155: We Want Them Infected (w/Jonathan Howard, M.D.)
What "really" happened during the pandemic? Conspiracists have decided to take a victory lap. They were right, you see? The vaccines failed, and besides, they were super dangerous. COVID obviously came out of a lab. Masks were useless, and the lock-downs were completely unnecessary forms of totalitarian oppression. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, who were censored on social media, were right all along.
Not so fast.
Our guest today is Dr. Jonathan Howard, who not only did grueling service at Bellevue Hospital in NYC (as the first wave raged, and corpses were stacked in meat trucks) but has put in the time to create a comprehensive document of how contrarian doctors shaped cultural perceptions during the pandemic. He takes the title of his new book, We Want Them Infected, from a quote found in a series of emails from July 2020.
Trump-appointed science-advisor to the HHS, Paul Alexander, urged officials there and at the FDA, and the CDC, to pursue a herd immunity strategy for COVID-19. "There is no other way," he wrote. "We need to establish herd, and it only comes about when we allow non-high-risk groups to expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD. Infants, kids, teens, young people, middle-aged with no conditions have zero to little risk. So we use them to develop herd. We want them infected."
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Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can follow us on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod.
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My last bonus was called the Dalai Lama Spectacle and it consists of about a month's work reviewing a cursed internet disaster from multiple angles.
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from many different angles with consideration and sensitivity.
Conspiratuality 155.
We want them infected.
We want them infected with Jonathan Howard, MD.
What really happened during the pandemic?
Conspiracists have this year decided to go ahead and take a victory lap.
You see, they were right all along.
The vaccines failed, and besides, they were super dangerous.
COVID obviously came out of a lab, masks were useless, and the lockdowns were completely unnecessary forms of totalitarian oppression.
The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, who were censored unfairly on social media, were right all along.
Not so fast.
Our guest today is Dr. Jonathan Howard, who not only did grueling service at Bellevue Hospital in New York City as the first wave raged and the bodies were having to be stacked in meat trucks outside, but he also put in the time to create a comprehensive document of how contrarian doctors shaped cultural perceptions and beliefs during the pandemic.
He takes the title of his book, We Want Them Infected, from a quote found in a series of emails from July of 2020.
Trump-appointed science advisor to the HHS, Paul Alexander, urged officials there and at the FDA and at the CDC to pursue a herd immunity strategy for COVID-19.
There is no other way, he wrote.
We need to establish herd.
And it only comes about when we allow non-high-risk groups to expose themselves to the virus.
Period.
Infants, kids, teens, young people, middle-aged with no conditions, etc.
have zero to little risk.
So we use them to develop herd.
We want them infected.
♪ ♪
So, Julian, we just recorded a couple of bonus episodes that will drop over the next few weeks,
in which we grappled with what we're now calling the institutional stage of conspirituality,
where we have...
Bobby Kennedy now beating out Mother Marianne Williamson in the Democratic primary polls, running on the strength of his spiritualized anti-vax networking, while also hiring Charles Eisenstein as his director of messaging.
So, it is becoming clear that conspirituality is not a blip or an aberration, but it's really baked itself into the discourse and has been normalized in the landscape.
Now, one of the most haunting lines from Dr. Howard, he said it several times in your interview, was that Kelly Brogan won the pandemic.
And he's saying that as someone who knew her personally long before, like, the anti-vax world went mainstream, long before she totally disappeared up her own asshole.
But it made me think, like, how did she win?
And I mean, some of our work is about tracking that network and its techniques, the algorithmic charisma, the disaster spirituality, the cult dynamics.
There's all these things that we're very familiar with.
But then you're talking to him, and we find out something that I think we suspected, but I certainly didn't have real clarity on.
I don't know if you did.
I think you were following a lot of these doctors more than I was.
And that is that the door to all of the broken brigade was kind of held open by legitimate medical pundits, many of them from elite institutions who all took minimizing rising positions towards COVID from the outset, and then
they doubled down when they turned out to be wrong.
So for instance, he talks about how John Ioannidis from Stanford wildly underestimated the death
rate and then he went and accused opponents of conspiring against him when the deaths
didn't peak out at, what was it?
He thought it was going to be like 40,000 nationwide?
Yeah, and then that's the only explanation for why he was wrong is that they're fudging
the data to conspire against him.
Yeah, right.
Bye.
Alright, so I'm listening to you guys talk, I'm wondering, also I hear you ask the question several times, like, what happened to these guys?
Like, why did Jay Bhattacharya lose his mind?
Like, how do Monica Gandhi and ZDogg wind up laughing at people For being scared of COVID and continuing to wear masks and wondering if they should continue social distancing.
Like, where did their standard of care go?
Like, what happened?
And I heard, and listeners, you're going to hear, they're going to reach into many possible, like, explanatory streams.
They're all, like, super crucial.
Audience capture.
Julian, you were talking about the flattery of being interviewed by Fox.
Yeah.
You know, that the spotlights will come into your house and your study and suddenly, like, you're on stage.
Yeah.
Your contrarian opinion is very important.
It's much more important than anything else that you've ever done because you're on TV now.
Then there's political payoffs.
If we think of, you know, Joseph Lopato, who becomes Florida Surgeon General by being a crank, who is like totally willing to openly fake evidence to pretend that vaccines are deadly.
And all of these answers appeal to like basic human corruptions, and I think they're all totally on point.
But here's what I want to suggest, and maybe this is its own kind of episode, maybe it's its own extra interview with Beatrice Adler Bolton.
I think that Brogan probably wouldn't have won except in a neoliberal landscape that already individualizes health care at the highest level, where Paul Alexander, as you quoted, basically does the medical version of exposure therapy, or like, I'm going to teach this toddler to swim by chucking them into the deep end and hoping for the best.
Some will drown.
Some will drown.
But the others will be really good swimmers.
Yes.
I think we just have to, like, be honest that aside from the wild claims, aside from 5G, terrain theory, whatever, what Brogan ultimately wanted was that the society in general was also willing to tolerate,
which is a choose your own adventure pandemic, in which the rich and the able-bodied
were gonna be able to be better off and that that would confirm our meritocracy, right?
And in the end, that's exactly what she got.
While she was able to bitch about the elites in medicine who were oppressing her,
when the truth was that COVID mitigations were only spottily applied.
Every state had their own sort of system, totally different between red states and blue states, and there was never really much of an intention to do a lot more than facilitate back-to-work schemes, when it really comes down to it.
And so, like, we wrote this whole chapter about how the yoga and wellness worlds were sitting ducks for fascist creep during the pandemic because of 50 years of explicit depoliticization.
And the macrocosm of this argument, I believe, is that a healthcare system, which is pilled on neoliberal responsibilism, like right up to the very top, It's just not going to be equipped to resist the medical chaos of Brogan, Sayerji, and Del Bigtree.
So, like, on the surface, I know you're adamant about making distinctions between these people, Julian.
I often lump really big pieces of the pie together.
So I'll say that, yes, there are differences.
Like, on the surface, the Brogan Brigade is saying batshit things like terrain theory is true, COVID is caused by Yeah, I mean, that's that's important to to actually underline, right, is that is that one of the disinformation dozen, Dr. Rashid Batar, who's meaning that he was a huge spreader of anti-vax messaging during COVID, just died.
He died, I think, at 57.
And so now Sayerji posted saying what exactly?
Sayerji said that Buttar told him that he believed that he was ill with COVID-type symptoms because of vaccine shedding.
But then there's another story circulating on Telegram and in the disinformation sphere that He told other people that he believed that he had been poisoned after an appearance on CNN.
So, you know, of course, there's the stories are going to just write themselves.
Yeah.
So that's that world.
And Alexander and Ioannidis aren't saying those things.
They're not going that far.
Bhattacharya is not going to talk about vaccine shedding.
