Interview with Jonathan Howard on Covid Contrarians
The pandemic was a confusing time with public health messages from officials and institutions that were sometimes confused, conflicting, or misrepresented and anti-vaccine misinformation being spread widely. Into this mix, a new phenomenon emerged, that of the covid contrarian. Contrarian doctors usually possessed some relevant qualifications and positioned themselves as independent critical thinkers willing to challenge the dogmas of the mainstream and take a more nuanced perspective on the claims made by anti-vaccine advocates.These contrarian figures are the voices that you would usually hear on 'heterodox' podcasts. Figures like the medical doctor Vinay Prasad, the Stanford professor of Medicine Jay Bhattacharya, or the retired nurse, John Campbell. But did they really offer an alternative critical perspective? Our guest today, Jonathan Howard, a practising doctor and professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, argues no. And he should know, he has spent the pandemic not only treating patients but tirelessly documenting (and refuting) the claims made by the contrarian set. This episode is unfortunately topical due to the recent online fracas surrounding Joe Rogan's credulous promotion of RFK Jnr and the subsequent 'calls for debate' and targeted harassment of Dr Peter Hotez -a public health specialist and advocate for affordable vaccines. In any case, we learnt a lot and enjoyed the discussion with Jonathan and hope you will too. Also covered in this episode: How many pull-ups Matt can do, why Chris is drinking a chalky green potion, and the psychology of placebos.LinksJonathan's New Book- We Want Them InfectedJonathan's articles on the pandemic at Science-Based-MedicineJonathan's Older Book- Cognitive Errors and Diagnostic Mistakes: A Case-Based Guide to Critical Thinking in MedicineWhat the Heck Happened to John Ioannidis?Honestly with Bari Weiss: RFK Jr. Is Striking a Nerve. He Explains Why.Vinay Prasad at The Free Press: What RFK Jr. Gets Right—and What He Gets WrongVinay Prasad at Unherd: We need to talk about the vaccinesVice Article: Joe Rogan, Elon Musk Instigate Harassment Campaign Against Vaccine ScientistUncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps: "RFK, Joe Rogan & Vaccines" with Michael ShermerVox Article: Joe Rogan wants a “debate” on vaccine science. Don’t give it to him.
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh.
How are you doing today, Chris?
You feeling healthy?
Feeling chipper?
I'm a regular Mr. Motivator.
You won't know him, Matt.
He's a celebrity from the 90s, I think, in the UK.
He was like a kind of exercise, TV exercise man who wore a bright rainbow.
Black British guy.
Yeah, Mr. Motivator.
I don't know of him, but you're my motivator because you have a pull-up bar in your office and you have been doing pull-ups and that inspired me to buy my own pull-up bar and attempt to do pull-ups.
But I think the ratio of my arm muscle to belly fat is prejudicial and I've managed just a few and then I hurt my arm.
Some ways to go there, Chris.
Some ways to go.
I could be an evangelical person for pull-up bars because I think they're kind of exercise and there's lots of variations of stuff that you can do, right?
But they're easy to do in a set amount of time.
That's why I need efficiency.
I'm an optimizer.
I've got things to be doing.
And I have young kids, have jobs and have a podcast and whatnot.
I need to make my exercise time extremely efficient.
It is efficient.
I'll grant that because it totally fucked my arms in like three minutes.
You know, I'm one of these people.
I like the sense of progress, right?
Like that you initially can do X amount and now you can do this amount and so on.
So yeah, that's good.
I'm glad to see, you know, a man of your age.
Getting back into the exercise zone.
That's the other disadvantage I have.
So we shouldn't be comparing how many we can do, stuff like that.
It's the wrong comparison.
It's the wrong question to be asking.
But I also do the virtual reality dancer-sizing music.
Oh, yeah.
What is it called?
Audio Trip is the app I like.
So, you know, my sense of accomplishment is when I can do all the moves to a Lady Gaga song and I get to the end and I've hit all the little glowing thingy.
Things with you.
Lightsaber sticks.
Yeah, I mean, I've played Beat Saber, as you know, and I think that is a proper workout.
There's a game called Superhot, which is like, it's kind of like the Matrix, like this kind of highly stylized world.
But you know, the bullets leave little trails, and the mechanic is, as you move, the bullets move, right?
But the thing is that the game actually makes you constantly contort.
Actually, I recommend that for you as a VR.
You also recommended that boxing game.
You like the fighting games.
I like the dancing games.
I think this says a lot about us, Chris.
That's a very good, yeah.
What's that?
Fight Night.
That's a very good VR boxing.
Making the Fight Night 2 was not out yet.
But when that happens, Matt, they are claiming that they will allow multiplayer where, you know, somebody else can use their VR.
Headset somewhere else and fight them.
