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The Baileys: From medical doctors to germ theory denial
Charlie Mitchell
Charlie Mitchell
June 28, 2025
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Sam and Mark Bailey in one of their regular question and answer sessions.
Substack
They started as hospital doctors. Now they claim viruses donât exist, chemotherapy is poison, and childhood cancer stems from parental failure. Sam and Mark Bailey have become evangelists of a strange new health movement aiming to sow distrust in conventional medicine. Charlie Mitchell reports.
The 11-year-old boy is dying. A tumour clings to the stem of his brain.
And so a family friend asks two former medical doctors for advice: âIf this was your little fellow, what would you do?â
Itâs a tough question. But Sam and Mark Bailey have some thoughts.
Every fortnight, the Baileys post video answers to questions from their many Substack subscribers. The former doctors are not legally allowed to practise medicine; they can, however, give general health advice, a line that proves to be blurry in practice.
The North Canterbury home of Sam Bailey and Mark Bailey, former medical doctors who have become evangelists of a strange new health movement aiming to sow distrust in conventional medicine.
ALDEN WILLIAMS / The Press
âIf it was my child,â Sam says about the dying boy, âI wouldnât go into the hospital system for treatment. I donât want chemotherapy for my child or any of my family because itâs a poison.â
Mark wonders if the boyâs illness stems not from cancer but from modern life: Medical treatments and vaccines, the toxins of city living. Even the school system, he says, is a kind of poison.
âThe only answer here has to be a dramatic change in lifestyle.â That means moving to the countryside, drinking water high in silica, and shedding weight if necessary.
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Have you heard of the Baileys?
These videos are a window into a subculture defined by scepticism of conventional medicine. The Baileys, a charismatic married couple, have become leading advocates of âterrain theoryâ, a belief that nearly all illnesses stem from oneâs emotional and physical environment rather than germs or genetics.
Their advice appears to follow a similar pattern.
A concerned husband writes to the Baileys about his wife, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after a psychotic break. She felt better after taking psychiatric medication, but he worries the drugs are harmful and could hinder their desire to have children.
âOur recommendation would be trying to get off all psychiatric medications, because none of them are useful and they will also do damage over time,â Mark tells the man. He advises tapering off slowly, under supervision.
Sam recommends instead the practice of âgroundingâ â walking barefoot outdoors to absorb the Earthâs natural electrical charge â as a superior alternative. Faith, too, can play a powerful role, she says.
Another subscriber asks if their elderly father should stop taking medicine for an enlarged prostate. Yes. He should drink silica-rich water. A woman with severe arthritis is told her medications are doing more harm than good. A man takes pills for high blood pressure. Should he go off them? You guessed it. Yes.
Underlying their advice is a belief that sickness is neither random nor inevitable. It does not come from a virus, or a genetic defect; it is a type of moral failure, punishment for failing to live in accordance with natural law. Every human is born with the power to spontaneously heal themselves. The choice to wield that power lies within each of us.
This message is meant to be empowering, but it can sound harsh.
A woman hoping for grandchildren wants help for her daughter, who struggles with severe endometriosis and is pursuing IVF. The Baileys question whether endometriosis truly exists, instead linking infertility to lifestyle matters like stress and weight.
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Sam warns that IVF can ruin marriages. The daughter shouldnât pursue it. âNatureâs trying to tell them something,â Mark adds, âand saying you need to improve in many areas.â
Dr Sam Bailey pictured in 2017 in front of Christchurch Hospital.
Stacy Squires / The Press
The burden of personal responsibility must have a limit. What about the dying 11-year-old boy? Surely he carries no moral culpability?
Of course not. The Baileys quote their spiritual mentor, a mid-20th century naturopath and faith healer named Ulric Williams, who deemed childhood disease âa form of parental neglectâ.
Thus, the responsibility shifts.
â[There must be] acceptance, from the parentsâ perspective, that theyâve done something wrong,â Sam says.
Meet the Baileys
The Baileysâ home in North Canterbury feels dislocated in time. A grand, ivy-clad manor of weathered grey stone, it could easily be mistaken for a 19th-century English estate.
Only the fluttering of the 1835 United Tribes of New Zealand flag â a symbol adopted by sovereign citizen movements to show independence from government authority âbreaks the illusion.
Itâs a fitting residence for a couple whose beliefs seem to hearken back to another era.
Sam and Mark Bailey deny germ theory, the foundational medical understanding that many diseases are caused by microbes transmitted between people.
Instead, they advocate for the long-outdated terrain theory, which holds that illness originates within the body and is shaped entirely by lifestyle and environmental factors.