But they also don't really have a solid framework or perhaps the values or the willpower for refuting what the batshit does in practical terms, which is to foster a health paradigm In which individuals just have to be responsible for themselves, and in which we should just all roll the dice and partake of the healthcare that we can afford, as Beatriz Adler-Bolton of Death Panel puts it.
Yeah, I think there is, as you were pointing out, I'm interested in the relationships between all of these different groups, and also in the distinctions between them.
I think you do have a spectrum, and When I hear Jonathan Howard say Kelly Brogan won, what I hear him saying is that the contrarian voices that came from an obviously like easy to dismiss
Already up to their armpits in pseudoscience, you know, set of influencers who were who were very conspiratorial, who may have been saying things like it's caused by 5G, or, you know, the vaccines are going to contain microchips, or that this is all part of some cabal that is trying to control us, that those messages got mainstreamed to such an extent that it became almost predictable that the waters we were swimming in, in terms of the mediasphere, and especially the alternative mediasphere, in during the pandemic, could have now people like these Ivy League educated, very, very well established scientists
Saying things that if not completely the same as the Kelly Brogan's and the Christian Northrop's of the world, we're definitely adjacent to that.
And we're definitely perpetuating now what you're talking about as the overlap, which is this libertarian and inhumane message that is essentially saying Every person for themselves.
Choose your own adventure.
We're not going to live in fear.
And you know, you're how seriously you're taking quarantine measures and getting vaccinated, maybe as a function of, you know, different variables that have to do with your age and your your income and how at risk you perceive yourself to be and how healthy you are and how fat you are.
And all of those sorts of That hierarchy, essentially.
Yeah, the calculus of cruelty, right?
Like, how can we add up all of the things that we can offload onto the individual in terms of their sins, shortcomings, and responsibilities so that we can absolve ourselves and move on, really?
Yeah, and if the conspiritualists that we've covered in such depth are sort of Unconscious, because of their privileged depoliticization and maybe lack of sort of intellectual background, if they're unconscious of how they're really speaking out of a libertarian or a neoliberal kind of political philosophy, the mainstream
Ivy League educated doctors who ended up saying somewhat similar things or promoting a similar kind of approach to how we should handle the pandemic as it wore on, they actually are very conscious about where they're coming from because most of them are actually networked in terms of these libertarian think tanks that had a very strong impetus towards, let's get the pandemic over as soon as possible so we can get back to work so that we can get the economy up and running.
And there's a valuing of that actually over any sense of the well-being and the health of the public.
Dr Jonathan Howard, welcome to Conspiratuality.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a real pleasure to be here.
I wanted to have you on today because you have a new book and it's titled We Want Them Infected, How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace the Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID.
Now, you've really followed the story from inside the medical establishment while we on this podcast have paid more attention to wellness influencers and pseudoscience peddlers.
Part of why I find this book and what we're going to talk about today so compelling and important Is because this year, what I'm seeing is rampant attempts to rewrite history on the part of the contrarians and conspiracists who have a lot of influence, especially on social media.
This, of course, is incredibly dishonest and self-serving, but it's also really dangerous in terms of future pandemics.
And I also see it as a really grotesque dishonoring of the dead.
I've experienced this as a chorus since January within the sort of heterodox new media landscape, also on right-wing shows and on the podcast and YouTube channels that platform Conspiracy Theorists.
And the chorus amounts to the following set of talking points.
COVID wasn't actually a big deal for healthy people.
Masks actually didn't work.
The tests were useless.
The vaccines failed and were much more dangerous than we were told.
Public health officials knew all of this, but lied to us due to ulterior motives and corrupting incentives.
The lockdowns were an overreaction and caused unwarranted damage to the economy and to children.
The lab leak actually looks like the most likely explanation now, and they used to call that a conspiracy theory.
Jay Bhattacharya and his Great Barrington Declaration co-authors were right.
It's turned out that the evidence supports their stance, and if we'd only followed a herd immunity strategy like Sweden did, the pandemic would have been over in three months or something.
Lastly, The Twitter files show that government and the mainstream media were colluding with big tech to censor contrarian voices and perpetuate a mainstream narrative, a COVID orthodoxy, that claimed to follow the science, but was in fact guided by the lies and mistakes of people like Anthony Fauci, who should be jailed for his crimes.
I hear some combination of these claims tossed around all the time, quite glibly, as if they are now established truths.
And this is not just by conspiracy nuts.
So my sense, and thank you for sitting through that long intro, my sense is that your extraordinary and very comprehensive book can help us sketch out an honest account of what really happened and how public perceptions got so skewed.
So All of that as a setup, let's start with who you are, what your professional experience was prior to and during the initial stages of the pandemic.
Yeah, so I have worked at NYU and Bellevue Hospital here in New York City for about the past 20 years.
And I really think I have two kind of qualifications that allowed me to write this book.
And the first of these is that I worked throughout Bellevue Hospital throughout the pandemic here at Bellevue Hospital.
And, you know, that doesn't mean that I'm going to be right About what I had to say didn't allow me to predict the future of the pandemic better than anyone else, but I saw it with my own eyes.
I saw what this virus could do.
I saw what it could do occasionally to young, healthy people, and I saw how things could spin out of control.
My experience wasn't unique, you know, tens of thousands of healthcare workers here in New York City saw the same thing and we heard the same thing.
The sirens wailing throughout the city at all times of night, the giant refrigerated trucks behind our hospitals that were needed to store the dead bodies.
and then inside the hospital, just the overhead airway pager,
airway team to this room, airway team to this room.
This is when a patient is crashing.
And normally you hear that maybe once a day in the hospital, maybe zero times.
It was every 10 minutes during the peak of COVID.
So I think that's qualification number one.
And the second qualification is I've had a decades long interest in the anti-vaccine movement
when one of the doctors who I've trained with and someone who you guys have discussed extensively,
Dr. Kelly Brogan morphed into one of the country's most famous anti-vaccine doctors.
And I knew her pretty well.
You're not going to get any gossip from me.
We had a good relationship.
You know, we were friendly.
She's nice.
I'm nice.
And it wasn't until after she graduated and really She didn't have to actually treat any real patients in front of her anymore.
She could pick and choose which patients she treated.
She really began her descent into pseudoscience and she began posting all of this anti-vaccine content and she's not stupid.
She went to MIT.
She went to Cornell.
She trained with me here at NYU.
And I became fascinated as to how smart people could believe crazy things like this.
And a lot of anti-vaccine arguments, the very first time that you encounter them, they're hard to refute.
They are very sort of superficially plausible.
You may not be aware that the person you're interacting with is just not telling the truth, just spreading fake numbers.
And I devoted the past decade to learning everything I could about the anti-vaccine movement and how to refute their myths.
And in 2018, I wrote a book chapter about this with law professor Dori Rees in a book called Pseudoscience.
And so I was really shocked during the pandemic when pro-virus ideas that obvious quacks like Kelly Brogan were spewing about measles and HPV Became kind of mainstream and you started hearing them from the mouths of, you know, prominent doctors from Stanford, Harvard, UCSF, Johns Hopkins, really top medical schools.
And it was a really shocking thing to see.
This is really the thing that I think is so unique about your book.
You know, we've talked about Kelly Brogan and her erstwhile husband Sayer G from the very start of the podcast because they were such big voices within the kind of wellness, alternative medicine, a holistic space.
Basically doing COVID denialism and anti-vax rhetoric and the kind of grift that we came to recognize as somewhat ubiquitous where, you know, the mainstream narrative is false, but I've got something to sell you that is going to be the cure for what ails you or is going to give you the one up where you don't have to be afraid and instead you can, you know, live your life in this kind of empowered, awakened way.
But you've really covered The doctors and the doctors who, as you were just saying, you wouldn't have expected to go down this road.
