Katalin Karikó co-won a Nobel Prize this week for her groundbreaking work on mRNA vaccines — but she had to fight against professional science to do it.
The Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded on Monday to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, for discoveries that led to the development of mRNA vaccinations, including those developed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Arguably few Nobelists had a hand in saving more lives than Karikó and Weissman. One study estimates that in the US alone, the vaccines prevented over 3 million deaths and 18 million hospitalizations and saved more than $1 trillion. Worldwide, of course, the effect was even larger.
By far the most effective vaccines against Covid-19 were the mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, and both companies benefited from the discoveries of Weissman and Karikó about how to change the body’s immune response to mRNA. Their Nobel Prize, obviously, is richly deserved.
It’s also a bit of a warning sign.
In hindsight, little medical research was of more importance than Karikó’s work at Weissman’s lab on making mRNA vaccines a reality. But at every stage, the research community that should have embraced this research instead stymied it, because of powerful incentives in science toward work that is more fundable and more publishable.
It’s hard to escape the impression that mRNA vaccines reached production despite the system, rather than because of it. And that raises the question: What other extraordinary, world-changing research programs are our current research lab system not equipped to nourish?
We nearly missed out on this huge line of research
Karikó was hired by the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 in a role that put her on track to become a full tenured professor. But she struggled to get grant funding for her work on mRNA. “She was too committed to the promise of mRNA to switch to other, perhaps more easily fundable projects,” David Scales, a junior researcher who worked in her lab at Penn, told WBUR.
And in roles like Karikó’s, bringing in grant funding was everything. In 1995, Penn demoted her. “Anyone of less grit and determination would have just given up long before the groundwork for today’s vaccines was laid,” Scales said.
But Karikó persevered. She had to hop from lab to lab at Penn and eventually joined Weissman’s lab, which was working on an HIV vaccine. Together, they ended up taking a closer look at a key barrier to creating mRNA vaccines: the body’s strong immune response to mRNA. mRNA would be unusable for vaccines if the body identified it as a foreign agent and destroyed it. Together, they worked out a way of altering the chemical bonds in mRNA in a way that appeared to allow it to escape the immune system’s notice.
A key scientific hurdle to mRNA vaccination had been cleared. But the hurdles that were a product of our broken academic science system remained.
“We couldn’t get funding. We couldn’t get publications. We couldn’t get people to notice RNA as something interesting,” Weissman said in an interview on Monday. “Pretty much everybody gave up on it.”
They tried working toward mRNA vaccination outside academia, founding a small company called RNARx. That too ran into problems. In 2006, Penn applied for and received two patents for Karikó’s and Weissman’s work. But RNARx struggled to come to a licensing agreement with Penn for the patents.
So, according to 2021 reporting in Nature, Penn sold the patents for $300,000 to a small lab-reagents supplier in Madison. When the funder backing the vaccine company Moderna called Karikó to ask to license the patents, she had to tell them she didn’t have them. They were eventually sublicensed to both Moderna and BioNTech (which partnered with Pfizer), for hundreds of millions of dollars.
“I was kicked out, from Penn, was forced to retire,” Karikó told Adam Smith, interviewing her on behalf of the Nobel Prize committee after she got her award. She eventually found a place at BioNTech, which required her commuting to and from Germany.
So in other words, a researcher with a world-changing discovery was for so long unable to get sustained funding to do further research — a clear failure of our institutions for deciding what merits funding.
It’s hard to guess exactly what went wrong in Karikó’s case, but there are some obvious possibilities. Researchers have long complained that a single objection on the committee considering a grant can effectively kill it, making the process highly subjective and leading it to strongly favor incremental, conservative research rather than bold ideas. Even worse, it can end up favoring work that is already halfway done.
One of the best strategies to get a grant is to not apply until you already have very impressive results data, but this strategy highly rewards having a well-funded lab. That makes it very difficult for new researchers to break in — like Karikó, who immigrated to the US at age 30, without many financial resources.