Virtually every doctor and scientist accepts germ theory as an established fact, repeatedly proven through multiple strands of evidence. They also acknowledge that environmental and lifestyle factors are important to health; the two are not in tension.
Yet the Baileys and their allies believe that germ theory has never been sufficiently proven, and every sickness usually attributed to a virus has an alternative explanation.
HIV does not cause Aids; the cold is not contagious; Covid-19 doesnât exist. A sick person may instead be loaded with toxins like aluminium or glysophate. Perhaps they feel shame from a sexual encounter. Maybe they are simply exhausted, or live with too much fear.
Some have likened this view to claiming the Earth is flat. But germ theory denial tends to thrive on scepticism and distrust, and is thus making a mild resurgence in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which amplified doubts about mainstream science and medicine.
The Baileys now reach over 30,000 subscribers via the online publishing platform Substack. Industry estimates suggest that 5% to 10% might contribute financially, potentially earning them between $134,000 and $267,000 a year.
Additional income streams include approximately $3500 a month from SubscribeStar â another subscription platform â as well as a separate paid-membership website, donations, and the sales of books they claim are popular. Though Samâs YouTube channel boasts 350,000 subscribers, they rarely post there due to frequent violations of medical misinformation policies.
They live a relatively isolated life on their North Canterbury estate, far from the hospitals and clinics where they once practised medicine.
Both Baileys were trained as medical doctors and spent years working in public health. But the pandemic marked a turning point: Mark voluntarily withdrew from the medical register, while Sam was expelled following an extended disciplinary process.
They have since embraced a sovereign citizen movement founded by a convicted tax evader. Despite secular upbringings, they have become devout Christians who live according to âBiblical rules.â They home-school their children, have no wi-fi, and do not see doctors, all lifestyle choices they advocate to their online followers.
Some of that advice can be unsettling. They have suggested people with melanoma, a dangerous skin cancer linked to sun exposure, spend more time in the sun. They have said newborns with sepsis should be treated not with antibiotics but vitamin C. They oppose virtually all health screening, including mammograms and cervical smears. They do not believe there is an immune system, and openly question how anyone survives chemotherapy.
Though such views remain fringe, they can have real-world effects. The BBC reported this week on the death of Paloma Shemirani, daughter of a prominent conspiracy theorist whose anti-medicine stance appears to parallel that of the Baileys. She declined chemotherapy based on her motherâs beliefs, ultimately dying from cancer.
UK woman Paloma Shemirani died in July 2024 after being diagnosed with a form of blood cancer.
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No direct evidence links the Baileysâ advice to adverse outcomes. Yet a thorough review of their videos, writings, and public statements reveals their central role in an emerging alternative health movement, contributing to a growing distrust in conventional medicine.
The Baileys did not respond to requests for comment.
The making of medical heretics
Mark and Sam Bailey met in 2007, during a long shift at Christchurch Hospital where both were working.
The connection was immediate. They started syncing their schedules to maximise time together and, before long, became inseparable. âWe were like, to hell with everybody else. We just do what we want,â Sam would later recall.
It was Mark who first grew disillusioned with the medical system. He was interested in Austrian economics, a school of thought rooted in individual choice and free markets. He started describing himself an anarchist. The public hospital system where he worked started to feel like the enemy.
He imagined a radical experiment: what if a city was split in two, with one half receiving medical care and the other left alone? He thought the untreated group might fare better.
He began quietly resisting the system from within.
âSam used to watch me put obstructions in the way of other clinicians trying to do things to patients that I didnât think were safe,â he said in one podcast interview.
Dr Mark Bailey, pictured in 2009, was a championship athlete.
David Alexander
âIâd do various things ⌠to try and protect the patients, including sometimes just getting them out of the hospital before anyone knew. Iâd just say, you donât want to come in here, because one thing will lead to another and youâll end up being far worse off.â
In one case, when a cancer patient died, Mark says he wrote âchemotherapyâ as the cause of death. A coroner asked for clarification. By 2016, after mounting tensions with colleagues, he left the medical system altogether.
Health New Zealand, which now oversees the hospital, declined to comment on his claims.
Sam, meanwhile, continued practising, even as her world view increasingly aligned with her husbandâs. âShe was just a baby doctor, and I started really putting ideas in her head,â Mark said later. âHe was a very bad influence,â Sam added with a laugh.
By 2019, she was becoming a rising star. She joined the cast of The Check Up, a television show in which doctors demystified health topics for the public. The show was popular enough to earn a second season, and Sam used the exposure to launch a YouTube channel.