I'm curious, you know, I was going to ask you about Kelly Brogan in this regard, but, you know, you just, you just talked about, you just gave the description of several types of doctors with several very high pedigree credentials who went down this road.
Do you have, and this is asking you to speculate, do you have Any explanation or hunch about how one makes that journey from going to an Ivy League school and from working in, you know, top level hospitals to being someone who is spreading COVID disinformation?
So, this is a little bit of speculation just because, you know, Kelly Brogan is the only doctor in this book who I've met.
Let me just say, you know, I think there are three big differences between the doctors who I write about and someone like Kelly Brogan.
So, the first is they mix good advice with bad advice.
So, they will recognize COVID is real, recognize viruses cause disease, and they will say that we should Definitely have protected nursing homes and older and vulnerable people.
We should, you know, use every means at our disposal to protect vulnerable people.
You know, Kelly Brogan would never say that.
Then they would mix that with bad advice, such as for anyone under the age of 65, driving to work back and forth is more dangerous.
So that's one way that they're very different.
Another way that they're very different is they claim, if you were to ask their philosophy of medicine and science, it would be no different than mine.
Data, logic, reason, science, evidence.
They do not talk about higher ways of knowing and intuitive medicine, this sort of thing, you know, like Dr. Brogan.
And I think the final thing is that unlike her, they were extremely influential during the pandemic.
Dr. Brogan and Christina Northrup and all the people you cover, you know, didn't do a lot of damage, but they weren't ubiquitous on Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic.
They didn't have private audiences with President Trump and Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin, whereas all of the doctors that I talk about We're very influential and famous and very big on social media.
And one thing that they do share in common for the most part is that they didn't treat COVID patients.
So I think that was kind of, with a few exceptions, but I think that was kind of the first step towards their pathway is that when we were surrounded by mass deaths here in New York City, and it wasn't just New York City, it was, you know, many other places eventually came to be almost everywhere.
You know, they were sort of in their offices at Stanford and Harvard.
I think a lot of them underestimated the virus at the very beginning.
They just thought it wasn't going to be that dangerous.
And a lot of good faith people, you know, made that air.
Dr. Paul Offit said he's a vaccine expert who thought it would kill one-tenth of the flu.
And within a month, he was obviously wrong and he admitted it, but these guys were incapable Of emitting air.
And so I think rather than just take the easy way out, at least for me, and sort of say, oops, I goofed, they kind of kept digging and digging.
And rather than admitting they underestimated the virus, started spreading what became QAnon memes that you guys have discussed many times, that people were dying with COVID, not of COVID, that death certificates couldn't be trusted, that it was just 90-year-olds with metastatic cancer who were doomed to die on a Saturday when COVID knocked them off on a Friday.
And even that doctors were killing patients through premature intubations.
So it was a real sort of, from Stanford University to QAnon pipeline, which really caught me off guard.
And, you know, all of the doctors that I write about, some of them were world famous.
A lot of them still are.
Paragons of evidence-based medicine, a Nobel Prize winner, just really famous people who really should have known better, I think.
Yeah, so we have the more alternative wellness holistic influencers, some of whom may have had medical credentials, which would mean that they perhaps should know better, but they would go down the road of very fringe beliefs like germ theory is not real.
It's terrain theory all the way and this notion that viruses cause illnesses has just always been wrong.
And you're talking about a different category of people who initially, I imagine, sounded quite reasonable.
Like they were saying, yes, we agree with all of these talking points, but in this particular area, we think that the mainstream orthodoxy, the scientific consensus may be getting it wrong for the following reasons.
And I can see how that's very compelling to a lot of people to go, well, look, this person seems legitimate.
And they are, they're not saying that germ theory doesn't exist.
They are saying that they're not saying that COVID is caused by 5G, you know, like some of the people we've covered, but they are, they are presenting some alternative interpretations of what the current situation means and how we should approach it.
And then I, what part of what I hear you saying is that, In many cases, they were not actually treating COVID themselves.
They were not on the front lines the way you were.
They, although front lines became a contested term as this whole thing.
Yes.
And it's, it seems to me that it's, I can imagine, as you said, they're sitting in their offices and they start to become sought after contrarian experts who are now appearing on TV.
And even if they had, if they, if they, if they had been very successful, In the field of medical science, they had never before had tasted what it was like to be on Fox News multiple times, to be speaking at big conferences, to have hundreds, perhaps thousands of people showing up and saying, yes, you're the one who's really telling the truth and we trust you and we celebrate you and you're the one who can lead us out of this mess.
And then I hear you describing a pipeline whereby that sort of audience capture phenomenon becomes more and more intoxicating and they're doubling down.
And as they double down, they start going deeper and deeper into levels of unreasonable beliefs that they're endorsing that you never could have predicted at the start.
One of the things I really found frustrating in 2020 From 2020 onwards, was that these contrarian and conspiracist voices who rose to prominence, they'd make very specific falsifiable predictions about what was going to happen.
And those would fail.
And these are people with a background in science, right?
And they never corrected themselves.
They never said, well, turns out the predictions I made didn't come to pass.
They also seem to never be held to account by the people who were platforming and celebrating them and bringing them in as the authority figure they were relying on.
It all just kept moving on to whatever the latest juicy misinformation happened to be.
It sounds like you saw that happening, too.
What was going through your mind as you observed that phenomenon?
Well, it took me a while to realize this because these were voices who I trusted and I thought were smart.
And they are smart, which is the point of the book, but really that they knew what they were talking about.
So when smart, highly credentialed professors from Stanford and Oxford were sort of saying that they think the pandemic is kind of on its way out in May, June 2020, when it was actually just beginning, I kind of believed them.
I thought they must know something that I don't.
But there was this kind of disconnect between what I had just witnessed with my own eyes and what these smart, brilliant, respected voices were telling me.
I thought I must be missing something.
And it kind of took me a while to realize that the emperor has no clothes.
And, you know, let me just give you an example of what you said absolutely correct about a falsifiable prediction that aged poorly.
On April 9th, 2020, Dr. John Ioannidis, probably the most famous scientist in America, maybe outside of Fauci himself, he is an epidemiologist and statistician at Stanford University and someone who has a reputation for really telling people doctors and scientists when they're doing bad research and
how they can make it better.
Anyways, on April 9th, 2020, he said, if I were to make an informed estimate based on the
limiting data we have, I would say that COVID-19 will result in fewer than 40,000
deaths this season in the USA.
Now, by April 9th, about 20,000 people had already died, and about 2,000 people were dying per day.
So essentially, he was predicting the end of the pandemic for that season.
And indeed, within a week, his prediction of 40,000 deaths had been broken.
And rather than saying, oops, I underestimated the virus, this is when he started spreading the conspiracies that people were dying with COVID, not of COVID, that you couldn't trust the death certificates.
For example, the week after his prediction of 40,000 deaths was obliterated, he went television show of Fox News firebrand Mark Levin and said
that the infection fatality rate, the number of people who get COVID who will die of it, was
about one in a thousand. And by that point, 10,000 New Yorkers had already died. So if 10,000 New Yorkers
had already died and one in a thousand people die of it, that would imply there have been 10
million infections here in New York City when only 8.3 million people live here.
So, it's just these mathematically impossible calculations that you could only get around by saying not that many people really died or doctors killed them through premature intubations, and these are still Widespread myths and beliefs that continue to affect our pandemic response today.
Yeah, and this is really classic conspiracy theorist logic, right?
If the evidence turns out not to support the claim I'm making, well, that's just more evidence of the conspiracy.
Yeah, no, no, exactly right, exactly right.
So, you just mentioned John Ioannidis.
Am I saying his name correctly?
I believe so.
Ioannidis.
Ioannidis.
Something along that, yeah.
So, he plays a very important role in the story.