Then, because of Karikó’s struggle to get grants, she was demoted by her institution. It’s a fate many scientists are deeply afraid of, and which therefore discourages them from doing work that may not get grants — even if they know it has important world-changing potential. And she wasn’t able to get other institutional jobs. Thankfully, Karikó had a supportive husband who could enable her commute to BioNTech in Germany to continue her work at a company that saw its potential.
(I should note here that mRNA vaccines were the work of countless people, and that no new vaccine is developed by a lone hero — that’s simply not how modern biology works. Many, many other people have worked on mRNA vaccines, and there are probably other routes around the immune system response problem. But if the technology had been even a few years delayed, millions of lives would have been lost, which means that Karikó and Weissman’s work, employed in both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, was indeed a huge deal.)
What we may be missing
This is not a triumphant story about the successful functioning of our systems for R&D and scientific discovery. Those systems appear to have basically failed. This is a story about how through sheer stubbornness, and a few strokes of luck, the mRNA technology made it to market, where it saved millions of lives and trillions of dollars. That makes it a great fit for a Nobel Prize, which celebrates individuals who made extraordinary contributions that changed the face of their fields. But it also makes it a cautionary tale.
How many people like Karikó and Weissman are out there, confident that they’re on to something world-changing and yet unable to get the funding to keep researching it? How many scientists quietly change careers toward something more fundable?
There are a lot of different ideas for how we could make scientific funding more flexible and responsive, and let scientists pursue projects without immediate payoffs. I’ve written about the Arc Institute, a philanthropic effort to do just that, as well as about zany-but-legitimately-valuable ideas like allocating some funding by lottery. But while we can debate the best solution, I don’t think we can debate any longer that there’s a problem.
There’s too much at stake in scientific research for us to set grant and tenure policies that systematically fail our researchers and then hope they overcome adversity and succeed anyway. Karikó’s untouchable conviction and decades-long labor in obscurity until she was at last vindicated is a beautiful story of the triumph of the human spirit, and it should never happen again.
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The baffling structure of rental car taxes and fees, explained.
The experience of renting a car can give you some trust issues. You’re booking on some travel website, where you start at Price A. Then, by the time you get to the checkout, you’re at a higher Price B that wasn’t the one you saw prominently advertised — maybe it was in small letters, but you didn’t notice. When you go to pick up the car, you’ve got to make a deliberate effort to avoid the even higher Price C, which the guy at the counter is pretty intent on selling you on. Even if Price B sticks, you find yourself staring at your receipt, wondering what in the world all those extra charges are. That’s assuming that the vehicle you intended to rent is even available. That’s assuming any vehicle is available.
We all know flying sucks. Airlines squeeze every penny they can out of us with add-ons and fees, and airports are wildly overpriced. The experience of renting a car often flies under the radar, but it can be similarly terrible.
The pandemic was an absolute nightmare for renting a car, and horror stories were not hard to come by. (To be fair to the companies here, a business where your inventory may be taken very very far away and not returned to its initial location is inherently complicated, and the pandemic was a doozy for the industry in a lot of ways.) Even though some of the dust has settled, it’s hardly smooth sailing now. The customer service experience remains exhausting. The concept of a reservation still comes with a bit of a wink — there’s a whole Seinfeld scene about it. The fees and tax scheme is incomprehensible.
“The fees in the car rental sector, in many ways, are worse than fees in the airline sector because there’s a factor of sticker shock,” said William J. McGee, senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly think tank.
There’s a specific and daunting element of surprise that comes with the price and logistics of renting a car. And yet, the rental car rodeo is often an inevitable part of travel: It’s expensive, it’s annoying, and it’s not clear it’s getting better anytime soon.
Don’t just be mad about rental car companies for the fees
A family friend recently reached out about the cost of their rental car from Budget at the Denver airport. They sent over the receipt, and it’s really something to behold. The base rate for an eight-day rental is $555.19; the total they owe is more than $400 higher.