At first, her videos were cheerful and practical. She talked about the side effects of common medicines, body image, and the usefulness of supplements. Her University of Otago degree hung visibly in the background. Her audience grew.
Then the pandemic arrived.
Just before New Zealandâs first lockdown in March 2020, Sam posted a video questioning the severity of Covid-19. Initially, her scepticism seemed mild. But it escalated quickly.
Sam later described a trip to the supermarket where the atmosphere felt surreal, as if people were in a trance. She likened it to scenes from The Gulag Archipelago, a harrowing account of Soviet labour camps she had learned about from listening to Dr Jordan Peterson.
âI thought, this has happened. This is here. We are living in a totalitarian state,â she said.
Over the following months, her online presence grew bolder. She released a video comparing Covid-19 to the flu and questioned social distancing policies. Though she still posted on topics like zinc supplements and managing anxiety, her content was increasingly tinged with denialism. At her peak, she was gaining thousands of subscribers daily, many urging her to investigate further.
PCR tests have a very low false positive rate when properly used.
Ricky Wilson / Stuff
In September, with nearly 100,000 followers, she published a video claiming that PCR tests â the gold standard for detecting Covid-19 â were generating false positives, fuelling a fabricated pandemic. She also vowed never to take a Covid-19 vaccine.
The video went viral. Public health experts swiftly debunked her claims, explaining that PCR tests detect unique viral genetic material and have a very low false positive rate when properly used.
But the damage to her professional life was swift. Friends and colleagues in the medical community distanced themselves. Complaints poured into the Medical Council. She risked losing her indemnity insurance, a requirement for practising medicine.
TVNZ, which aired The Check Up, asked her to remove the video. She refused. They fired her. Today, her stint on the show has been nearly erased from the internet.
The fallout was profound.
âEverything fell apart,â she later said. âEverything that I once knew to be true just left. It was gone.â
A promotional image for The Check Up featuring Dr Sam Bailey, left.
TVNZ / Supplied
A new gospel
While Sam was the face of the YouTube channel, Mark was also influential in its content.
The evolution of their beliefs was not Samâs alone. Early in the pandemic, Mark stumbled upon a fringe book titled Virus Mania, which posits that pandemics are inventions of the medical-industrial complex. âI was totally blown away,â he later recalled. He read it aloud to Sam, convinced by its radical thesis: viruses donât cause disease.
The book aligned perfectly with Markâs libertarian world view. Years earlier, he had travelled to Alabama just to meet the founder of a right-wing think tank he admired. If there were no viruses, there could be no pandemics; no need for lockdowns, masks, or public health measures. Health becomes solely an individualâs responsibility â and the state, by extension, becomes irrelevant.
In the midst of public backlash in September 2020, Sam received an interview request from Virus Maniaâs authors. It was like a sign from God. She agreed, and was soon invited to co-author a new edition of the book, published in early 2021.
By then, the Baileys were openly rejecting germ theory.
It opened the door to a much broader world view.
âThat suspicion, or what youâd call a conspiracy mindset, can sort of become a lens through which you look at everything,â says Dr John Kerr, a senior research fellow at the University of Otago.
Kerr studies science communication and misinformation. He says the pandemic accelerated this mindset, particularly around health.
âPeople suddenly found that medicine and health and science were reaching into their lives in a way they hadnât before, both in terms of the virus but also the way that different governments responded,â he says.
âThey became more sceptical about the demands that were being placed on them, and they started looking for information.â
The Baileys did not stop at germ theory. If they had been misled about something as fundamental as viruses, they reasoned, what else might be wrong?
A flag associated with sovereign citizen beliefs flying at the Baileysâ property.
ALDEN WILLIAMS / The Press
It was less a rabbit hole and more a branching network of subterranean tunnels. Sam watched a five-hour video by a former X Factor Australia contestant claiming that Freemasonry is a satanic paedophile cult controlling the world. She later credited the video for making her realise that evil could only be defeated by embracing its opposite. Both Baileys are now devout Christians.
Elsewhere, theyâve invoked the alleged influence of the Rothschild family, dismissed climate change as a âscamâ, and claimed theyâve witnessed chemtrails above their property. Sam has suggested she does not believe in evolution and that 9/11 was a hoax.
Mark once recalled coming across a person who claimed the Titanic never sank.
âTen years ago, weâd probably say, what is he talking about?â he said.
âNow, we go, thatâs probably true.â
Discipline and defiance
Meanwhile, Sam was facing unrelenting action by the New Zealand Medical Council (NZMC).