So if that happens, we obviously have to do a fight.
We have to fight.
I'll make my avatar suitably ridiculous.
Yeah, that'll be fun.
So we can do that.
We can disagree and then go in and we can offer any of the gurus to come up.
Not an actual fight where people could actually get hurt.
Just virtual reality.
Exercise from a middle-aged man who can't actually box properly.
That would be entertaining, no?
I see you're sipping on a bottle of green goo there, Chris.
Is that part of your health?
Well, yeah.
So that, what to say about that?
I'll say, Matt, that, you know, on this podcast, I've detailed to the listener's joy and great fascination my developing interest in...
Mixed nuts of different varieties.
I've talked about my struggles with sweet coffee from Japanese convenience stores.
You know, the struggle is real.
Jordan Peterson has a cider.
Other people have chronic health problems.
I have a slight tendency to drink too much sweet coffee.
And I did, you know, I didn't mention it, Matt, but I was kind of went, I think, a month and a half or so completely off.
But I managed to just switch my addiction to a different brand.
Because there was a specific brand that I really liked.
And then I was like, if I can just get off that, I don't like the other brand, so I'll be good.
And then I tried one of the brands that I don't like, and I was like, yeah, I don't really like that.
So I can take that because I'm not going to get addicted to that.
Yeah, you do.
Of course you do.
And now that's the only one I drink.
I don't like the original one anymore.
I'm such a fucking victim of psychology.
But so, now.
The green, green goop I'm drinking.
So, yeah, you know, people occasionally want to advertise on our podcast.
And there was a certain company that, you know, I think wants to entice us to allow them to advertise and offer to send a sample of their wares.
Now, I'm pretty aware that we are not going to be advertising supplements on this podcast, given the theme.
Nobody, you know, the whole thing was pretty transparent.
I said, yeah, you can send the sample, you know, but we are a science podcast, so it's rather unlikely.
And they said, no strings attached, you know, just try.
But the thing is, Matt, so without naming names, I have a thing that creates what I would describe as a green potion, right?
Full up of all these, basically multivitamin kind of thing.
Does it have antioxidants?
I'm sure it does.
Yeah, it probably does.
It's removing my toxins and it's making my gut biosphere into a relative.
It's like a rainforest down there.
Yeah.
But so the thing is, I'm a human, Matt, right?
I might not always seem it, but I and I'm somebody interested in like, you know, ritual psychology and that kind of thing.
And crucially, I'm someone that wants to curb my coffee consumption.
And I can't do it by willpower.
So I've tried various things and it kind of works, but not that well.
But this thing is kind of working because it takes me a long time to drink because it's like, you know, like a chalky green drink.
And it's not bad, but it's not good.
So it's the whole thing of, you know, putting a powder in and mixing it around and stuff like that.
It kind of takes up.
Mental load.
And it ends up that it has reduced my coffee consumption.
That's what I wanted it to do.
But I do feel conflicted because I'm not sold on all the various alleged health benefits from taking multivitamins.
I think they basically don't do anything unless you're deficient.
Like, you know, you're a pregnant woman who needs iron or you're...
Not getting enough vitamin D or whatever.
But like, overall, I don't think it does much.
But the kind of placebo, psychological effect, and the ability to curb my sweet coffee drinking.
Yeah, you know what I'm saying.
I get it.
I get it.
Your problems are primarily psychological ones, not health-related ones.
So it's the right thing for you.
Yeah, personally.
After we talked before, I felt a little bit peckish.
I marched to the kitchen.
I fried three pieces of bacon, two eggs, and lots of butter, and made some homemade barbecue sauce.
And I made a barbecue bacon and egg sandwich.
That's my attitude.
And that's why your pull-up, Max Rap, will never.
But your life will be significantly better.
Yeah, I said this to you before, but I also feel like, you know, in the...
The Matrix or the Matrix, whichever version you've seen.
The agent tells Neo that when they made the artificial human world, they made the initial version like a paradise.
And they said human minds couldn't accept it because you just don't like, you want grime and you want, you know, like kind of things to be bad.
Basically Twitter.
Yeah.
But I kind of feel the same way with this whole category of healthy green drinks or whatever.
Like if the drink was bright pink.
And it had the exact same ingredients.
I feel like people wouldn't feel it's as healthy.
And also, if it tasted sweet, right?
Like if it was sweet and good and it didn't have the slightly unpleasant chalky residue, it wouldn't have the same effect.
So like, because our minds are like medicine should be slightly unpleasant or things that are good for you shouldn't be that good.
It's interesting.
As you know, Chris, there's a big literature on the placebo effect and how to maximize it.
And obviously, the more intense you can make the placebo, the better it is.
And, you know, I think that's got something to do with the Chinese medicines they have.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which I took many times.
