A contrarian doctor “just asking questions.” Super reasonable. Certainly not anti-vax, just a regular guy who grievance-mongers about quarantine measures and mocks people afraid of long Covid. Vinay Prasad cuts a different type of figure on the conspiracy-influencer stage. He fits right in with his pal, the charismatic guru-esque Dr. Zubin Damania, and might just pop up in your YouTube feed alongside Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia.
Prasad demands unrealistic randomized controlled trial data for everything on his podcast, including protecting ICU patients from Covid via visiting restrictions. Who’s volunteering for that control group?!
Julian sits down with returning guest, Dr. Jonathan Howard, the author of We Want Them Infected. They talk about Prasad (among others) who play a sensationalist science-distortion role in the digital economy and their connections to libertarian think tanks like AIER (architects of the Great Barrington Declaration) and Brownstone Institute—who’s founder, Jeffrey Tucker, wants to repeal laws around child labor and underage smoking.
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This all got started because Montgomery County, a good old MoCo just outside of D.C., has re-implemented an N95 mask mandate for kids.
Well, well, well.
That's a pretty boneheaded decision by public health.
We do know community mask recommendations have no evidence that they improve outcomes during this pandemic, and the randomized evidence from Cochrane shows that they just don't work.
The Democrats treat the mask as if Moses himself descended down the mountain and passed him out, and also that it is a political symbol, and it is a symbol that we're doing the right thing, and it's sort of a derangement that exists on the left, and we can take advantage of children.
We can actually make children do things that adults don't want to do, which makes zero sense in the pandemic because this virus was always no greater threat to children than influenza.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
Julian Walker here, and I'm joined today by Dr. Jonathan Howard for a brief titled The Super Reasonable Vinay Prasad.
He's the doctor whose voice you just heard at the top, but Dr. Howard is a returning guest, having visited us almost a year ago for episode 155, We Want Them Infected, to talk about his book of the same name.
He's Chief of Neurology at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and Associate Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at NYU.
Dr. Howard also writes at Science Based Medicine about the normalization of the anti-vaccine movement in mainstream medicine.
Jonathan, welcome back.
Did I leave anything out about you that you'd like to add?
No, thanks so much.
It's great to be here again, Julian.
I appreciate it.
Let's see, I guess the only thing that you could add is I started my own little podcast titled, We Want Them Infected, but where we go over in great detail what we're going to go over relatively quickly today, but doctors who spread misinformation about COVID.
That's really good to know.
I will look forward to listening.
So, on this podcast, we cover a lot of out-and-out anti-vaxxers, COVID denialists, influencers who traffic in really outlandish conspiracy theories, and these may be based in pseudoscience or promoting their own unregulated quack cures or insisting upon metaphysical dogmas and evidence be damned.
So, doctors or former doctors like Christiane Northrup, Zach Bush, Kelly Brogan, and Peter McCullough all fit the aforementioned description quite well.
But in the field of medicine, there's another confounding variable, shall we say.
These influencers cut an atypical online profile.
They don't necessarily reject vaccines.
They're not selling supplements.
They aren't pretending to be priests or shamans.
They're just asking questions and they present themselves as super reasonable.
Now, listeners will perhaps think of the latest style of bro science self-optimization podcasters like Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman, but we might talk about them a little bit later.
But to my mind, Vinay Prasad is more on the nose for reasons that we'll discuss.
So, here's how I want to put it to you, Dr. Howard.
Prasad inhabits a world very much parallel to your own.
He's been an associate professor.
He works at San Francisco General Hospital.
Like you, he's published two books.
He also writes online, in his case for MedPage Today.
And like you, as we've just discovered, he also has a podcast.
How do we tell you apart?
So I think it's very hard to tell us apart.
And I think that's what makes doctors like him so interesting and so fascinating and ultimately so dangerous.
We both have credentials.
We both have fancy titles.
I think if we were to broadly state our approach to medicine and science, it would be the same.
We value science and data and logic and reason.
We don't look to tarot cards, our inner higher sources of wisdom, for example.
We have each published in the medical literature.
Dr. Prasad has published many more articles than I have.