All working doctors need to be registered with the council and follow its professional standards. This includes supporting vaccination. Those who donât can be referred to the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal (HPDT) and face consequences.
Sam Bailey, with her large and growing platform, was an obvious target. Her public rejection of medical consensus, delivered with the confidence of a trained television presenter, gave her unusual reach.
Though she had let her practising certificate lapse in 2021, she remained on the register and was still subject to the councilâs authority. Mark, too, was still on the register but not practising.
When the investigation began in 2021, Sam chose to resist. She hired a Kingâs Counsel in an attempt to quash the inquiry, but her case was swiftly dismissed.
The episode only deepened the coupleâs distrust â not just of medicine, but now of the law. It was during this period that they encountered a fellow doctor, also under investigation, who introduced them to a set of legal beliefs known as âEquity and Trust.â
Charlie Mitchell ⢠Senior journalist
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Charlie Mitchell is a senior journalist for The Press.
This doctrine is a branch of the common law movement and argues that all authority is illegitimate, drawing from concepts that span the Bible to the Roman Empire.
Its New Zealand variant, which the Baileys adhere to, posits that everyone in the world is a shareholder of a MÄori Trust called the âIngarani MÄori Incorporationâ, and that laws prohibit anyone from interfering with the shareholders of a MÄori trust (ie everyone in the world).
This theory is closely associated with Waihi farmer Ewan Campbell, who in 2016 was convicted on 59 charges of tax evasion. He was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.
âHe is the most selfless human being,â Sam Bailey once said about Campbell, adding that they had become friends.
Christchurch Hospital, where the Baileys once worked.
Peter Meecham / The Press
The Baileys came to believe that virtually all legal matters could be solved by sending âequity noticesâ, which claim that the sender has no legal contract with the other party.
When the NZMC sent a warning to Mark about views he had expressed publicly, he responded with one such notice. The council deemed it legally meaningless, and removed him from the register while continuing disciplinary proceedings against Sam.
The process dragged on. Servers struggled to deliver legal documents to Sam, who refused to participate. She didnât submit evidence or attend the tribunal. Online, she described the NZMC as âessentially like a terrorist organisationâ and mocked the process and its participants. To her followers, it was further proof of a conspiracy to silence dissent.
When the tribunal finally ruled, its language was unequivocal. Sam Bailey, it concluded, had âbrought significant discredit to the professionâ. She was censured, fined $10,000, and ordered to pay $150,000 in legal costs.
Her troubles arenât over. She now faces additional charges of professional misconduct related to videos denying that HIV causes Aids. Once again, she has declined to engage with the process.
The NZMC declined to comment on whether further action will be taken, or if it intends to recover the unpaid fines and legal costs.
Old ideas, new platforms
During her ideological awakening, Sam Bailey discovered the writings of Ulric Williams, the obscure naturopath from Whanganui.
She was captivated by his story. Williams began as a conventional doctor in the early 20th century before undergoing a spiritual transformation. He converted to Christianity, renounced germ theory, and became a faith healer.
Though Williams attracted loyal followers, most of the medical establishment dismissed him as a crank. He was expelled from the British Medical Association and narrowly avoided deregistration by the NZMC following the death of a patient.
During the polio epidemics of the 1930s and 40s, Williams opposed vaccination and blamed outbreaks on malnutrition. Public health officials were alarmed. One doctor warned his ideas were a âpotential dangerâ and linked them to low vaccine uptake in the region.
For Sam Bailey, the parallels were striking: A conventionally trained New Zealand doctor who found religion, who went on to be hounded by the establishment for rejecting mainstream medicine.
The Baileys republished Williamsâ writings as a book. It reads like a collage of unintelligible ranting, conspiracy theories, and Bible quotes interspersed with recipes. âAlmost all disease begins in the soul,â Williams wrote. âThe greater proportion of physical disharmony is but an out-picturing of discord far deeper.â
Ulric Williams, right, was a prominent anti-vaccine proponent.
Evening Post
The Baileysâ embrace of his ideas appears to underscore their broader project: Reviving old-fashioned and widely discredited views, and skilfully disseminating them through a new medium.
To those who have followed the evolution of germ theory over more than a century, defending it is like being asked to prove the sky is blue. It is so foundational, so deeply embedded in layers of evidence, that rebutting denial requires retracing well-worn steps.
One place to start is with how viruses are identified.
When an unknown illness emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, fluid from a patientâs lungs was introduced into living cells in a laboratory. The cells released viral particles that were imaged and sequenced â what scientists confirmed to be a new virus.
The same virus has since been isolated and photographed thousands of times around the world. Its genome is publicly available.