And, you know, it generally, I'm sure you've had it yourself, generally comes in a sachet of powder.
And it is always an intensely bitter...
Foul powder that you have to put on your tongue and it's dry and it sticks to your tongue just to make it worse.
And they could put it in a pill, right?
So you could swallow it without having to taste that, but they don't.
But they don't because my theory is that the suffering is part of it.
There's a supplemental side of medicine in Japan, which is actually very mainstream.
Like you'll get it from the majority of doctors in Japan will prescribe.
Normal medication, antibiotics, whatnot, but also this thing called Campo, which is Chinese herbal medicine in essence.
But I looked into it and it's sort of interesting because what they've done is they have kind of...
One of the issues with Chinese herbal medicine is that you don't really know what's there, right?
Because the kind of standards for how it's prepared are not very stringent, right?
And so even if something says it's...
Ginseng herb or whatever the case might be.
It might not be, right?
Or it might be a mixture of other things.
But in Japan, it seems like the manufacturing is regulated pretty tightly, almost like pharmaceutical industry standards.
And they've kind of restricted it to the...
Some of them are not really effective, but they're all the ones that actually have physiological effects.
And so it...
Like, they do do things, but they're always, like you say, in these little satchels with an extremely bitter taste to them.
And yeah, and for the most part, it's placebo or, you know, like a very mild effect in whatever the case might be.
So yeah, like a lot of medicine does this, like also modern medicine.
It's not like doctors are above exploiting the placebo effect.
They will often...
Prescribed medications where the main thing they're doing is giving the person something that will set their mind at ease, but actually they probably don't need.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
When you're a GP and you have people that will just keep coming in and wanting something, so you give them something that's not going to hurt them.
Yeah, yeah.
This is how I feel about my green concoction.
Maybe it's because of all the computer games.
You drink the little green potion and go...
I think that is part of the association in my mind.
But that's it.
It's my confession, Matt.
It's my...
I like all humans.
It doesn't matter if you know about ritual psychology or you know about the association and all those kind of things.
You're still a victim to your psychology.
So it does...
It does work.
I'm sure if you took an effect measure of me, I'd feel more positive effect after consuming my green gup bottle.
Absolutely.
Being a professor of specializes in addiction, it hasn't helped me at all in resisting the various things I shouldn't be consuming too much of.
What a camerasist, Matt.
What a camerasist is accepting money.
Yes, and I'd like to think we would not accept it even if we weren't doing a science podcast, if we were doing a podcast about movies or something.
I'd like to think we would take it.
I don't know.
It depends how much they're off.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, but it depends.
It depends on the company or whatever.
But anyway, that's my report on unnamed green.
Substance, I'm concerned.
So, today we've got a great guest who's going to talk to us about stuff to do with the COVID contrarians.
And another COVID vaccine contrarian who's been making a splash recently is Joe Rogan.
Hey, Chris.
Shocking.
He's usually so good on this topic that it's really surprising to see him engage in anti-vaccine discourse.
Yes, and to be clear, this is not someone who, I don't know, has concerns about lockdowns or booster shot for the COVID vaccine.
This is someone who thinks that the thimerosal or mercury in vaccines is killing us all.
He's old school.
MMR vaccine, autism, Wi-Fi causes cancer.
This is something he talked about.
And all of the people, I want to ask all of the people, including Joe Rogan, and all of the people, the idiots that are sort of on the other side of this, have they stopped using their Wi-Fi?
If they think this guy is so great and he's right about everything, have they turned off their Wi-Fi?
No, they haven't.
They haven't, have they, Chris?
No, they have not.
So there's, I think they would just say, well, you know, I don't agree with him on everything that he says.
But like that, again, it might be an indication that perhaps his standards of evidence are somewhat lacking.
And yeah, so the one thing is, should you be interested in it?
Debunk the Funk has a detailed 40 plus minute episode refuting the various claims that RFK makes on the episode.
Vinay Prasad, one of the COVID contrarians that Jonathan Howard, our guest, will talk about, on the other hand, has produced an article saying, oh, the things that RFK gets right and the things that it gets wrong, you know, it's kind of a mixed bag, 50-50.
Shocking!
That was also his take with Robert Malone and Peter McCulloch, who we covered, and I would say, it's not exactly 50-50 on the amount that they get right and wrong, but if you're in a heterodark space...
This is seen as the nuanced position to take.
And Barry Weiss recently interviewed RFK Jr.
Lex Friedman has announced that he's going to interview him.
And yeah, their framing of this, and particularly Barry Weiss's.
Now, an incumbent challenger has never won the primaries in modern political history.
And RFK Jr. probably isn't going to break that historical precedent.
But that he's doing this well, this early on, tells you a tremendous amount about the current state of our politics.