He's a very impressive figure.
If I was a time traveler and I fell asleep in January 2020 and woke up today, I would not know who to believe, sort of him or me.
So I think the best way you tell us apart is to be very familiar with what we've said over the course of the pandemic.
So Dr. Prasad has been wrong about a lot of things.
And rather than recognizing them and expressing a little bit of humility, he doubled down quite a bit.
He wrote this article called Kids Don't Need COVID Vaccines to Return to School, where he said kids are less likely to acquire SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, than adults.
He wrote a long Twitter thread with the same thing.
In June 2021, he said, remember that cases are falling precipitously.
The actual numbers show that COVID and MIS, which is this horrific complication in some children, is plummeting with adult vaccination.
So the next year, in 2022, he continued to argue against COVID vaccination, and his reason in 2022 was, and I quote, most kids already had COVID-19.
The CDC estimates that 75% as of February, but this number is an underestimate as millions have been infected since.
So, whether cases were going down, kids don't need the COVID vaccines.
The next year, after a case had spiked, kids don't need the COVID vaccines.
So, he starts with this primary belief, and treats you as ridiculous, as a fool, if you don't agree with him.
I want to note that in looking over his YouTube channel, I saw what is actually a pretty typical contrarian influencer pattern, even if he's in a slightly different category.
His videos got pretty modest view counts in the low thousands until he suddenly broke through in December of 2021.
with a video on FDA vaccine officials resigning, and that had over 650,000 views.
And it was actually a follow-up to a very similar video on the same topic from two months previous that had cracked 500,000.
His next two big videos are titled, No One Wants the COVID Booster, and 11 Reasons an Annual COVID Booster is Not Like, in capitals, an Annual Flu Shot.
Then he covers topics like the CDC being wrong about myocarditis risks, And advises viewers not to report COVID test results to schools.
He also adds the word resist in the title of that last video.
So I can't help but see a turn there in terms of what is delivering maximum exposure and clicks and probably revenue for him.
And in this case, I'm also thinking about folks like Andrew Huberman, who hasn't gone full red-pilled conspiracist, but you know, he's got a mega lucrative deal with AG1, which I won't ask you to comment on, and he's fine endorsing completely unevidenced and unregulated supplement claims and then using cherry-picked studies to support his endorsements.
Most recently, he tweeted out his thoughts about how only trusting doctors who looked fit and healthy Kind of makes sense.
It kind of seems super reasonable.
Yeah, so I'm not a mind reader, so I can't say for sure.
And I'll say someone like Vinay Prasad, I think, had a stellar reputation before the pandemic, which is true of all of the doctors who I write about.
So I think it's a few things.
I think that they kind of made a reputation for themselves as just being a little bit different.
You know, someone like Kelly Brogren, if everyone says water is wet, she'll say water is dry.
These guys, if everyone says water is wet, will say water's wet most of the time, but sometimes it can be dry.
So it's just this reflexive sort of opposition.
And that's not always a bad thing.
We need people to think outside the box.
The woman who won the Nobel Prize for developing the mRNA COVID vaccines may be an example of such a person who was willing to think outside the box.
So there's nothing wrong with, we need contrarians.
We need people willing to do that.
But they couldn't turn it off.
When their predictions aged poorly, they just kept going on as if nothing ever happened.
You talked about people who sell unregulated supplements.
But some of these doctors can get big boosts from their income from their digital presence.
There was a very good article called Subscription Science, how crowdfunding has become a key
conflict of interest by doctors Benjamin Mazur and Michael Rose.
And I'll just quote from that a little bit.
They wrote, digital platforms such as Patreon, Substack, YouTube and Twitter allow fans to
offer recurring payments to healthcare professionals who produce opinion pieces, explanatory videos
and podcasts.
Substack, an online newsletter platform, is increasingly used by physicians to write to
the medical commentary, with some newsletters reaching tens of thousands of subscribers.
And they go on to sort of say that if a physician accrues 5,000 backers, they could expect 270,000
dollars in revenue.
And so Dr. Prasad has developed two things which I think are very dangerous.
He has developed a persona, right?
He has come out very strongly against COVID vaccines.
