2019

Now in its fourth year, the Health Influencer 50 list has featured people from all over the healthcare spectrum. This year, the wide range of talent and skills represented on the list even expanded to Olympic champions, a movie star and former Navy SEALs. To capture where the list is headed, MM&M broke down the past four years to see which sector the most influencers come from. While the agency, pharma and comms influencers are on the decline, government, social media and celebrity influencers are making their voices heard.

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Before you meet our Top 50 Health Influencers, meet the top five health negative influencers, who sometimes seem to exist in an alternate reality — one in which vaccines are harmful and climate change isn’t an actual thing.

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1. Jenny McCarthy and Jessica Biel

They’re certainly not alone among celebrity non-professionals questioning the safety and efficacy of vaccines (spoiler: Vaccines are safe and efficacious). That said, McCarthy has long ranked among the loudest and most persistent anti-vax voices in the debate.

Biel, for her part, walked back her testimony before California lawmakers — she spoke against a measure, since signed into law, giving the state power to reject certain vaccination exemptions — after she was lumped into the anti-vax camp. Biel’s “it’s about parental choice, not the vaccines themselves” response remains the mother of all vaccine-related straw man arguments.

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2. Tom Cruise

Cruise’s great strength as an actor lies in his ability to convey empathy, whether playing a super-spy in the Mission: Impossible franchise or a dissembling misogynist in Magnolia.

And yet he has opined multiple times over the years that psychiatry is a “quack” profession, as opposed to one proven to help individuals navigate mental-health challenges. Whether or not this opinion is fueled by Cruise’s religious beliefs, and notwithstanding attempts to debunk it by some of the leading professional associations, it’s an unfortunate one for someone with such broad influence to air publicly.

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3. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)

If you believe that climate change is or ultimately will be a health issue — and if you don’t, we’ve got some seaside property in Miami to sell you — then the senior Oklahoma senator should rank high on your pay-no-mind list. We tend to focus on Inhofe’s “if it’s cold outside, how could there be global warming?!” stunts, like bringing a snowball onto the Senate floor. But his stubborn resistance to even considering the evidence at hand, available from the CDC and the WHO, makes him perhaps the top climate-change denier — and thus the top denier of health risks that will stem from the inevitable warming — in the upper ranks of government. And yes, we’re aware of how much competition he has for that title nowadays.

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4. K.C. Crosthwaite (Juul)

Juul’s recently appointed CEO doesn’t tweet and hasn’t publicly addressed the public health crisis that, fairly or not, his new employer is perceived to have played a major part in creating. But it’s hard to be optimistic about the lifelong tobacco executive’s ability to manage the crisis, given that his first statement as Juul CEO was packed with bromides about “inviting an open dialogue” and “striv[ing] to work with regulators, policymakers and other stakeholders.”

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By: Steve Madden, Editor-in-Chief, MM&M

Putting a swimmer on the cover of a magazine about health influencers might raise a few eyebrows, I’ll admit. I mean, if you wanted to improve your times in the 200-meter butterfly, you wouldn’t call a shrink, would you? I guess it depends on who the shrink is, and who the flier is, too. But that’s what the advent of the influencer has wrought.

Used properly, influencers can be extremely powerful tools to help raise awareness — of brands, issues, causes. Witness Michael Phelps’ work to raise awareness about the value of tending to your mental health. The Olympic star had the courage to stand up and admit he had emotional problems, and that he had sought therapy to help overcome them. That he did so on behalf of Talkspace, an app that connects users to licensed therapists, was beside the point.

Phelps wasn’t promoting himself as the therapist; he was saying that it was OK to seek help. By doing so, he has helped remove the stigma from seeking help for emotional issues. Having someone of Phelps’ achievements stand up for a cause drew massive amounts of attention to the issue. And for that work, and his courage, we put Phelps at the top of our list of the most influential people in health marketing.

I wish that all celebrities used the platform their fame provides them to such admirable ends. I don’t need to name names here, but there are plenty of well-known people who have decided to use their fame — some of it achieved through naked ambition — to promote bogus causes such as anti-vaccination or the completely unfounded powers of, say, a juice cleanse.

Apart from the utter lack of valid, scientific proof, these types of influencers often pass themselves off as experts in the field. When that’s combined with the nature of celebrity — they’re famous, so they must be smart, right? — influencers can really mess things up.

I’m not immune to influencers, but I take them for what they are. Two of my favorites on this list are David Goggins and Jocko Willink. Goggins’ Instagram feed often shows him in the middle of a 50-mile run. I get tired driving 50 miles, so I know I’m not going to Be Like David. But I can appreciate his message: have a goal, a plan for how to achieve it and go after it, no matter what you’re trying to do. I need to hear that once in a while. We all do. Which is why Goggins makes the list.

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By: Steve Barrett, VP, editorial director, PRWeek

PRWeek’s fourth annual health issue shines a light on an increasingly vibrant, disruptive and influential sector that contains some of the most complex, meaningful and compelling narratives in the communications space.

From drug pricing to opioid abuse to celebrity influencers to citizen activism to gun crime, health is the place where hot-button issues are being debated. And, in the agency and consultancy sectors, some of the highest rates of growth and most meaningful pockets of innovation revolve around the health ecosphere.

All these elements are reflected in our Health Influencer 50 list, which we have once again produced with our sister brand MM&M — you can also view this online at www.HealthInfluencer50.com.

In addition, you can hear in-depth and directly from two of our 2019 influencers: DTC healthcare startup Hims & Hers’ founder and CEO Andrew Dudum and pharma behemoth GlaxoSmithKline’s CMO Amardeep Kahlon. There is also a profile of nonprofit health system Kaiser Permanente’s SVP and CCO Kathryn Beiser.

The Affordable Care Act and coverage expansion, Medicare for All, drug pricing, cannabis and abortion are set to be big voting determinants in the 2020 election and many of our Health Influencers will play a key role in directing these discussions over the coming 12 months.

Hopefully some of them will also elevate other important topics into the debate, such as Michael Phelps on mental health, Ethan Lindenberger on vaccines and Serena Williams on maternal healthcare.

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