Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

The notoriously ignorant right-winger and anti-vaxxer Candance Owens went from denying the validity of vaccines to encouraging her 4.1 million followers on Instagram to follow her regimen of using colloidal silver as a daily supplement.

“Yes, colloidal silver!” Owens says enthusiastically in her latest Instagram video. “I take colloidal silver every single day, I love colloidal silver. That is a great one. That is another one that people probably know nothing about.”

And just in case you’re interested in staving off illness with colloidal silver, the Mayo Clinic clearly says the stuff isn’t safe or effective for anything basically. “Silver has no known purpose in the body. It's not an essential mineral.”

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center reports side effects of using colloidal silver that include: seizures, skin burns, near renal failure, hospitalization, neuropathy, acute myeloid leukemia, and death.

The most infamous side effect from using colloidal silver is argyria, a condition that can permanently turn the skin of the user a bluish-gray.

Owens began her rant against vaccines, HPV, and tetanus after being called out by Meghan McCain for being “owned by Trump” after former President Donald Trump told Owens during an interview that he believed in the COVID-19 vaccine, even calling results “very good.”

Owens explained to her followers that the former president’s opinions should be dismissed as just a product of his generation, which didn’t have TV or the internet to do independent research.

The irony here is great because colloidal silver was the cure-all used before the advent of antibiotics in 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.

We’d have thought that Stan Jones, a former libertarian candidate for Senate in Montana whose face turned blue after he repeatedly used colloidal silver in 1999, would be enough of a deterrent, but I guess Owens didn’t do that research. Jones believed he should take the silver to ward off infection as a precaution against shortages of antibiotics from Y2K and the impending anarchy.

Owens is in the fatuous company of Info Wars chief Alex Jones. TheDaily Beast reports that in 2020, Jones got a warning from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) telling him to stop promoting colloidal silver products on his website as a cure for COVID-19.

Jones was selling products such as “Superblue Silver Immune Gargle,” “Super Silver Whitening Toothpaste,” “Super Silver Wound Dressing Gel,” and “Superblue Fluoride-Free Toothpaste.”

Disgraced TV televangelist Jim Bakker also peddled colloidal silver as a cure for COVID-19 until the Missouri Attorney General's Office sued him.

According to The Washington Post, Bakker advertised colloidal silver products for as much as $125.

Bakker invited “naturopathic doctor” Sherril Sellman on to his show to discuss the benefits of the products in fighting the coronavirus.

Sellman admitted that the products hadn’t been tested on COVID-19, but said it had been tested on other strains of the coronavirus and had been able to eliminate it within 12 hours. “Totally eliminate it, kills it. Deactivates it,” she said, adding that the government has “proven” that the product “has the ability to kill every pathogen it has ever been tested on, including SARS and HIV.”

Willliam LeGate posted on Twitter that Owens gave specific instructions to a commenter on Instagram, telling the fan that she takes a “teaspoon a day,” and “more when I’m sick.”

Article reprinted with permission from Daily Kos