And so when articles come out, and I'll read from an article from January 8th, 2024, real world analysis, COVID-19 vaccine is strongly effective for children and adolescents during the Delta and the Omicron.
And that's one of about 30 articles all showing the same thing.
He can't do that because his personality is tied to COVID is mild for children.
The vaccine doesn't help them.
So all he can do is just dunk on these studies.
Ah, they're not an RCT.
And he has an audience to please.
For him to acknowledge that those studies are valid and that the vaccine has helped some children, it would be like Andrew Wakefield being like, oops, my bad.
Measles is actually dangerous.
He just can't do that at this point.
So, you know, you just mentioned Vinay Prasad making fun of people, right?
And he first came to my attention during 2021 when he started making regular appearances on the YouTube channel of another super reasonable doctor, Zubin Damania, who goes by ZDogg online and had at that time had a much bigger profile.
And they talked about the importance of COVID vaccines, but they also did a fair bit of lampooning journalists and public health officials, doctors and patients who they deemed too fearful to just get on with moving past quarantine measures now that the vaccines had become available.
So I want to play you a clip.
This is from September of 2021.
And this is right around the time that Vinay Prasad sort of starts to break through because he had just published a very controversial paper in The Atlantic.
ZPac, ZDoggMD, Dr. Vinay Prasad, VP.
Pleasure to be back.
What is up, son?
It's been a while.
Listen, just having you here is gonna get me cancelled on Twitter.
I hear that, yeah.
I've had doctors... Oh my god!
VP blocked me.
He said stuff about kids and he's not a pediatrician.
Oh boy.
Can we cancel The Atlantic for featuring his piece?
What even did you talk about in The Atlantic?
Yeah, I've seen a lot of calls to unsubscribe to The Atlantic.
They must have lost, I don't know, 10 or 15 readers over this.
But what did I write?
I wrote an article about the case for masking young children.
Of course, you know, in this country that the AAP and the CDC says mask kids too, and on up.
And even though the WHO says don't mask a child under six, and I wrote an article about what do we know about masking school aged children?
And I think people have overstated the evidence.
We really don't know a lot, and we don't know if it slows the spread of the virus in schools, and we really don't know what the long-term downsides might be to these kids.
One of the points was, there are many kids being hospitalized right now in some states.
And my counter-argument to that is, the point I'm making about masking the kids in school is, if we really don't know if that helps, and if it turns out that that doesn't help, then you can be spending great deals of political capital getting that to happen, and you will still have the problem of the kids coming in to the hospital.
Boy, there's a lot to discuss there.
you gotta do things that work and not things that merely appear to work,
but you don't know for sure they work.
And so that's why I'm pushing for cluster randomized trials.
And that's the point of my authentic article that, you know, rubs some people the wrong way.
Well, you know, I've lost three viewers over this, VP, for having you on.
Super reasonable, right?
Boy, there's a lot to discuss there.
Let me just say, this really shows a fundamental disagreement
that I have with Dr. Prasad.
And there's two core issues.
I'll start with how he ended it.
I'm pushing for randomized controlled trials, okay?
So what Dr. Prasad got famous during the pandemic for doing was just listing RCTs that he felt other people should do.
When he said, I'm pushing for them, he didn't mean I'm trying to get a grant to run such a trial myself.
What he meant is I'm going to just what he's doing right now.
I am making YouTube videos and podcasts and writing editorials saying someone else should do a trial.
And he set this up, that if you disagreed with him, you were against the highest form of evidence.
Because we all agree that randomized controlled trials are really the highest form of evidence that we have.
And this was a big, big problem during the pandemic, was that doctors like him made things that are very, very, very hard sound very, very easy.
I was in a randomized controlled trial.
I was in the RCT of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
I'm not a hero for that.
It was a very small thing, but it was a real thing.
And that's much more than he has done over the course of the pandemic.
And doing RCTs is really hard.
And you should read some quotes from people who actually were doing RCTs over the course of the pandemic.
I will read some of them for you.
Here's what one researcher said.
I think of what my clinical research team went through to enroll people in that trial, and I thought my nurses were going to die.