Is there more that you want to share with us about him?
Yeah.
So, as I said, I mean, he is this Top-notch, you know, scientist.
If you look at his Wikipedia page and all the awards he's won, you know, he's won more awards last year than I'll ever win in my life.
And, you know, he seems like a very decent fellow.
He speaks in a very calm, reflective way.
And, you know, again, this is what differentiates him from Kelly Brogan.
He won't say anything that's obviously crazy.
And I think that he really helped get our pandemic response off on the wrong foot in the mainstream media and in scientific journals early on in the pandemic.
He was constantly downplaying the threat.
Again, he would recognize, he would say, we have to protect nursing homes, we have to protect grandma, but everyone else, it's really nothing to worry about.
And at the very beginning in March 2020, he thought that the virus was just not going to spread that widely.
Okay, fine.
A month later, he did a very controversial antibody study in Santa Clara, California, which claimed that the virus is already widespread.
And therefore, this was also nothing to worry about because, you know, most people don't even know that they've gotten it.
So this is one thing that's been fascinating to witness this pandemic.
Whatever the facts on the ground show, People use that to support their arguments.
So when he thought it wasn't going to spread widely, don't worry about it.
When he thought it was already widely spread, don't worry about it.
And this sort of repeated itself throughout the pandemic.
Another area where this happened, and I'm sure we'll talk about this more, is pediatric vaccinations.
You know, there were doctors who two years ago in 2021 Thought kids didn't need vaccines because the pandemic was going away, and then a couple years later, today, they say kids don't need vaccines because they've all got it already.
So, the belief comes first.
COVID isn't that bad, kids don't need vaccines, and whatever facts on the ground you can point to support that belief.
It's really fascinating hearing you lay it out like that, because those kinds of ad hoc rationalizations They're the false version of how science actually unfolds.
And it seems to me that one of the one of the really big failures during the pandemic was of science communication.
And that when the data Unfolded and changed and when public health positions needed to be revised and when Fauci contradicted something he had said earlier, a lot of the public interpreted that as they're lying.
This is suspicious.
The conspiratorial kind of interpretation starts to creep in because there isn't an adequate understanding that This is a new situation, we're gathering the data as we go, we're giving you the best possible recommendations we can, and those are going to be subject to change.
And so the sort of shadow false version of this is exactly what you're describing, where someone like Ioannidis is going to proceed from a hypothesis that he's already invested in being true.
And he's just going to keep modifying the way he explains why it's true.
And yeah, I'm just, I'm just struck by that.
Irony in a way, you know, is that, is that he he's also evolving his position, but he's not actually doing it from the place of.
scientific inquiry that stays true to the principles of the method and so therefore the true scientists are actually in a more vulnerable position.
Well true scientists are always in a more vulnerable position because You know, they have to say, I don't know quite a bit.
And that's a very difficult thing for people to say.
I mean, Dr. Ioannidis would sort of say that at the beginning of the pandemic, he was saying, I don't really know anything.
You know, we just need better data.
But that's not really true.
You know, early in March 2020, he said that if only we had devoted as many resources to stopping COVID as to stopping the flu, we might save tens of thousands of lives.
And, you He said that COVID was going to be entirely benign for people under the age of 65.
So they just got a lot wrong and they couldn't adjust as the facts on the ground changed.
One thing that's extraordinary about this book is that you really bring receipts.
You quote all of these doctors many, many times.
You use their own words to illustrate the damage they were doing.
You quote people like Jay Bhattacharya, Monica Gandhi, John Mandrola, Marty Macquarie, Scott Atlas, Vinay Prasad.
Zubin Damania alongside Ioannidis.
Is there some kind of hierarchy here?
We've talked about sort of different categories of doctors or experts who were spreading misinformation.
Is there a kind of hierarchy in your mind regarding who had the biggest negative impact?
I think all of those doctors had very negative impacts in different places.
So again, I think Dr. Ioannidis and even Jay Bhattacharya, he also wrote an essay at the beginning of the pandemic called, is the coronavirus as deadly as they say?
And of course he said no.
He also kind of predicted that it would cause about 20 to 40,000 deaths.
I think those guys directly influenced Scott Atlas, they're all at Stanford, and Scott Atlas brought all of this to the Trump administration.
And, you know, one thing that I want to get across very clearly is the title of the book is meant to be taken literally, We Want Them Infected.
I mean, that was a quote from a guy by the name, an epidemiologist in the Trump administration, Dr. Paul Alexander.
Who said, we want them infected.
We want kids, teens, young adults to get infected with this virus.
The plan was to spread the virus, to get rid of the virus by spreading the virus.
And I think those guys really, especially Scott Atlas, really made it policy.
I think a lot of the other people that you named, Monica Gandhi, ZDogg, Vinay Prasad, John Mandrola, they really were active on social media.
And what's interesting is they didn't all start there.
by the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal.
So I really think that they took the message directly to the people that the virus was
going away and it was nothing to worry about.
And what's interesting is they didn't all start there.
If you look at some of their very early pandemic pronouncements, they were, you know, taking
it seriously as they should.
It's only when I think the phenomenon of audience capture and that things got politicized, you know, where wearing a mask was seeing you were some sort of lefty liberal, that they began to rebel against those sorts of things.
Yeah, I mean, I think of Suman Damania, who you just called out by his stage name of ZDogg, and Vinay Prasad.
Like, they did a whole series of YouTube videos where they were discussing all things
pandemic-related.
And a lot of it seemed really reasonable.
They really presented themselves as knowledgeable professionals
who had reasonable opinions and were both opposed to COVID denialism, but also opposed
to what they might have framed as a kind of hysterical fear-mongering.
And one of the phrases that we heard thrown around a lot in overlapping circles was during the pandemic, especially in the early days, was that fear is the real virus.
So what's your sense of Prasad and Damania, fear is the real virus, how this was positioned On these social media platforms in a way where I think for a lot of people, they may have seemed to have been, you know, not as problematic as they turned out to be.
Yeah.
So this is one of the main themes of the book is that the people that you guys talk about, you know, Kelly Brogan and Sayer G, who were talking about fear is the virus at the start of the pandemic, that their ideas won, you know, that these crazy quack fringe doctors, their ideas won the pandemic, at least for For a segment of it, at least for young people, I mean, vaccination rates are extraordinarily low, and yeah, people like Vinay Prasad and ZDogg started to echo the words of Kelly Brogan, which is shocking, that fear can do more harm than the virus, that anyone who tries to avoid it is living in fear, and they just became these sort of mockable,
That anyone who's trying to avoid the virus became a target of mockery and shame.
And I don't like living in fear, but fear is necessary.
We are all alive today because our ancestors lived in fear of enough stuff to make it to
reproductive age.
And you know, great graveyards are full of young fearless people.
But I will say this, that they spoke about measures to contain the virus in extraordinarily
fearful terms.
Anything that any organization or institution did to control the virus was described as
draconian and just heavy handed and that it was going to cause societal collapse.
You know, they spoke about lockdowns as, you know, just these catastrophes that would linger for generations.
And, you know, I do want to say, of course, the lockdowns did have harms.
And, you know, I want to speak from a position of privilege.
I was never lonely.
I was in the hospital all the time.
I never missed a paycheck.
I don't own a small business.
So I want to recognize that I was Spared, for the most part, the harms of lockdowns.
And yeah, they couldn't have gone on forever.
We couldn't have shuttered everything forever.
But they were just described in these catastrophic terms, while the virus was described as dangerous for grandma but no one else.
And so you have these figures who have expertise in one area and then fall in love with the idea that they can also be experts on public health policy, on politics, on what counts as draconian authoritarianism, on what the cultural and psychological impacts are going to be on people's lives and on children.
And you have Vinay Prasad, I actually hadn't seen this until I read it in your book, so thank you.
