Kim Rogers, a former health care worker from Arkansas, first started to develop an interest in parasites about five years ago, when she decided that she had them. After experiencing symptoms like brain fog and fatigue, she says she “saw” liver flukes, a type of worm that can infect the liver, gallbladder, and bile duct, after doing a “parasite cleanse.” But Rogers didn’t become a self-described “Worm Queen” until her video telling the story went viral on TikTok in July 2021.
Now, Rogers believes nearly all of our maladies—from self-esteem to sadness—are caused by parasites. “They can hijack our nervous system, and they can hijack our lymphatic system, which we need in order for us to feel good about ourselves,” she told Turning Point USA during a recent podcast interview. “They can also hijack our small intestines which is where that feeling of worthiness comes from, so they can get into our bodies and really do some damage.”
After going viral, she started selling her own “detox” tincture, called the RogersHood ParaFy. Containing grain alcohol, raw honey, wormwood, and black walnut, it’s available on her website for $35 a vial. Happy customers post pictures of their used toilet bowls alongside their five-star reviews.
In 2023, Vice wrote about a slew of viral videos showing toilet bowls full of what looked to be worms sparking renewed anxiety about parasites; Rogers was one part of the larger TikTok trend that took off in the postpandemic years. Now her account boasts about 582,000 followers. And the Make America Healthy Again crowd is taking notice. In March, Diana Atieh, a Texas-based influencer who posts as @diaryofacrunchymom, told the Daily Mail that she’s been doing the ParaFy cleanse as she embraces the MAHA lifestyle’s approach to “addressing the root cause of illness.” On the show Camp Chaos, an interview with Rogers about parasites aired in between episodes about the inauguration and the story of one host’s recent trip to the emergency room with her daughter.
This latest iteration of the parasite obsession has roots in older ideas about health and purifying the body, according to historian Surekha Davies, and there is a connection between right-wing claims about immigration and the recent enthusiasm for parasites. “The word parasite conjures up that sense of something that takes without giving back and may well weaken the body,” Davies tells Vanity Fair. “If you are fighting an illness, to talk about the fights being between you and the parasite—‘parasite’ sounds so much more melodramatic than just saying ‘germs.’”
In her new book, Humans: A Monstrous History, Davies writes that we tend to dehumanize people by comparing them to infections, even as our stories give “monsters” otherworldly powers to weaken or destroy. “Immigrants are often being framed as these parasites, and it’s a process of monster making,” she says. “It pushes them out of the category of the human and not even simply into the category of animals, the worst of the animals.”
It’s worth noting that modern medicine and hygiene have eliminated many parasitic infections that were once common in the United States. According to the CDC, the disease burden of parasites is much higher in developing countries, and in the US, people are most likely to encounter intestinal parasites from travel abroad and contact with animals. Once the organism has been identified in a laboratory, it can be treated with an array of FDA-approved antiparasitics.
Still, medical experts are practically unanimous in recommending against regular “cleansing” as a response to parasites. The parasite cleanses on offer claim ingredients similar to herbal remedies for intestinal ailments that date back centuries, but they have been widely replaced by pharmaceuticals. In the 1990s, naturopathic doctors brought renewed attention to the possibility of parasitic infections among Americans and offered “traditional” treatments. It was a common topic in the types of books you might have flipped through at a hippie health food store. One retired infectious disease doctor tells Vanity Fair that people who, despite a lack of evidence, believe they have parasitic infections will look for parasitologists and “hound them incessantly.”
The parasite craze has died down in mainstream spaces after debunking efforts in publications like Rolling Stone and USA Today. The right-wing parasite craze may be harder to tamp down because it is part of a more totalizing ideology about purity. The toilet bowl photos may have been inevitable once the antiparasitic drug ivermectin became a conservative cure-all during the pandemic, despite a lack of evidence indicating it as a treatment for COVID-19.