One of them got COVID and got sick.
Imagine trying to do that on a daily basis, multiple patients, some of them facing intubations, none of them have their families.
Another said, there was one day our system had 84 patients, and you're going to ask me to potentially put them on a placebo?
It's just really heart-wrenching talking with families.
If your patients are able to communicate and you're dealing with all these deaths.
And so, Vini Prasad said, do an RCT, do an RCT.
Again, not to advance medical research, but just to create doubt.
To say, we don't know if this works.
And he's right, but we have to make decisions in real time.
without the evidence of pristine knowledge.
And he had a very different attitude towards the virus.
He didn't demand RCT evidence to make sure that SARS-CoV-2 was safe.
He wrote an article titled, Should We Let Children Get Omicron?
And he wrote this article in February 2022.
This was after the The worst month of the pandemic for children was January 22.
I think something like 150 children died.
And he wrote, when it comes to infectious disease, normality means a world where they are routinely exposed to and overcome viral illness.
For children, getting sick and recovering is part of a natural and healthy life.
Parents must consider that exposures are how we best protect our children against the variants of the future.
In fact, it is reckless to let children age into a more serious encounter with a disease that best dealt with when younger.
Immunity is built through illness.
There is no RCTs supporting those statements.
Yeah, so you're pointing to a hypocrisy here, which, you know, really underlines what you were saying before.
Like, if you were an alien and you arrived here and you were, like, looking at these things, you would say, well, I'm not really sure.
They seem to have all the same qualifications.
They use very similar language.
They pledge allegiance to very similar kinds of standards of evidence and integrity.
But really, there's this sleight of hand that goes on where Any quarantine measures, oh, we don't have RCTs on those.
And in fact, that reminds me of RFK Jr.
You know, one of his big talking points is there has never been a single, and he'll list it all off, like randomized, double-blind, placebo, RCT, right?
That proves the safety of vaccines for children.
But if you really look at that, it's like, just as with this claim about masks So in the midst of the COVID pandemic, are you really saying we need to do a study where we have a control group of kids who don't mask at all and we have a group of kids who do mask and then we see if the ones who didn't mask get sick and die at a higher rate or develop serious illness, right?
Right, so we have to make decisions with incomplete evidence all the time, and the core fundamental disagreement is what do you view as a decision?
So Dr. Prasad would say a decision is intervening to stop a virus, whereas I would say Letting children repeatedly get COVID over and over again is also a decision.
He feels very comfortable making a set of recommendations about how we should just let kids develop natural immunity and there's no randomized controlled trials that prove that with COVID that is something that is a good idea, right?
And so it's interesting because that actually to me falls into kind of a political position, right?
Where there's this kind of libertarian attitude that sees taking away of quote-unquote freedoms as a much bigger deal in terms of a public policy decision than like just letting, you know, everyone do whatever the hell they want to do and the devil take the hindmost, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And again, I mean, Vinay Prasad wrote dozens of YouTube videos about vaccine side effects, which were not detected in randomized controlled trials.
It would be very interesting to follow a doctor on rounds during the day and Ask them, is every blood test you're ordering supported by a randomized controlled trial?
Is every x-ray and every EKG?
If I only made decisions that were supported by randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial of thousands of children or whatever, I wouldn't get anywhere.
Yeah, it's it sounds to me like it's really completely black and white, inappropriate, like fundamentalist misuse of a particular principle in a way that just creates doubt and just makes it seem like you're the reasonable one and everyone else is just, you know, basically going based on their biases.
So look, it was this is 2021 that we've largely been talking about in terms of what I've been sharing.
We could be forgiven, I suppose, for thinking that Maybe just like everyone else in the first couple of years of the pandemic, Prasad was just trying to make sense of an unfolding epistemic process.
Maybe he's corrected himself or generally landed on the scientific consensus we can dream.
But I'm going to share another clip, which is from just a few weeks ago, actually, just like 10 days ago, according to him.
And I say this because I can find no evidence of this else anywhere except on his YouTube channel.
He gave the keynote address at a bioethics conference.
Here's his explanation for why the measles vaccination rates are down.