This is a tweet from Prasad.
He says, I want to write a children's book about a bear who didn't want to leave home until it was perfectly safe.
He never left, and life passed him by.
In the sequel, he stands at the window shouting at anyone outside that they're killing fellow bears and spreading disinformation.
That's extraordinary.
Right.
And what's even more extraordinary is when you realize when he wrote that treat, which was January 2021, which was the middle of the worst wave of the pandemic.
3,000 people were dying every day.
And, you know, he just mocked people who tried to avoid the virus.
He, at that same time, described vaccines as a perfect panacea that completely eliminated bad disease and completely stopped transmission.
You know, as many people did, myself a little bit included, a little bit wishful thinking that the pandemic was on the way out.
And I think that allowed him to just sort of take this mocking tone, which is constant in all of these doctors' pronouncements.
That if you tried to avoid the virus, there was something wrong with you, there was something shameful, and they treated it from the first day as a well-known entity, that something that was as familiar to us as measles, and variants were nothing to worry about.
Wow, that is such a fascinating distinction, that part of the reason for his mocking tone Was that he believed the vaccine had now solved.
Now that we had the vaccine, it had solved the pandemic and there was no reason to be afraid or to or to self quarantine.
And that anyone who was doing anything like that was just ridiculous.
Yeah, I mean, in his defense, I mean, the vaccine trials when they first came out showed 95% efficacy against infection and near perfect perfection against severe disease.
But they were new vaccines.
We'd never used this sort of technology before.
This was a new virus.
We don't that we didn't know that it was done mutating and we still
don't, but they really treated it as this very, very predictable entity, even from the
moment that it first arrived on our shore. So Dr. Ioannidis talked about in an article
from March 2020 in Stat News about how closing schools might prevent children from
contracting the disease and developing herd immunity as if we knew that one infection would lead
to permanent immunity, which of course we didn't know. That was always an article of faith
and it turned out to be wrong, unfortunately.
It was definitely.
Please visit www.horrorfilms.live So yeah, let's just deal with that really quickly here.
The Great Barrington Declaration essentially said, and it was signed on to, it was started I believe by J. Bhattacharya, it was signed on to by I don't know how many doctors, many of whom were very highly pedigreed.
It said the pandemic would be over in three months if we just allowed herd immunity to develop.
And if we accepted the fact that there was going to be a certain amount of the population who were more vulnerable than others, who would sort of inevitably had to be sacrificed.
This is how I interpreted it.
That's probably putting a little bit of a sharp spin on it.
And there are there are people like Barry Weiss, Who will go on Bill Maher's show and say, you know, this, it turned out to be true.
Jay Bhattacharya should never have been shadow banned on Twitter because he was actually right.
And if we had listened to him, the pandemic would have been over in, you know, a much shorter period of time.
What are the facts?
And also it's often then pointed to, Sweden is often pointed to as the country that followed the herd immunity strategy.
And look, it worked out great for them.
Yeah, so the Great Barrington Declaration was published on October 4th, 2020, and it was signed by, initially written by three doctors, J. Bhattacharya I from Stanford, Martin Kulldorff, who at the time was at Harvard, and Sunita Gupta, who is an epidemiologist at Oxford.
And it was an unusual thing.
It was signed in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which is where it got its name from.
There were journalists there, there were cameras there, and that usually doesn't happen when doctors get together to talk shop.
I've never been filmed and had journalists there.
So it was a very choreographed thing, run by a man by the name of Mr. Jeffrey Tucker, who was sort of an anarcho-capitalist type.
Who has some problematic views.
Before the pandemic, he wrote for an organization called Sons of the Confederacy or something like that, you know, which had white supremacist ties.
He wrote an article I think in 2016 called Let the Kids Work.
Which, as the name implies, was an overtly pro-child labor article saying that children should get out of the classroom and into the factories.
And he also wrote an article that children should smoke when they are young because it's cool and they can give it up before it does too much damage.
So this guy who wants my children to drop out of high school
and smoke with their friends during their break from their shift at Walmart
really influenced our pandemic response.
And the Great Barrington Declaration itself is very short.
It probably took about an hour or two to write.
You can read it in five minutes.
And it was based on this idea that people could be easily dichotomized
into vulnerable and not vulnerable.
I mean, clearly they're right about the fact that an 80-year-old with hypertension and diabetes
is gonna be very vulnerable to COVID and a healthy 10-year-old is not going to be,
although some healthy 10-year-olds have died.
But they didn't recognize that there was a gradient.
They talked about vulnerable and not vulnerable people.
And they only talked about death as a bad outcome.
So either you survived COVID and were totally fine or it killed you.
And their idea was that not vulnerable people could be completely walled off from vulnerable people.
So they wanted to have zero COVID for vulnerable people and pure COVID for everyone else.
And if only that was to happen and young healthy people contracted COVID and if one infection led to permanent immunity, then Vulnerable people who'd been subjected to a stringent three to six months home imprisonment could emerge unscathed and the whole pandemic would sort of be a blip on the history books.
Very few lives would be lost.
We could open everything back up and The virus would be gone.
So get rid of the virus by spreading the virus.
Which was Kelly Brogan's idea about how to treat HPV.
That the best way to get immunity to HPV is to get HPV.
So that's what I mean when I say her ideas won the pandemic.
And they turned into cheerleaders for the virus.
So Martin Kulldorff wrote about young people having an obligation to contract the virus the same way our grandfathers fought in World War II.
They wrote articles called Triumph of natural immunity and Jay Bhattacharya celebrated, you know, people getting COVID.
Notably, he postponed his date with the virus until after he'd been vaccinated twice.
So I think a lot of these people wanted the herd to be available for them.
There's not much evidence that people actually wanted to join the herd.
And, you know, their plan to protect the vulnerable, it really wasn't a plan.
Again, you can read the Great Barrington Declaration in five minutes.
It was just a list of demands for public health workers.
And it was, you know, feed old people at home, give them all hotel rooms if they need a place to stay, you know.
And there's a big difference between writing words, feed people at home, and actually feeding tens of millions of vulnerable people at home during the raging pandemic.
But they made these very difficult, probably impossible things sound very easy.
And that was a great benefit to them because it allowed them to say, no one is listening to us.
We told them exactly what to do and no one is listening to us.
So I sort of liken them to a football coach who tells his team, score more points than the other guys.
It's not the wrong plan, right?
If we could just protect the vulnerable, Great, but it's not a good plan, and a football coach who tells his team only, you know, score more points than the other guys, you know, his team isn't going to win.
Yeah, but you can't deny that if you score more points than the other guys, you will win.
So the logic is really strong.
Yeah, so I just want to acknowledge I sort of misremembered how vulnerable people were positioned within that sort of great Barrington Declaration, and yeah, The theatrical sort of grandiosity that you're describing is really quite something.
Right.
And then you asked about Sweden.
So, I mean, I think Sweden's pandemic response can really be divided into pre-vaccine and post-vaccine.
And post-vaccine, they did very well, actually.
They vaccinated a very large swaths of their population.
But during the first wave, during the first year, they had many more deaths than their Nordic neighbors.
There were some really horrifying reports of people in nursing homes not being taken to hospitals, being given morphine instead of oxygen, you know, to basically kill them.
And the myth there is that Sweden never locked down.
And if you listen to people who live in Sweden, I've talked to a few, you know, at various points they had to limit gatherings to eight people.
They closed a lot of parks and zoos and a lot of things were closed for very long periods of time.
They closed high schools at some point.
And even in elementary schools, which were never officially closed throughout the whole country, there were times, just like here in red states and Texas and Georgia, where the virus just completely shut down schools and students had remote learning for months at a time, even though schools were officially open.
And of course, vulnerable people in Sweden were subjected to a very strict lockdown of sorts.