Deciphering what each line item corresponds to requires navigating a ton of jargon. A “concession recovery fee” costs $77.74; the “Colorado road safety fee” is $19.17; an “energy recovery fee” is $7.11. A look at Budget’s glossary and some googling provide an explanation of the fees, especially where they come from. The concession fee is a kickback to the airport. The state fee helps pay for Colorado’s roads. The energy fee is because customers are supposed to chip in to keep the company’s lights on, which seems like it could be rolled up into the base rate but okay.
It’s ridiculous that consumers would need to look in a glossary to decipher the list of charges they’re faced with. More importantly, it’s representative of the issue with rental car fees and taxes: They’re coming at you from every which way, and many of them you can’t avoid. The guy at the counter trying to sell you on insurance is someone you can hopefully say no to (more on that later), but the locality that’s figured out that a rental car tax is a nice way to pay for a new sports stadium, not so much.
“People are not wrong to hate all the fees that they’re hit with, but we distinguish between fees that are unavoidable and those you can potentially do something about,” said Chuck Bell, director of financial services policy at Consumer Reports.
It’s sort of like consumers are walking down the street, and state and local governments, airports, and car rental companies are all picking cash out of their pockets at every step.
Airports can charge different fees that add up quickly, such as concession fees, which amounts to the rent companies are supposed to pay for being allowed to do business on their premises. That’s generally passed on to the consumer. The same goes for facility fees, which are supposed to go toward new car rental facilities. If you pick your car up at the airport, those fees are unavoidable.
Many state and local governments across the country levy a number of fees and taxes on rental cars, too, whether it’s for police training or miscellaneous projects or (I was being serious earlier) sports arenas. The reasoning on the part of lawmakers is that it’s easier to raise taxes on out-of-towners than it is on locals, and state and local governments want and need the money. “In some cities and states, there are politicians that say, ‘Well, if we try and put in a tax for this big project … the people that vote for us are all going to be upset, and they’re not going to want to pay this tax,’” McGee said. “But if you have tourists coming through, they don’t vote for you.”
One question you might be asking yourself here is why any of these fees and taxes are even broken out. If it’s an unavoidable part of the total cost, who cares who the money’s going to? One simple answer is it is a way for rental car companies to offer full disclosure to consumers — and to show them their bill is more expensive in part because of mandated extra charges outside of their control. From the consumer’s perspective, it’s a bit of a wash.
But also do be mad at the companies for the fees
There’s probably a discussion to be had about whether governments and airports should account for so much of the rental car receipt pie. But what can be a bigger pain point for consumers — and one that’s within the industry’s control — is the extra charges the companies themselves add on.
The industry will say a lot of the extra fees are your choice, which is true. You decide whether you want to pay that extra driver fee, and you pick if you want that insurance. Still, some of it isn’t up to you, like having to pay the company for parking and licensing the vehicle, or being hit with some random penalty for smoking in the car even though you swear you did not. Regardless, a lot of it is confusing.
In the summer of 2022, Brittany Miller, who works for a nonprofit in Seattle, got duped by a Hertz location in Las Vegas on what was and was not her choice. The agent there told her she had to purchase additional insurance (in rental car parlance, a collision damage waiver) even though she and her boyfriend had insurance of their own — your regular car insurance usually covers rentals. She says the agent made it seem as though they wouldn’t be able to walk out of the lot if they didn’t agree, telling them it was Nevada state law. So, they relented.
Once they later realized they’d been tricked, they decided to try to get their $300 back — an endeavor that took over a year. Hertz at one point told her it would be $25 to even investigate the case because six months had passed since the original rental date. Eventually, she found an email address on Reddit that got her results. Hertz returned the money and apologized for the “misinformation” the couple was given at the lot. “It was kind of gratifying but also frustrating to hear,” Miller said. “It shouldn’t be pulling teeth to get them to admit wrongdoing.”