I think right now we talk so much about the anti-vax sentiment.
And believe me, I lament it.
Dropping in MMR vaccination rates is a catastrophe.
Measles epidemics can be catastrophic.
You know, routine childhood immunization is very important, particularly for diseases that could be eradicated or near eradicated with high rates of, you know, sterilizing antibody titers, you know, like measles, for instance.
There are many very important childhood vaccines, but you can see every survey showing you that they're dropping and dropping and dropping.
Who is to blame for that?
I think we don't do enough to acknowledge that the establishment, to some degree, and pushing particularly the COVID-19 vaccine and booster on children who probably didn't need it, is eroding the benefit of the measles vaccine, which they probably do need.
We have to be very careful that you can't, you know, you've got to be careful.
So let me tell you about what happened in 2020.
So let me just say here, he goes on now to argue that some believe booster after booster could increase the risk of getting COVID, and that voices suggesting this were proudly published in Nature while Trump was president, and that the New York Times and other legacy media outlets were more skeptical of the vaccine during Trump's presidency, and then all of them flipped for political reasons after the election.
And he even says That there is no medical explanation.
This is the, let me tell you what happened in 2020.
There's no medical explanation for why the vaccine companies extended their data gathering period until after the election.
So it had to be that they wanted to make sure that Trump didn't get a vaccine bump in popularity.
Yeah, so listen, let me talk about his false narrative that COVID vaccines and measles vaccines are in competition with each other.
So, first of all, this was a very revealing segment, because notice how he talked about measles.
He correctly said measles can be a devastating disease for children, and he's right about that.
Notice how he talked about COVID, that they should get it, that it's a problem if you protect your children from getting it.
And so this is this because he knows that in 2019, anyone who said measles was a benign disease would be rightly called a quack.
Now, when did measles last kill children in the United States?
As far as I know, the last fatal outbreak of measles in the United States was in 1990 and 1991, when nine children in Philadelphia died during a measles outbreak due to under-vaccination.
Okay, and so Dr. Prasad is absolutely right about measles.
I think probably measles is more dangerous than COVID.
The measles vaccine is definitely better than the COVID vaccine, but At least here in the United States, COVID is what's circulating.
So here he is, a month after COVID killed 150 children, saying, let them get it, but oh, we need to protect them against measles.
And if he was right, Then we should be seeing that then the then Europe, especially the UK, should be very protected from measles at this time, because they were very slow to vaccinate their children.
They have a completely different COVID policy booster policy.
Well, guess what's going on in the UK right now?
People, measles is spiking.
They're much worse than here.
So COVID vaccines obviously are not to blame.
And if Dr. Prasad knew anything about the anti-vaccine movement, he would know that it's not a deficit of knowledge, but this is a deficit of trust.
And so you can see here at every step of the way, He is trying to promote fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
And he even made videos for Reason Magazine called Stop Trusting Public Health.
And so, if I made a video saying Stop Trusting Public Health, I wouldn't wonder Why people have stopped trusting public health.
And you can also look to the state of Florida as well, which had a very anti-vaccine policy towards children.
Their vaccination rates for routine vaccines are falling as well.
So I've written a lot about this on Science Based Medicine and I hope Dr. Prasad looks in the mirror and recognizes that his pro-virus, don't trust anyone rhetoric is What anti-vaxxers have been saying for decades, since the smallpox vaccine.
Yeah, and he's shifting the blame away from people who have created all of this vaccine confusion and misinformation and onto the public health apparatus and the fact that the science has been unfolding in real time and hasn't been perfect.
You know, here's just one more short clip to show that, in fact, he's remained quite preoccupied for the last two years or more with the issue of masking kids in school.
We compare the amount of randomized studies run on hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, tocilizumab, against the number of randomized studies run on face masks, school closure or school reopening, testing and screening strategies, and it turns out there are so many randomized studies of these drugs, and so few randomized studies of non-pharmacological interventions.
When it comes to obesity, nobody likes non-pharmacological interventions.
Nobody likes diet and exercise anymore.
We all like Ozempic.
When it comes to COVID, nobody likes pharmaceutical interventions.
