Amazon’s e-commerce site still prominently features content about COVID-19 that was deemed as misinformation and called out more than two months ago by U.S. lawmakers.
Searches for terms such as “COVID-19” and “vaccine” yielded “highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures,” according to a Sept. 7 letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy by Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Such content remains prominently featured on Amazon as COVID-19 cases rise worldwide and the Omicron variant shows potential to overwhelm already taxed hospitals. Health officials are urging people to get vaccinated and boosted as the fast-moving variant surges in Europe and spreads through the United States.
Omicron appears to be rising swiftly in Washington state, where about about 18% of people over age 12 have not yet received a single dose of vaccine.
In her letter, Warren singled out the “The Truth about COVID-19,” by Ronnie Cummins and Joseph Mercola, among other materials. The book tells readers not to rely on vaccines, and advises taking vitamin D, quercetin and a host of other pills to prevent COVID-19, all of which are sold on Amazon.com from Mercola’s supplements company.
Mercola is the number one spreader of anti-vaccine content on social media, according to a list compiled by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. He reaches the largest audience online of any vaccine skeptic, according to an analysis by the New York Times.
Mercola’s book showed up among the top four results after a search on Amazon.com by GeekWire on Dec. 10 for “COVID-19.” Also featured was “COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey,” which claims to reveal “a plan to reorganize the world in the name of public health.” A search for “vaccine” yielded material such as “Vaccines: The Biggest Medical Fraud in History.”
“As long as these materials remain on the site, Amazon is directly profiting from the sensationalism of anti-vaccine misinformation,” said Calif. Rep. Adam Schiff in a letter sent to Jassy on Sept. 8.
GeekWire’s searches were made while signed out of the site using a VPN and a browser cleared of search history.
In November, another book began to climb Amazon’s charts,”The Real Anthony Fauci,” by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy is ranked second on the list of anti-vaccine content spreaders, after Mercola. The book is a bestseller on Amazon.
“As a company, we continue to encourage our employees to get vaccinated, and we believe it is an important step for communities to stay healthy and recover from the pandemic,” said an Amazon spokesperson in an email to GeekWire. “As a retailer, we respect that our customers want access to a wide variety of viewpoints on the matter, which is why we continue to list the books in question.”
Amazon previously replied to Warren, a frequent critic of the power of big tech companies, with a similar response on Sept. 22. You can read the letter to the Massachusetts senator below, signed by Amazon’s vice president of public policy Brian Huseman.
Warren had requested a public report on the link between Amazon’s algorithms and COVID-19 misinformation, and a plan to modify the algorithms. She also asked the company to clarify its policies on books and products containing COVID-19 misinformation and actions the company was taking to addressing its spread.
In his reply, Huseman pointed Warren to Amazon’s guidelines for authors, publishers, and book vendors, which state, “we reserve the right to remove content from sale if we determine it creates a poor customer experience.” The policy does not contain specific guidance for misinformation, or for COVID-19 topics.
“Amazon believes getting vaccinated is the most important thing our employees can do to protect themselves and their communities,” Huseman told Warren. He noted that Amazon links to public health sites in response to COVID-19 related searches.
Huseman also said: “Our search and recommendations features are not designed to direct consumers to a particular point of view, but rather to help customers find products they want to purchase.”
In a tweet on Oct. 8, Warren said: “Amazon’s response? They told me they can eliminate misinformation if they want to do it — but they won’t. Amazon’s unwillingness to stop leading consumers to dangerous COVID-19 misinformation is irresponsible.”
Schiff’s office said it received a response from the company, but it did not release it.
“We appreciate their candor but do not believe Amazon has taken the steps needed to stop misinformation from running rampant on their site,” said Schiff spokesperson Lauren French in an email to GeekWire. “Misinformation is deadly and it is incumbent on social media sites and retail companies to hold themselves responsible for public health.”
Schiff had also written a letter to Facebook, now Meta, about COVID-19 misinformation. Facebook and other social media giants have also taken heat for their role in vaccine hesitancy and political misinformation.
Mercola’s book is the best seller on Amazon in contagious diseases, had five stars and more than 4,400 reviews, up from about 1,700 reviews in August.
Kennedy’s “The Real Anthony Fauci” also had five stars and was number two in the bestseller category overall for books. The book claims to show how Fauci, the chief COVID-19 medical advisor President Biden, as well as Bill Gates and “their cohorts” influence the public “with fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence and pathogenesis.” It has reeled in more than 2,300 reviews since its release on Nov. 16.
“This is a tactic that a lot of anti-vaccination activists use. They try to diminish the trust that we have in public officials, government and scientific institutions,” said Kolina Koltai, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Mercola’s channel was taken down by YouTube in September, and Kennedy has been banned from Instagram, but COVID-19 conspiracy theories and anti-vaxx material continue to be amplified on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And while social media companies spread misinformation, Amazon also enables purveyors to monetize it, said Koltai.
“By promoting content that we know to have misinformation, from known actors who are actively contributing and profiting off that space, [Amazon is] becoming complicit in the spread of vaccine misinformation,” said Koltai.
Amazon has been scrutinized before for health materials on its site. A study this January by Tanushree Mitra, an assistant professor at the Center for an Informed Public, flagged about 5,000 products on the site linked to health misinformation.
“If I search for the same keywords today on Amazon, I still get similar anti-vaccine books and medicinal products that are not FDA approved,” Mitra told GeekWire in an interview. Her study also showed Amazon’s algorithms amplifying such products to people who expressed an interest in similar ones. She added: “What they are doing after the study came out is not very clear, not very transparent.”
In addition to the books, the other top four hits in the search for “COVID-19” were two test kits for COVID-19, including one made by Amazon. Amazon is building up its healthcare offerings, with Amazon Pharmacy, its growing telehealth services, and its COVID-19 diagnostic kit. The company also sells a variety of masks, which Warren and others have criticized for their quality.
A report in the Washington Post last week found that Amazon has also been donating to groups that discourage vaccination, including one founded by Kennedy, through its AmazonSmile program. That program enables customers to choose a nonprofit to receive half a percent of their purchase price as a donation. Mercola also has donated millions to such groups.
The U.S. is reporting more than 1,100 daily COVID-19 deaths, the vast majority among the unvaccinated. More than 60 million eligible Americans remain without shots, and vaccine hesitancy is common in other nations such as South Africa, which first reported the rapidly-spreading Omicron variant.
Omicron is on track to become the dominant variant in several European countries this week, and appears to be rising in Washington state. The variant accounted for more than 10% of cases from Dec. 8 in early data released Monday by the University of Washington’s virology lab, which analyzes a large proportion of the state’s COVID-19 tests. That’s up from a handful of cases only a week earlier. The case count will undergo confirmation in the next few days.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center researcher Trevor Bedford said in a tweet Thursday,“I believe a significant Omicron wave is inevitable and we should be doing our best to prepare for it now.”