And that's what the Great Barrington Declaration wanted to do.
They didn't do any polling to ask vulnerable people whether they were okay with every single visit to the grocery store being a life or death experience.
They just wanted to impose their will on everyone else and call it freedom.
And there's interesting political underpinnings there.
I think I'm remembering that Jay Bhattacharya had been very involved with groups like the Heritage Foundation.
There's a think tank orientation towards libertarian economic policies that tries to find ways to shoehorn science into supporting whatever is going to basically be good for big business and libertarian impulses.
Yeah, I mean, they all treated the pandemic like it was a game, like it was a thought experiment, like it was a puzzle to be solved for which there were no consequences on the real world.
And this is what I try to do throughout the book, is bring in real stories of people who read his article, The Ill-Advised Push to Vaccinate the Young.
I don't know that anyone directly refused the vaccine because of that specific article, but absorbed the message that children didn't need the vaccines, or young people didn't need the vaccines, or it was just the flu, and the tragic consequences of people who realize too late that it's not just the flu.
And the flu can be really bad, too.
That's right.
That's right.
So speaking of theatrics, on June 15th of 2021, you write about how San Mateo County celebrated Dr. Monica Gandhi Day, in which she cut a ceremonial ribbon made of COVID masks and declared California reopened thanks to the work of They positioned her in their publicity about this as their great infectious disease expert.
Yeah, so Monica Gandhi is an infectious disease expert at UCSF, University of California, San Francisco, who was one of many doctors who started in 2021, essentially declaring the pandemic over.
And every month, Starting, actually starting at the beginning of the pandemic, but it really picked up starting in 2021 when we started vaccinating people.
The idea that the pandemic was over, so articles started being published called, we'll have herd immunity by April, that's Marty McCary, or the COVID threat is over, now is the time to stop living in fear.
In February 22nd, 2021, she and Dr.
Damania, a.k.a.
ZDogg, made a video called The End of the Pandemic, in which they laughed and they laughed about variants, shmeriants, and as new variants arrived, as the Delta variant arrived, they said, you know, the data on the Delta variant is reassuring.
When Omicron arrived, you know, Marty Makary called it Omicold and nature's vaccine, and over and over and over again, the pandemic was declared over.
And you gotta watch the video because they just thought it was so funny.
And one thing that I love about what you guys do on this show is you don't talk about just what people say,
but you talk about the presentation, how it's all part of a package,
the resting guru face, for example, and you talk about how people like Charles Eisenstein
can really almost put people in a trance that they could probably just be reading
from random pages from the dictionary and sort of make it sound profound.
And that really opened me up to try to look for that in what these doctors do, like Vinay Prasad and ZDogg.
And I think that they do it just by mockery, just by, oh my gosh, if you're worried about COVID and kids, you're fear mongering.
What are you going to do?
Never let them leave the house?
You're just a ridiculous sort of person.
And an interesting thing is that the fact that we were okay at protecting young people at the start of the pandemic, Okay, true.
That's true.
But one of the reasons that's the case is because we didn't let COVID run rampant in the pediatric population as you suggested that we do.
So you're only able to say that more children died of suicide than COVID because we didn't let mass children die of COVID.
And we don't have to pick between those two things.
We can Yeah, and I often think of that as an example or a similar dynamic goes on with how the success of vaccines kind of mean that for a lot of people, they say, well, I mean, I don't know anyone who's ever gotten any of those diseases, so why do we need to be vaccinating kids against them?
It's because of the vaccines that you don't know anyone who's ever suffered any of these actually really debilitating diseases.
And in fact, if you just visited some less privileged countries where they don't have the infrastructure to do the kind of vaccination we do here, you'd see some pretty shocking things.
As we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, with vaccines becoming widely available, we've already discussed a little bit how these anti-vax adjacent libertarian contrarians were really coming to the fore.
And the most egregious kind of iteration of this was the insistence on comparing vaccine mandates and quarantine measures to Nazi policies.
What was your sense of how this really impacted our broader recovery from the pandemic, as well as, let's not forget, the lives of public health officials and medical professionals?
Yeah, so this sort of thing has gone on for as long as vaccines have been around.
Obviously, comparisons to Nazis only began after Nazis came around.
But, you know, you can look back at old anti-vaccine cartoons from 1900 and see, you know, poor drawings of, you know, poor souls being gathered by the police and injected by doctors.
So this sort of propaganda is really very old.
And before the pandemic, anti-vaxxers would wear yellow stars to claim solidarity with persecuted Jews.
You know, really, really disgusting stuff.
And this continued throughout the pandemic.
You guys have discussed RFK Jr.
and his statements that Anne Frank had it better because at least she could hide from the Nazis.
And Kelly Brogan said the same thing, that this was all some sort of forced agenda to vaccinate us all, the sort of dehumanization that preceded the Holocaust.
And most of the doctors that I discuss didn't go quite that far.
Although Vinay Prasad wrote an article in which he's fantasized that healthcare workers, that a future Hitler could use public health measures in a future pandemic to seize control, to really, you know, to become an authoritarian.
And this is just, you know, oppression fantasy.
When you look at the people who are carrying Nazi flags during this pandemic, they were not people who are trying to vaccinate people.
They were trying people who were trying to resist vaccination.
And most of us think that it's heroic to stand up to Nazis.
I would certainly not argue that.
And so a lot of people thought they were being heroes when they stood up to public health workers and vaccine clinics, even voluntary vaccine clinics.
And public health workers were threatened.
They were abused.
They were attacked.
Many left their jobs.
So when I read accounts of Jay Bhattacharya being silenced because YouTube took down one of his videos, he, I don't think, I hope not, wasn't threatened and attacked.
He was just very strongly criticized.
But it all had consequences on the ground, and I do think that we are less prepared now than we were three years ago for a pandemic, because if another virus hits, there's going to be extraordinarily backlash to anyone who takes any measures to control it.
Let's try to put to rest some of the false claims about the COVID vaccines.
These include they were developed too quickly, there were really dangerous side effects that were covered up, they were much less effective than claimed, they didn't actually stop the spread, they aren't really vaccines, they're a new and untested form of gene therapy.
What might you address here?
Boy, there's a lot.
I mean, so the vaccines were developed very quickly.
I think there's many reasons why.
First of all, we weren't starting off from a zero point.
There had been a lot of work on mRNA vaccines.
scenes before the pandemic.
So they weren't exactly developed from scratch.
That's point one.
Point two is no expense was spared for Operation Warp Speed.
I mean, everyone agrees pretty much that that was a great success and a great way to spend
money.
Usually, for medical trials, funding is hard to come by.
So that's point two.
Point three is people beat down the door to volunteer to be in these studies.
I was in one.
I volunteered to be in the AstraZeneca study.
So it can often take a long time to recruit volunteers to be in vaccine trials.
That wasn't a problem in these.
And then the fourth thing is just that COVID spread so quickly.
So the way the vaccine trials were designed is they said, we're going to wait until 150 to 200 people get COVID, then we're going to look at the results.
So let's say you were doing this for a more slowly spreading virus like HIV, you'd have to wait a decade before you got 150 cases, depends how big your study is, but you know, HIV doesn't, doesn't spread wildly and out of control.
So with COVID spreading wildly and out of control, it didn't take long at all before we accumulated 150 cases.
So these vaccine trials went quickly for those reasons.
In terms of their efficacy, yeah, they're not as good as during the initial trials.
It's not like those initial trials were wrong.
I don't think data was faked.
But the virus has changed, and unfortunately, immunity for these vaccines and for this virus just isn't super long-lasting.
And that's only something that we were going to have determined just by waiting, but with all these variants.
And then the third thing is side effects.
You know, this is something that I predicted in my very first article on science-based medicine, where I've done most of my writing on May 10th, 2021.