They all like masking and quarantine and all these things, but they never studied any of these things.
To me, the one that is most problematic is the two-year-old masking policies.
All right, so this is still part of that keynote address that he gave just,
you know, sometime in the last 10 days or so.
And after this, he likewise invokes the complaint that no randomized controlled trials were done
on whether it helped to stop the spread of COVID to keep family members of patients getting bone
marrow transplants or cancer treatment off the ICUs or to prevent them from seeing someone
dying of COVID.
Yeah, I mean, again, not everything can be studied in a random...
trial, and not everything should be. We don't have randomized controlled trials of fire
hydrants and smoke detectors. Not everything needs to be subject to a randomized controlled
trial. A lot of doctors got big reputations by essentially saying, ìHere's what I would
have done.î A lot of these are just engineering problems rather than randomized controlled
trial problems.
How do you stop a virus from spreading in a hospital, for example?
Yeah, absolutely.
So look, at the risk of getting a bit conspiracy minded ourselves, I want to tie things back around to someone who I know is your favorite think tank guru, Jeffrey Tucker, and his Brownstone Institute.
And both Tucker and Brownstone have ties to AEIR, which is the American Economic, what's it called?
The American Institute for Economic Research, who sponsored Something called the Great Barrington Declaration, which listeners may remember, was that controversial open letter delivered with much fanfare by a group of contrarian doctors and academics in October of 2020.
And it calls for basically just allowing COVID to run rampant with no quarantine measures, let everyone rapidly develop natural immunity, And, you know, let the people who don't survive just die.
And that's a tough strategy to do ethical randomized controlled trials on, but it turns out it's not actually that far from what some red states did.
It's even closer to what Sweden opted to do at scale.
In essence, this gave us data, and the data, as it turns out, was appalling.
Specifically, Sweden, the last I checked, had about 40 times the death rate of Norway during the first year of the pandemic, and then it sort of leveled out.
And some red states here apparently had about 30% more deaths from COVID than blue states.
I don't think that Prasad and his buddy ZDogg were at least officially involved in the Great Barrington Declaration, but what's your sense of how super reasonable expert influencers like them intersect with that actually quite political libertarian discourse and its motivations?
Let me just do something I don't think I've ever done before, and I'll at least defend the Great Barrington Declaration a little bit.
It wasn't, in theory, a completely wet-it-rip policy.
They had this fantasy that you could identify vulnerable people and not vulnerable people, that you could dichotomize them.
That death was the only bad outcome from COVID, and that you could completely wall off these groups, and that if about 250 million, at the time, unvaccinated, so-called not vulnerable Americans contracted COVID simultaneously, herd immunity would arise in three to six months, and the pandemic would be over.
So yeah, it didn't work out that way, but they They felt that older and vulnerable people should be sheltered at home and essentially taken care of by the government.
Now, I don't think that they really meant it.
I mean, their plan consisted of things like seniors should have groceries and other essentials delivered to them at home, which, again, is like my plan for world peace.
Great.
But there's a big difference between writing that sentence or back to Vinay Prasad saying do an RCT and actually delivering Groceries to tens of millions of homebound seniors in the middle of a pandemic.
So, yeah, all... Vinay Prasad and ZDogg were not officially involved in the Great Barrington Declaration.
But they all intersect and they all overlap.
So it's this sort of web of network of things.
So, for example, Vinay Prasad is good friends with, he's also said that he thinks the Great Barrington Declaration got it right about many things.
And he is good friends with Dr. John Ioannidis, a very famous, probably the most famous scientist in the country, maybe besides Fauci.
He was an epidemiologist at Stanford who was good friends with Scott Atlas, who became Trump's coronavirus czar.
They were in touch daily and who embraced this idea that the best way to get rid of COVID was to spread COVID.
And Jay Bhattacharya was on ZDogg's podcast in 2021 where ZDogg called him, let's see if I can find the exact quote, he called him Let's see here.
He said, you're fearless, you're compassionate, you're rational.
The ZDogg, this former advocate for vaccines, was praising this anti-vaccine doctor who wanted to purposefully infect children.