Hertz did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
While Miller’s experience is perhaps an extreme one, it’s not entirely novel. Once you’re at the counter trying to pick up your car, you’re faced with a barrage of questions that can be tough to decipher, especially as the agent tries to upsell you. A few years ago, I found myself in a back-and-forth with a rental car agent over whether I should get the extra extra insurance. He warned me the coverage I had wouldn’t pay for damages … if a tree fell on my car.
“There’s a lot of fine print, so if you’re not prepared for it when you walk up to the counter, you can be persuaded to take it because you’re afraid,” Bell said. “The devil’s really in the details with a lot of these things, and I think people get bamboozled into accepting add-on charges that they don’t need.”
Car rentals, relative to other services, have more discretionary and add-on services that they try to induce people to accept. There are all sorts of levels of protections for the car, for liability, for possessions, and accompanying fees consumers have to sort through. Do you need a car seat? What about GPS? Will someone under 25 be driving? Really, have you thought about the insurance? What about transponders for tolls? There can also be penalties for canceling, for dropping off a car too late, or for dropping it off too early.
Your mileage may vary on which of these is fair and which isn’t, but some of it does feel, at the very least, mildly unfair. Rental companies sometimes push consumers to pay extra for toll transponders, even though there aren’t tolls in the area. If people forgo a transponder and do hit some tolls, the add-on charges can be much higher than the tolls themselves. There have been lawsuits around the issue, and some rental car companies have reached settlements to repay consumers over hidden fees around tolls. This is all likely disclosed somewhere in rental agreements, but who has time to pore through contracts to see where they may or may not get gouged?
“There’s a lot of confusion at the front desk, and there’s that huge rental document that they’re scrolling through on an iPad and getting you to sign,” said Melanie McGovern, a spokesperson for the Better Business Bureau.
Why are we — or rather, rental cars — like this?
Reporting for this story, I heard all sorts of terrible tales from consumers.
Shoshana Weissman, a Washington, DC, strategist, was charged some $2,000 by Budget after her rental because the company claimed she hadn’t returned the car to the Salt Lake City airport. She sent the company all sorts of proof she had, going as far as to request security footage from the airport. Eventually, Budget sent her an email saying the car had been re-rented in Minneapolis and returned the money, no further explanation offered. “They accused me of stealing a car,” she said. (This is a problem Hertz has made headlines for, too.)
Budget didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.
One man couldn’t get ahold of the company’s tow service when his rental car broke down, so he had to hire an outside service and then fight to be reimbursed even though it was the company’s car that was defective. Another man spent days going from location to location trying to find something comparable to the van he’d reserved, eventually realizing that the agent at the first office had lied about the vehicle’s availability elsewhere. Another customer was in an accident that wasn’t his fault while driving a rental car. He has insurance through his credit card; the rental car company tried to charge him for forgoing its insurance anyway.
I don’t want to malign the car rental industry here, which did go through quite a roller coaster ride in terms of inventories and demand as a result of the pandemic. But it feels fairly clear there is much to be desired in the consumer experience. As to why it’s like this, there’s no one specific answer, though there are some issues in play.
For one thing, there isn’t much competition in the car rental industry. Enterprise, Avis, and Hertz run some 86 percent of the show, McGee said. “There are only three car rental companies in the United States, which is kind of shocking when you think about it. Because Enterprise owns National and Alamo, and Hertz owns Dollar and Thrifty, and Avis owns Budget,” he said. “It’s an oligopoly, really, between the big three. And so that’s problematic in terms of service, in terms of cost.”
McGee said he believes the industry needs more regulation and attention. “Problems with car rental companies just don’t seem to get the sort of media coverage that other problems do with airlines and hotels and whatnot,” he said.