I correctly wrote that once millions of teens are vaccinated, something bad is going to happen to some of them because that's how it's always been with vaccines.
You know, with the HPV vaccine, you know, millions of girls were vaccinated and Tragically, some died within the next week of whatever.
And that happened with the pediatric vaccine as well.
And these sort of rare tragedies were, of course, blamed on the vaccine.
Because once you've gotten a vaccine, everything will forever be blamed on the vaccine.
And what are the harms of the vaccine?
Well, the biggest harms are with the vaccine that not so many people got, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that can cause blood clots and did lead to a few deaths in some people.
The mRNA vaccines, the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines, this is what all children got.
The main side effect that that can cause is myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart.
It seems to be rare.
The exact frequency of vaccine myocarditis varies from one study to the next, but a reasonable sort of estimate is that it's about 1 in 10,000 adolescent boys after their second shot.
And if you do the math and look at how many people were vaccinated, that probably affected about 1,000 children in the United States.
And then if you look at the prognosis of that, every study, every single one, there's over
20 uniformly described it as having a favorable prognosis in the short term.
That in the most recent series from Canada, almost all children were sent home from the
ER.
And the doctors who I write about literally treated this rare, mild vaccine side effect as a fate worse than death from COVID.
become more sick. I don't want to minimize it, but it's not as bad as death from COVID.
And the doctors who I write about literally treated this rare, mild vaccine side effect
as a fate worse than death from COVID. So for example, Dr.
John Mandrola, whose name you mentioned, he wrote for, he's a prominent doctor on
social media, writes for online medical journals like Medscape, wrote an article called, No
Young Adults Should Not Live in Fear of COVID. And he said, fear of death is not a reason
for young adults to try to avoid COVID because it's so rare.
And then when he talked about vaccine myocarditis, he said, vaccine myocarditis demands respect.
So this transient, mild side effect was treated as a fate worse than death.
And Vinay Prasad did this as well.
He made 25 videos on vaccine myocarditis.
You know, one for every 20 patients affected by the disease.
But when talking about death from COVID, he talked about it as vanishingly rare.
He mocked Everyone who talked about it, he said they were breathless.
That's how he always described anyone who even just presented basic facts on pediatric COVID.
They were just hysterical fear mongers.
But vaccine myocarditis, that's worse than death.
Mm hmm.
So fear is the real virus, except fear of a rare side effect for which the prognosis is really, really good.
That actually occurs more frequently and is more severe in people who are unvaccinated as a result of COVID.
Yes.
Yeah, you know, so this is a lot of pandemic discourses, you know, which causes more myocarditis, the virus or the vaccine?
But that's not even really the right question, because COVID can do much more than cause myocarditis.
It can kill.
It can cause this entity, MIS, multisystem inflammatory disorder in children, which is a very severe post-viral autoimmune type condition, which has affected over 10,000 children, killed about 75 of them, 80% of children with this condition go to the ICU.
There have been cases of hemodynamic collapse due to this condition,
but that is treated as more as rare and more milder than vaccine
myocarditis when it's neither. You know one of the recurrent themes
we cover on the podcast is how far-right conspiracy theories
will exploit the vulnerability of children to really stir up hysteria and
to inspire extremism.
And this goes all the way back to the medieval blood libel, and that carries through to the satanic panic, which is more recent, and then up to QAnon in the last few years, anti-vax, and then even like the CRT, critical race theory, moral panics, and the drag queen story hour, you know, people are actually We've been talking about how children became tragic pawns during the pandemic for this kind of rhetoric.
What else can you tell us about that with regard to kids and COVID and vaccinations?
So first of all, you know, I don't want to be accused of fear mongering.
So I'll say this that the vast, you know, the only good thing that you can say about COVID is really the vast majority of children will be fine with it.
And I, you know, all the kids in my life had COVID and I was not particularly worried about them, even the younger ones who had it before they were vaccinated.
Having said that, rare things multiplied by 73 million American children add up, and COVID's overall impact was not benign for children.
It was definitely comparable to many other vaccine-preventable diseases.
So, although these numbers are not exact, there are sources that they can be underestimated and overestimated.
But around 2,000 children have died of COVID.
Just under 200,000 children have been hospitalized, and about a third of those go to the ICU, and maybe 5 to 10% of them get intubated.
As I said, there have been about 10,000 cases of this condition, multisystem inflammatory disorder.
And a lot of children, I think there's more questions and answers about it at this point,
but long COVID in children is real.
And we're gonna be learning about the consequences of repeat infections the rest of our lives.
You know, if the child is born today, how many times are they gonna be infected
by the time they're 20?
And what are gonna be the consequences of those repeat infections,
especially for unvaccinated children?
So the fact that COVID impacted elderly people more was used as a reason to leave young children vulnerable,
which is of course nonsensical, right?
that is the way it is.
The idea that just because grandma is in more danger, we shouldn't protect kids is kind of silly.
The fact that it wasn't the number one leading cause of death in children, that guns and car crashes killed more children was another reason used to leave children vulnerable to COVID.
And the fact that most children who suffered from COVID had underlying conditions, not all, but most did.
And these were very common underlying conditions like obesity and asthma, not just, you know, Children with end-stage cancer was also used as reasons to leave children vulnerable to COVID and all of the numbers that I just presented would have been much worse had we made no effort to protect children.
So had we let the virus spread through the pediatric population at the pandemic start as all of these doctors feel we should have done, I don't know exactly what would have happened, but I feel comfortable saying hospitals would not have been able to handle the volume.
They already were overwhelmed during the Omicron wave.
So I think thousands more children would have died, hundreds of thousands of more children would have been hospitalized, and some of them would be very sick.
Some children have had strokes or needed amputations or needed lung transplants.
Again, these are not common things, but given that a vaccine can almost wipe those tragedies down to zero. It's astonishing that
doctors would parrot Kelly Brogan and say, let's just leave kids vulnerable. That kind of reasoning
always seems to me to be based on the idea that they seem to be based on an over exaggerated
estimation of the danger of side effects and and underestimation of the dangers of actually
getting sick.
It's almost like there's some kind of fallacy at play that says doing nothing Is more kind of morally defensible than taking action that actually scientifically we know has a much better outcome.
And you said before that your sense is that we're less prepared now for another pandemic than perhaps we were before this last one.
We find ourselves in a very interesting position here with the two challengers that are going up against Biden so far for the Democratic nomination for president are Marianne Williamson, who I
wouldn't say she's a straight up anti-vaxxer, but she's expressed plenty of standard. I'm not an anti-vaxxer,
but I have these concerns.
I have these questions. I have these demands, you know, for testing that have already been
met. A lot of misinformation has come out of her mouth about, about vaccines. And then
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the other one who's actually, you know, polling pretty close to
Biden at the moment, which may not mean anything, but nonetheless, he's, he's made a career
of being a very prolific anti-vaxxer.
I really shuddered a little while ago at the implications of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointing this Public Health Integrity Committee in December of last year, and he put Brett Weinstein on there, who's, you know, Ivermectin proponent and vaccine alarmist, and Jay Bhattacharya, I believe, is on that committee.
What is your sense of these developments and what it means?
Yeah, I mean, it's terrifying.
I mean, that I think the anti-vaccine movement has now gone mainstream.
You know, I think Joseph Ladapo, the Surgeon General of Florida, was recently caught Basically faking data.
I think a scandal almost as bad, if not as bad, as Andrew Wakefield.
And, you know, we just kind of shrug it off at this point.
And, you know, a lot of the worlds that we're talking about are overlapping.
So, you know, we've talked, you know, so far, as if, you know, the guys that you discuss and the guys that I discuss are separate.
But they're beginning to merge.
So, RFK Jr.
has featured some writing by Vinay Prasad, and so has the National Vaccine Information Center, the NVIC, which is the oldest anti-vaccine group here in America.