We know it spreads through human contact because of epidemiological studies showing clusters of cases across disparate regions. In lab experiments, genetically modified mice exposed to the virus developed pneumonia. In a human challenge trial in the UK, healthy adults were deliberately exposed to the virus â half became sick; none in the control group did.
Similar evidence underpins our understanding of nearly all infectious diseases. Viruses can be seen under electron microscopes. Outbreaks can be traced. Symptoms repeat with mathematical regularity. Most people have experienced germ theory first-hand: a toddler returns from daycare with a snotty nose and, by weekâs end, the whole household is sniffling.
The Baileys argue that this body of evidence falls short of 19th-century standards âspecifically, Kochâs postulates, criteria originally developed to prove a specific bacterium causes a specific disease. They say that because viruses are cultured in cells and not isolated in the same way as bacteria, their existence has never been definitively proven.
Scientists point out that Kochâs postulates were written long before viruses were discovered, and that viruses need host cells to replicate, requiring different methods of proof. Those methods â sequencing, imaging, culturing, and epidemiology â have stood up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.
To infectious disease physicians like Dr Tim Blackmore, the Baileysâ position is baffling.
âI had someone test positive in the lab for meningococcal disease today,â he says. âTheir life will be saved because of the discovery and use of antibiotics.â
Before antibiotics, which are used to treat bacterial infections, people died young. Women perished in childbirth. Now, people routinely live into their 80s and 90s.
Sam Bailey has fronted videos in which she denies that the HIV virus causes Aids.
123rf
Blackmore gave evidence at Sam Baileyâs most recent disciplinary hearing, which involved the videos denying that the HIV virus causes Aids â an issue he knows intimately.
It was discovered and described when he was a medical student. He remembers his first patient, a man who had been infected by his wife, who contracted it from a blood transfusion during surgery. It was before there were effective treatments; both died soon afterwards.
Now, thanks to antiretroviral medicines, the disease is no longer a death sentence.
âI look after people with HIV now who are well into their 80s, and some of them have had HIV since the 1990s or before,â Blackmore says.
âWe now have treatment that is far more effective and enables people to live essentially normal lives.â
So if Aids is not caused by a virus, what is responsible? The Baileys have offered an alternative explanation: It comes down to lifestyle choices, particularly among gay men using drugs like âpoppersâ. Like much of their world view, it assigns moral responsibility to illness.
âItâs completely wrong, and itâs quite offensive,â Blackmore says. âWhatâs implied by the Bailey argument is that people were getting what they deserved, and if only they lived a better life they wouldn't get sick.â
The story they tell
In a recent podcast interview, Sam Bailey reflected on what she sees as the heart of her journey.
Over the past five years, she said, people have lived under the shadow of fear â fear of viruses, of contamination, of each other. Terrain theory allows you to release that fear.
âKnowing never to be scared of germs ... thatâs the biggest win for me,â she said. âIt honestly brings tears to my eyes when people write to me and say, youâve helped me lift this veil of fear.â
What the Baileys offer, says Dr John Kerr of the University of Otago, is a narrative that restores agency. In the Baileysâ world, illness isnât an arbitrary misfortune inflicted by unseen forces. Itâs a consequence â and therefore, something that can be prevented or reversed through the right choices.
âHumans, we donât like uncertainty,â he says. âSaying itâs actually all about things that you are in control of is very appealing. I can see why some people would be drawn to that.â
What makes them persuasive to some is the authority they borrow from their former medical credentials. They adopt the language and posture of science â citing studies, critiquing methodologies, sprinkling jargon throughout their videos, even while their conclusions often rest on a wholesale rejection of the scientific method.
âThe idea that theyâre doctors, and that theyâve spent time in those circles, probably adds to their credibility,â Kerr says. âItâs symbolic of having spent time learning about and understanding these thingsâ.
Still, germ theory denial remains a hard sell, even within fringe health movements. But the Baileys press on.
Recently, a subscriber asked for guidance. Their toddler, unvaccinated, had developed a serious case of hand, foot and mouth disease. Other children at the daycare were sick too, as was his brother. How, they wondered, could this not be contagious?
Sam attributed the sickness to stress. They talk about their own toddler, who they say has not been out of their care for more than two minutes in his life. He will never go to school. His health is perfect. Theyâve got it all under control.
âYou have to be honest with yourself,â Sam tells the subscriber. âIf you know in your heart that itâs not a virus, then whatâs going on?
âItâs something that you can fix, which is actually more exciting. Itâs not this external thing thatâs happening to you. You can go, actually, Iâm going to make this better.â
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