Pete Evans
Banned for COVID Misinformation
Pete Evans was one of Australia's most recognizable celebrity chefs, a longtime judge on the hit television show My Kitchen Rules, and a bestselling cookbook author. That mainstream credibility made his descent into health misinformation and conspiracy theories particularly damaging. Evans used the trust he had built as a household name to promote paleo diet pseudoscience, anti-vaccine rhetoric, and eventually full-blown conspiracy theories that earned him permanent bans from every major social media platform.
The warning signs appeared well before the pandemic. In 2015, Evans published a paleo cookbook for babies that included a bone broth formula recipe which health experts warned could kill an infant due to dangerously high vitamin A levels. The publisher added a disclaimer, but the incident revealed Evans' willingness to dispense potentially lethal dietary advice based on ideology rather than evidence. His commitment to the paleo lifestyle had already begun to shade into medical claims that went far beyond what any chef should be offering.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated Evans' radicalization. He promoted a fifteen-thousand-dollar BioCharger device and suggested it could address the coronavirus. He shared anti-vaccine content relentlessly. He posted an image featuring neo-Nazi symbolism. The escalation was rapid and shocking to those who remembered him as a charming television personality. Facebook and Instagram permanently banned him. Pan Macmillan dropped him as an author. Major Australian retailers pulled his products from shelves. His career in mainstream media was effectively over.
Evans' trajectory illustrates a recurring pattern in the influencer economy: a public figure with legitimate credentials in one domain uses that credibility to promote increasingly extreme and dangerous ideas in another. His 1.5 million social media followers trusted him because they knew him from their television screens, and he repaid that trust by steering them toward conspiracy theories and health advice that put vulnerable people at risk.