And Vinay Prasad recently listened to a podcast of RFK Jr.
and praised him and said, you know, he's not on the right track about vaccines causing autism, but, you know, he's on the right track about, you know, or he should have focused more on the harms of the COVID
vaccine.
So these worlds are beginning to sort of merge and overlap in a very scary way.
And there's no question that this is going to bleed into distrust for routine childhood vaccines as well.
Vinay Prasad even spoke positively about infecting children with chicken pox,
or the benefits of contracting the flu.
Do we really know that it's really desirable to prevent the flu infection in children?
Maybe that will lead to cancer later on.
And this was the sort of stuff that, before the pandemic, was the unique purview of people like RFK Jr., Sherry Tenpenny, Suzanne Humphreys, Kelly Brogan, all the anti-vaccine quacks.
So our worlds are overlapping.
Yeah, and with Prasad praising RFK, he's actually in the company of Alex Jones and Charlie Kirk.
There's a whole list of them.
Roger Stone.
Steve Bannon, who've all, you know, when Kennedy announced that he was running, all said, well, he's, he's the real deal.
You know, he's the man of great integrity.
And in fact, a couple of them have said that the Trump RFK Junior ticket would really be a dream come true.
God, my nightmare is that it's Trump versus Kennedy and I have to pick one to vote for.
Oh my goodness gracious.
I think I know who I'd pick, but it'd be a, you know... Oh, God.
Okay, so, last question.
You know, your book, I think, represents a very sobering clarion call about what we can learn from all of this and how we can potentially move forward armed with an understanding of what went wrong.
What's your sense of how we can create positive change in the world moving forward around these topics?
So it's tough.
I certainly don't have all the answers and you know there are certain movements which seem to have kind of hit a roadblock to Have more sort of formal sanctions for doctors who spread misinformation that state licensing boards should take a harder tact on these doctors.
I'm always a little bit wary of these sorts of solutions because I do not want Ron DeSantis to win presidency and have Joseph LeBappo become our Surgeon General and have him sort of say what doctors can and can't say.
So I'm sympathetic to that view.
But I think the main thing that we have to do is what you and what your podcast has done such a wonderful job of, which is to really sort of Shine sunlight on some of these bad actors.
And there's a tradition in medicine of academic freedom, which is good and important, and we need to be open to heterodox voices.
Just because someone is saying something outside the mainstream doesn't mean that they're wrong.
But it has led to a tolerance of misinformation that most of my fellow doctors just kind of shrug.
And my interest in the anti-vaccine movement and Before the pandemic was seen as just this sort of weird quirk, like as if I like collecting stamps, you know, there's like this sort of weird hobby.
Like what's the matter with you that you find this worthy of your attention?
Right, exactly, a little bit.
And the doctors who spoke out about this before, people like David Gorski and Steve Novello, the founders of science-based medicine, You know, they weren't rewarded for it.
They weren't promoted.
They weren't given academic accolades.
Not that that's what motivates me, but in response for their hard work, they were just
threatened and threatened to be sued and harassed and this sort of thing.
And the medical community, I think, really didn't have their back.
And even now, you know, who's speaking out?
It's kind of just random doctors like myself, but department chairmen, I think, have been extremely timid and deans of medical school.
They're so afraid of appearing as censors that they have censored themselves.
All of the people that we are talking about And you described this very well and have devoted whole shows to this, the weaponization of perceived victimhood, that if you contradict me at all, you are trying to silence and censor me, and therefore you're as bad as Hitler.
And no one wants to be seen as a censor.
And I think that people in positions of authority have been so afraid of that accusation that the only people they've silenced have been themselves.
And we don't need to threaten Jay Bhattacharya's career or Vinay Prasad's medical license.
We just need to not tolerate it.
And when he says things that are ridiculous, Like, polio is more dangerous for children than COVID, even though polio hasn't infected a child in America in 40 years.
We need to say that's ridiculous.
We don't need to say that's thinking differently.
But a lot of doctors do that.
They just say, no, he's just thinking differently.
This is just heterodox.
It's a different opinion.
When in fact, the disease that killed 2000 children is worse than the one which killed zero.
And that wouldn't have been controversial in 2019.
Yeah, it seems to me what's missing from this fetishizing and posturing around being heterodox is that coherent heterodoxy has to rely on rigor.
It has to rely on, okay, we are going to look at both sides of this argument and then we're going to consider what the evidence actually shows.
Because if the two sides of the argument are contradicting one another, they can't both be right.
Unless this is a very, very complex, nuanced situation where, you know, you could find a way to square that.
So often I see that heterodox debate as elevating pseudoscience and logical fallacies and conspiracy theories to being on a level playing field with points of view about reality that are just much more reasonable.
And let me tell you about one heterodox voice who was right this pandemic.
It's probably someone who you haven't heard of.
She didn't become a household name because she doesn't care for attention.
And I hope I'm going to say her name right.
She's this Hungarian mRNA scientist, Karina Kariko.
I probably butchered her name, but she's a basic scientist who studied mRNA for decades.
And I only know what I read about her in the New York Times.
but she was sort of thought of as this kind of quirky woman doing her own thing and just like in some corner of a lab.
She never really got her own funding.
She never really got her own support, but she did groundbreaking work in mRNA
that paved the way for these vaccines.
So yeah, it's definitely important that we don't silence heterodox voices,
but you're exactly right.
They have to bring the evidence.
I think a lot of these doctors just contradicted whatever the mainstream would be
and called themselves heterodox.
So I think, for example, that if all vaccines were banned, Kelly Brogan, Christiane, Northrop, et cetera,
would say correctly, these are a suppressed miracle cure.
They are hiding them because, you know, doctors make more money treating illness than preventing it.
And I think that's true about the doctors who I write about in my book as well, that if pediatric COVID vaccines were banned, they would say, are you crazy?
You know, 2000 children, you know, you're just going to let 2000 children die.
You're going to let hundreds of thousands of children be hospitalized for what reason?
They would be right in that situation, but I get the sense that they were just being heterodox for the sake of being heterodox and opposite for the sake of being opposite.
Whereas this woman, Karina Kareko, again, whose name I'm butchering, but probably most people haven't heard of because she doesn't have a YouTube.
She doesn't have a sub stack.
You know, she avoids interviews.
She avoids the limelight, which is indirect.
You know, can you imagine Kelly Brogan turning down an interview or Vinay Prasad turning down an interview?
That'd be like my dog turning down, you know, treats.
It just wouldn't happen.
Yeah, yeah.
So people like her are not relying on the algorithmic boost of contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism continuing to generate revenue and fame and whatever the other incentives might be.
This has been really illuminating, Dr. Howard.
Thank you so much.
Where can people read more of your writing and where can they buy the book?
So, well, first of all, thank you for having me on.
And like I said, I've learned so much through your podcast because you have taken on characters that I have been familiar with for many years.
And I have focused on just the facts that they got wrong, just the signs they got wrong.
But you have really, all three of you guys have really sort of shown me just all these, you know, interweaving threads and connections that I never would have considered.
So thank you for that.
That's very kind.
You can find me on Twitter at 19joho, and I write two to three articles per month.
It's science-based medicine.
The book can be found on Amazon or Red Hawk Publishing, and I will just say this, that my publishers were wonderful.
They really cared about the book, and they got it out in a timely fashion.
I couldn't have been happier.
But they are small.
They have no marketing division, and I have no marketing division.
I have no agent.
I'm just like one dude with an apartment here in New York City.
So the book has to spread by word of mouth.
So if you read it and you can tolerate it, it's meant to be a hard read.
It's meant to be very difficult to read, and that's a lot of the feedback that I'm getting.
But I appreciate you just letting your friends know, and thanks for having me on.
Thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
