories, has returned to Twitter, where he is using his verified status to sell expensive “vaccine cures.”
A longtime anti-vaxxer, Cook is a former naturopath who resigned as executive director of the California Naturopathic Doctors Association in 2016 to “educate as many parents and others as possible about the dangers of vaccination.”
Among Cook’s many inflammatory claims, he has said vaccines kill babies and children. “Not only can any vaccine given at any age kill your child,” Cook wrote in one ad, “but if this unthinkable tragedy does occur, doctors will dismiss it as ‘Sudden Infant Death Syndrome’ (SIDS)”
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Cook is now using his Twitter platform to sell medically dubious products such as “Zeolite Heavy Metal Detox Spray” for $63.83 a month, which he claims “helps clean out the chemicals from the body.” Cook also maintains an Amazon storefront where he earns a commission selling anti-vax books, alongside supplements.
Cook was banned from Facebook and Twitter in November 2020 after using his platform to spread QAnon conspiracy theories. But he has built a new following on Elon Musk’s Twitter 2.0, where he is a verified Twitter Blue user with over 37,000 followers. (Then-Twitter CEO Musk confirmed in April that these verified accounts are prioritized as part of Twitter’s algorithm, meaning they are more likely to be seen by users on the platform.)
“I think it’s a terrible move to bring Cook (and others, such as Naomi Wolf) back to Twitter,” Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University told The Daily Beast. “All they do is spread disinformation about vaccines—I see Larry’s latest is that vaccines cause “turbo cancer,” whatever that is, and type 1 diabetes. This is absolutely unsupported scientifically, and has no purpose but to enrich Cook’s coffers as it did before he was kicked off multiple social media and fundraising sites. He is a public health menace.”
When asked by The Daily Beast for a response to Smith’s statement, Cook tweeted: “That epidemiologist is lying. Trust parents, not Pharma shill epidemiologists. Or hit pieces by fake news.”
Cook declined to comment further, instead tweeting: “I don’t respond to these hit piece requests anymore.”
After his social media ban in 2020, Cook built a more explicitly right-wing online presence, founding a spin-off group called “Medical Freedom Patriots,” which he described as “Pro Donald Trump,” “QAnon Friendly” and “Anti Vaccine.”
His current Twitter presence has expanded beyond anti-vaccine misinformation, and into a number of right-wing talking points. In recent weeks, Cook has tweeted criticism of gender-affirming care for minors and trans people participating in sport, called COVID a “scamdemic,” and claimed the wildfires raging in Canada are the work of “Black op eco terrorists to supercharge the climate change narrative.”
“Larry Cook was one of the most prolific and dangerous superspreaders of anti-vaccine misinformation during the Covid pandemic–which allowed him to raise huge amounts of cash by peddling deadly lies,” Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told The Daily Beast in a statement. In 2021, Cook was highlighted as a “Pandemic Profiteer” by The Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
“When he took over Twitter, Elon Musk put up the ‘Bat Signal’ to all manner of disinformation actors and extremists, encouraging them to flood back onto Twitter. It is more than happy to give a huge algorithmic boost to anyone as long as they cough up $8 a month–no matter how toxic they are,” Hood continued. “Malicious, self-interested actors like Cook are permitted—even incentivized—to peddle extreme propaganda by exploitative social media platforms that offer them direct access to captive audiences of paying followers.”
Initially Cook focused his efforts on building a community on YouTube and Facebook, where his group “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” was one of the site’s largest anti-vax communities, with 195,000 members by 2020. In November of that year, Cook’s Facebook group was shut down and he was booted off Twitter as both companies attempted to curb the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories on their platforms.
It was not Cook’s anti-vax activism that ultimately got him kicked off Facebook, but his support for QAnon, which violated the company's policies designed to “address militarized social movements and violence-inducing conspiracy networks,” Newsweek reported.
“I put a huge—and I mean HUGE—amount of effort building my audience on Facebook. I lived on Facebook. When I learned about [QAnon], I got active on Twitter as well,” Cook posted on the conservative social media site Parler after his removal. “Remember we are at war. This is Good vs Evil. Pray, and Pray Big every day.”
Cook has long been able to harness the power of social media to reach new audiences. He ran multiple GoFundMe campaigns, raising around $80,000 before anti-vax campaigns were banned by the site in 2019. One campaign alone amassed $56,636. At the time Cook said the funds would go towards building a website and interviewing parents who believe their children were injured by vaccines. Another GoFundMe campaign in 2020 claimed the medical community was covering up baby deaths.
Cook also spent thousands of dollars of targeted Facebook ads. In 2019, The Daily Beast found that Cook spent a total of $5,302 on 54 advertisements on the platform between May 2018 and March 9, 2019, according to Facebook’s ad archive.
“I’m a full-time activist,” Cook told The Daily Beast in a phone interview in 2019, when asked about money he was raising. “I’m not a nonprofit. I don’t need to report any income—we are in a capitalist society and anyone can raise and spend how we want.”
That year, Cook took out a series of Facebook ads targeting parents in Washington State, where more than 50 people had been infected in a measles outbreak.
“Are you concerned about vaccines? What about MANDATORY VACCINATION, like what’s being proposed in WA State and other states? Should our children REALLY be force vaccinated?” one of the removed ads read. “Read this tragic story and then join our group Stop Mandatory Vaccination if you want truthful answers that your pediatrician and mainstream media will never tell you.”
Facebook later removed Cook’s ads, citing their vaccine misinformation policies.
“Several of these ads contained verifiable hoaxes identified by leading global health organizations like the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and were removed,” Devon Kearns, who worked in policy communications at Facebook, told The Daily Beast in March 2019.
In November 2019, the journal Vaccine found that the majority of Facebook ads spreading misinformation about vaccines were the work of only two groups—Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “World Mercury Project” and Larry Cook’s “Stop Mandatory Vaccinations.”
Cook came under fire in February 2020, after a Colorado mother posted in his “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” Facebook group looking for advice for her 4-year-old son who was sick with the flu. The child was prescribed Tamiflu by a doctor, but posters in the group encouraged his mother not to give the boy the medication. Instead, they recommended “Vitamin D and C, Elderberry, Zinc,” and fruits and vegetables, according to CBS News. The child later died.
In response, Cook posted in the group blaming the death on Children’s Hospital Colorado Springs, who he said “never offered any real treatments that would have likely cured her boy.”