Some efforts to address “junk fees” in rental cars, among other sectors, may be underway as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to broadly take on hidden charges and drip pricing, where companies draw consumers in with one price and then slowly add on extra charges. (I will note here that the rental car websites are generally pretty good about telling you at least the base unavoidable total cost upfront. The travel websites are not so great; the total cost might show up on the search page, but in much smaller print than the lower advertised price they’d like you to notice.) The FTC is currently exploring a rule on junk fees. It also has resources for consumers on navigating the rental car industry.
Part of the issue here is that there’s nobody advocating for the consumer in the web of rental car fees. “There’s nobody at the table telling the airport or state and local government, ‘Don’t tax people for this,’” Bell said. “That also just reflects interest-group-based politics where consumers are underrepresented.”
You could imagine a government that would say it wants to hold down costs for people when they go on vacation and would regulate the fees that are charged by providers, but our system doesn’t really do that. “You can charge extra fees to consumers because you can,” Bell said.
Greg Scott, a spokesman for the American Rental Car Association, said that every rental car company he is aware of “is aware of and in complete compliance” with the National Association of Attorneys General guidelines on disclosure to consumers. “There’s no question that at the counter, you’re asked a series of questions and you have to make a series of decisions,” he said. “We’re in the customer service business. We rent cars, we want you to be happy with it.”
Good luck and Godspeed next time you’re at the rental car counter
The fact of the matter is that when it comes to rental cars, a lot is out of consumers’ hands. There really is no getting around a lot of the fees, whether it be from states or airports or the companies themselves. The whole which-car-will-you-even-get situation is frustrating but inevitable. Prices, while they’re coming down, are still much higher than they were in 2019. But there are some limited measures consumers can take.
Do your homework before you get to the counter so that when you get there you know what you’re going to do. Check if you’ve already got some sort of insurance coverage on the rental so you’re ready to say no on the collision damage waiver. Figure out the closest gas station so you’ll be able to fill up before returning the car instead of paying the prepaid fuel fee, which is almost always more expensive. You can bring your own toll transponder if you have one. If you don’t, look up whether the route you’re going to take has tolls and how hard it is to avoid them. Avoid picking your car up at the airport and choose a non-airport location. Call ahead to make sure your reservation really is there. Note any potential damage to the car and how many miles it has on it before you leave the lot.
If you’re not sure about something at the counter, press the agent on it, even if you feel pressured to move fast. “BBB encourages consumers to read the fine print and take the time to ask questions to understand the full agreement before they sign anything,” McGovern said.
If something does go awry, complain, not only to the company but also to the FTC and CFPB and Better Business Bureau. “I would encourage people to fight back if they’re having problems,” Bell said. McGee noted that people can appeal to their credit card companies, specifically invoking the Fair Credit Billing Act that limits liability for unfair billing practices, and ask them to put a hold on the charge and investigate it. “It often works,” he said.
Comparison shopping can be tricky because the initial price you see often has little to do with the final cost. There are other options, like Turo, which is sort of like Airbnb for cars, said Charles Leocha, president and co-founder of Travelers United, a traveler advocacy group. “There’s different levels of car rentals, and they all have different pricing,” he said. He also recommends looking at budget brands, even if many of them are owned by the big three. “They take care of the car the same way, it’s just they’re maybe a year older.”
The catch in all of this is that it puts a lot of onus on consumers to do what they can to make sure they don’t get tripped up at every turn.
And yet, many of us have found ourselves there before and will likely be there once again: Standing at the rental car counter, ready to get moving, and wondering what on God’s green earth is going on.
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Each month, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
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Castor oil won’t dissolve cysts and tumors. Some creators on TikTok Shop are earning commissions by suggesting otherwise.
For the past few weeks, TikTok creator Busy Belle has been telling her nearly 30,000 followers that castor oil, if applied to the belly button, can fight bacterial infections and dissolve tumors. She’s posted several videos to TikTok Shop, the platform’s new e-commerce tool, promoting Aliver Jamaican Black Castor Oil. One of these videos has more than 1.5 million views and the product she links to lists more than 33,000 total sales. Belle presumably got a cut from more than a few of these.