And that's Jay Bhattacharya, who is one of the three main figures in the Great Barrington Declaration.
Just back to Jeffrey Tucker.
I mean, what kind of guy is he?
He's not a very good guy.
He wrote an article in 2016 called, Let the Kids Work.
And the title really says it all.
He said, I'll just read from it.
He talked about closing public schools, or at least letting children drop out.
He said, if kids were allowed to work, compulsory school attendance was abolished.
The jobs of choice would be at Chick-fil-A, at Walmart, and they would be fantastic jobs,
too, instilling in young people a work ethic, which is the inner drive to succeed and awareness
of attitudes that make enterprise for all.
It would give them skills and discipline that build character and help them become part
of a professional network.
He denigrated school.
He said, ìCompare this to any scene you can observe today at the local public school with
30 kids sitting in desks, boards out of their minds, creativity and imagination beaten out
of their brains, forbidden from earning money,î and it goes on and on and on.
He was also pro-tobacco.
He felt that children should smoke while at school.
And he went on to found the Brownstone Institute, which I know you guys have talked about before,
but it's become a major source of COVID misinformation.
So Vinay Prasad writes for them.
Jay Bhattacharya writes for the Brownstone Institute.
And here he is, an oncologist nonetheless, legitimizing a man who is openly pro-child labor
as child labor laws are being loosened throughout the country, including in Florida,
where a lot of the Great Barrington Declaration doctors had influence, and is pro-tobacco.
You know, but here is Persaud willing to lend the legitimacy of the medical profession His name, our profession, to someone who wants my daughter to drop out of school so she can smoke with her friends during her break from flipping burgers at Chick-fil-A.
I guess they flip chickens at Chick-fil-A.
But you get my point.
Yeah, yeah.
That's pretty astounding.
Alright, so we focused a fair bit on Vinay Prasad as an archetype of the super reasonable doctor who's actually tiptoeing down the conspiracy path.
But, you know, we've mentioned ZDogg a few times, his friend, and one thing about him is that he's a little bit more in the conspirituality wheelhouse.
Every now and again, I've noticed on his channel, maybe we can end with a quote from him on this, he likes to play at being a bit of a meditation teacher or a kind of non-dual awakening guru.
Yeah, so ZDogg was a vaccine hero before the pandemic, who made these really clever, funny videos and was an outspoken vaccine advocate, and he's another doctor who correctly talked about measles as a devastating disease.
He talked about the measles outbreak in Samoa before the pandemic in 2019, which killed about 60 children, mostly under the age of four, and he said at the time The tragedy of measles deaths in Samoa is a stark warning.
Never listen to the anti-vaccine cult when they say this natural disease is harmless.
He's right about that.
Fast forward a year.
Here's how he talked about COVID.
He said, even though this thing, COVID, has killed less, you know, or about as many as the flu would kill in a normal year in kids, I say hardly any.
By that point, about 300 children had died of COVID.
And when he said hardly any had died, so 300 dead children, that is his standard for hardly any.
He made this podcast with Dr. Monica Gandhi.
Again, this is October 2020, before anyone was vaccinated.
And he said, we live in this now moment that is so colored by anxiety, fear of mortality,
fear of other, fear of everything.
And that's a coloration of what we actually are, which is beyond death and life.
And it has nothing to do with religion.
This is a purely an experience that you can have through meditation.
And once you have that experience, your fear of death, and in fact, in many ways, when
you really have an experience like that, and you can have it through prayer, you can have
it through meditation, you can have it through looking at the stars as an atheist, the ego
dies transiently, and you experience death.
And what you're left with is this still ever-present awareness.
Hey, that's not so bad.
And I think it's worth comparing it to what people who actually Dr. Jonathan Howard, it's been a pleasure talking to you again.
There was one nurse who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and after seeing 3,000 people die of COVID,
she said, war doesn't even compare to this.
I would rather die any other way of dying than dying of coronavirus.
Dr. Jonathan Howard, it's been a pleasure talking to you again.
Thank you so much for your time.
I want to direct people to read you on science-based medicine,
to go and get your book, We Want Them Infected, and to check out the podcast by the same name.