“The people who are like, ‘Eh, blah blah blah, TikTok people are just lying,’” Belle says in one video. “No, we are not. Why would I be posting about it? I’m a Taurus, I don’t lie, okay?” She said her routine involves “lathering” herself with castor oil once a week, adding, “I’m telling everybody to do it. It’s natural and why not.”
Although castor oil has been sold (with little evidence) as a cure-all for ages, it’s recently become trendy, and its sales are getting a boost from influencers and stores claiming that it can relieve a wide range of ailments. Its popularity spans several social platforms. But on TikTok, creators like Busy Belle can make you feel as though you were fated to discover a new trend that promises to make you feel or look better.
Recommendation algorithms can feel magical when they deliver what you want. And when they work, you might be tempted to interpret the eerie insights as evidence that the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. Get a steady stream of posts and videos about a certain topic and you might start to wonder if your feed is trying to tell you something about yourself. So in the land of wellness influencers on TikTok — and the diaspora of niches that draw from this space — you might feel as though a promised treatment or cure “found” you just when you needed it most.
Social media platforms like TikTok have always been filled with snake oil salesmen and wellness influencers pushing questionable cleanses and protocols. But the US rollout of the TikTok Shop in September has shined a spotlight on how dubious online wellness advice and TikTok’s trend cycles work together to find new audiences, and how they repackage ineffective or dangerous health remedies that have been around for years. Creators shilling parasite cleanses, detox drinks, miracle cures, and promoting oils and tinctures with overbroad health claims have all been pushed onto the For You Pages of TikTok users in recent weeks.
TikTok Shop is an in-app marketplace selling an unfathomable amount of products that have become, or aspire to become, viral must-haves. Its listings are a river of offerings from verified brands, to scammy or counterfeit copies of popular items, to the sort of cheap apparel and household goods you might expect on Wish or Temu. It’s designed to help the company make money off the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt phenomenon, where viral attention drives viewers to buy everything from vegetable choppers to beauty products to portable carpet steamers. Instead of jumping to Amazon or another third-party online store, TikTok Shop incentivizes users to buy products directly in the app.
The Shop also provides a revenue stream for creators, who can make “affiliate” videos promoting products found in the shop. Instead of a paid sponsorship arrangement, affiliates make a commission from sales. Some influencers and companies have been able to use the Shop to monetize trends by targeting TikTok’s young users in order to sell ineffective, dangerous, or unethical products.
The mechanisms for this sort of targeting predate the Shop launch. Earlier this year, some wellness TikTok creators popularized the dangerous and ineffective practice of drinking borax diluted in water. Fitness influencers have also previously promoted “dry scooping” protein powder, which experts say is not a good idea. Merchants have even used TikTok’s popularity with younger viewers to push steroids and steroid-like drugs, according to a recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Researchers found that videos promoting these substances, at times appearing to target teenagers, were viewed more than 500 million times on TikTok, mostly by people younger than 24. Those videos shill products on behalf of third-party merchant sites, and the influencers making the content get a commission for sales. (The report’s data precedes the launch of TikTok Shop in the US.)
“Alternative” health trends do well on TikTok because they provide recommendations that are “cheap, accessible, and explained through a scientific-adjacent explanation that feels familiar,” Rachel Moran, who studies health misinformation as a postdoc scholar at the University of Washington, told Vox earlier this year. But there’s another factor at play here: Personal anecdotes, a powerful marketing tool on TikTok, have long been a core evangelizing tool for dubious wellness and health advice. And even TikTok influencers with apparent credentials and large followings might be giving out compromised advice. A recent Washington Post investigation found that American Beverage, a lobbying group for the soft drink industry, had paid 10 registered dietitians to promote the benefits of artificial sweeteners on social media in response to the World Health Organization’s warning that aspartame might cause cancer.
What’s happening on TikTok Shop is an extension of these trends, for those who can get their products past the platform’s moderation tools. While steroids and borax “detox” mixes aren’t necessarily showing up in the Shop tab, some dubious wellness trends are finding success there by offering products that have some legitimate uses, just perhaps not those being promoted by those getting paid to sell them. Castor oil, for example, has been surging in popularity this summer as a wellness hack, but it’s also an FDA-approved laxative and an ingredient in some skin care products and eye drops. Creators advertising on behalf of castor oil merchants on TikTok Shop, however, are making much broader claims, ones often not backed by any scientific evidence.
Which brings us back to influencers, like Busy Belle, who have been pushing castor oil’s health benefits and encouraging people to buy products that influencers will get a commission for selling. While castor oil may help moisturize your skin and hair, claims about stimulating hair growth or reversing wrinkles are not supported by research. Claims about castor oil’s ability to improve eye health also aren’t backed up by any high-quality research, according to a recent close look at the oil’s new status as a wellness trend in the New York Times. And while it’s unlikely that applying castor oil to your skin will cause any serious issues, it won’t penetrate your body and dissolve tumors and cysts.
By early October, #CastorOil had at least 925 million views on TikTok, according to the platform’s page for the hashtag, and many of the top videos specifically promote applying the oil to your belly button. In one TikTok Shop video advertising Aliver’s castor oil, a beauty creator with 99,000 followers who goes by @mtagbeauty tells viewers to “start slow” with castor oil, claiming that it’s such an effective detox regime that some people might feel a bit sick if starting too strong. Other Shop videos about castor oil claim that it can treat anxiety, boost the immune system, and treat arthritis.
Some sponsored videos use audio from a popular lecture from Barbara O’Neill, an Australian activist who has promoted treating cancer with baking soda and claims that all vaccines are harmful. In it, O’Neill says that if castor oil is applied on or around the belly button, “it will heal any problems in the abdomen,” that the oil will “penetrate” and break up cysts and fibroids in the uterus, and heal constipation and diarrhea by “penetrating” into the colon. In the same lecture, she claims it can cure cancer in the abdomen and brain (none of these things are true). O’Neill is not permitted to provide health services in Australia, after a health care watchdog investigation found in 2019 that she was not accredited, had not earned any health-related degrees or diplomas, and was, under the guise of a naturopathic medical practitioner, providing her patients with false, potentially deadly advice and encouraging them to forgo chemotherapy in favor of her preferred, ineffective, cancer “cures.”
Some of the recent castor oil videos appear to violate TikTok Shop’s policies against selling “unlicensed medicines, herbal or homeopathic products, and those making health claims,” weight loss supplements, and “beauty and personal care products that claim to have medical applications but are not verified by the United States Food and Drug Administration.” But it’s not clear whether these rules apply to the TikTok Shop listing, the TikTokers being paid to advertise these products, or both — even when an item’s popularity seems to be tied directly to a questionable health practice that has become a trend.
This current castor oil trend on TikTok can feel like a multimedia assault on the For You page of anyone who has indicated to the algorithm that they’re interested in the topic or even wellness trends in general. See enough videos advertising Aliver’s castor oil — of which there are many — and you might start getting videos shilling the company’s other beauty offerings, including its aphrodisiacs and skin-lightening products, which are also against Shop rules.
Whenever a new bad trend gets attention — whether it’s drinking borax, pushing ineffective cancer “cures,” or selling vaccine “detox” concoctions — social media platforms eventually swoop in, enforce their rules, and emphasize that the majority of users on the platform aren’t seeing the content in question. The attention fades, the influencers regroup, and the cycle begins again.
TikTok Shop is a new era for the platform, one that makes it even easier for the company to monetize trends in real time instead of being outpaced by the astonishing speed of TikTok fame. But rule enforcement, context, and caution continue to lag behind.
A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!