Namely, that Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the options on the table, especially Democrats, who are desperate, it seems, for a Biden alternative.
According to one recent poll, four in ten Democrats, almost half of Democrats in America, want Biden to step aside in 2024.
So that's the political aspect of this story.
RFK's popularity also tells you, I think, something much deeper and perhaps more unsettling about what's happening in American life that goes well beyond partisan politics.
And that brings us back to Joe Rogan and the wager currently on the table.
At the heart of that Twitter storm is not the question of whether or not this doctor or that one is going to go on Rogan for a debate.
It's really about the broader and far more existential issue about who we trust and who we don't trust these days.
And the fact is that many Americans seem to trust Joe Rogan more than they trust the New York Times, even more than they trust the CDC.
And we should think deeply about the reasons why that might be.
It also speaks to the question of what fits into the realm of acceptable conversation and acceptable disagreement in our culture.
And whether the lines of debate have been drawn too narrowly, and whether RFK Jr. should be in or out, and whether or not the questions he raises are legitimate ones.
He says things in public life that are considered by some to be out-and-out disinformation or conspiracy theories.
But others hear what he's saying and hear a brave truth-teller willing to suffer the consequences of going against groupthink.
So what you hear there, Matt, is her presenting it as some people have criticisms of his position, but is it just because he's asking, you know, questions that people would rather aren't looked at in the light of day?
And, you know, is it just that people are afraid to address these issues?
And the fact that he's popular, doesn't that mean?
But, like, he's popular amongst her.
The reason for him increasing profile stuff is because of people like Barry Weiss.
It's kind of this weird thing where they act like, how is he getting attention?
And why is he becoming talked about while they platform him and promote him and talk about him?
And it's like, Yuri, it's you guys.
There is this process of laundering from The absolute loony extremes.
And then there's all of these figures that Occupy points along that crazy spectrum up to the enlightened centrists just keeping an open mind and let's hear all the arguments, etc.
Where the crazy stuff gets laundered along the way and becomes increasingly more mainstream and more and more supposedly within an Overton window of reasonable conversation.
It's really quite annoying.
And the other thing you notice about this stuff is that, of course, Joe Rogan has demanded in his sort of great chief sort of way that Peter Hotez come on the podcast to debate RFK Jr.
Because that's obviously how medical and scientific questions get sorted out via a one-on-one deathmatch on the Joe Rogan podcast between a prominent figure on one side and a prominent figure on the other.
And Hotez...
Until now, it has probably quite rightly resisted the temptation to accept that offer.
But the thing I wanted to mention, Chris, is just how their brains work.
Like, this obsession with Fauci, as if he's like this mastermind pulling all these strings and is responsible for all this stuff, has now switched to Hotez, who is now as complicit in probably taking money from Big Pharma or whatever the idiots are saying.
Like, it's this thing that's intrinsic to conspiracy theories, where there's this pull for them to focus on personalities and on individual characters as if they are these instrumental figures, and the way to sort it out is by focusing on them.
And it's just like, has it ever occurred to them to look to the scientific consensus in the literature?
That's just not something that they seem to be able to do.
No, it's not interesting.
And also, like, a lot of this has...
Now I swirled around the discourse land about whether or not to debate conspiracy theorists or anti-vaccine people, whether that is strategically a good thing to do,
right?
Because if you give the public the impression that you're afraid to debate them, it can garner them further support.
And other people are saying, actually, it is possible to debate.
People and effectively reveal that, you know, they are presenting like things in an inaccurate way and like kind of unmask them.
And that is possible.
But it's also not a skill that people automatically have developed.
Like, you know, we've looked at like Peter Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan.
Christopher Hitchens, yeah.
Christopher Hitchens and who was the other?
Tariq Ramadan, I think.
Yeah, but in any case, we've seen lots of people who are good orators, and a subset of good orators are also good debaters, right?
I think the part where I agree with some of the heterodox folk is that I think there is value in critical debates that you can actually have effective outcomes.
There's plenty of examples that people can point to historically.
But it's also true that...
Winning a debate or being rhetorically more powerful does nothing to the underlying scientific evidence.
So it is an approach which comes with the potential of making a position which is fringe, seeing that it's more valid.
And actually, the evidence base doesn't change no matter what the perception of that is.
So you can understand why people are hesitant.
But I also think it is...
True that there can be value to people debating cranks and conspiracy theories if they're prepared to do the work in order to prepare for that.
Yeah, I agree with all that.
If anything, I'm probably a little bit more skeptical of the value of debates.
I mean, people should, by all means, have them if they want to have them.
But if you are somebody that is constrained by facts and evidence and basically being truthful, then I think that puts you at an intrinsic...
Rhetorical disadvantage.
When you're not constrained by that, you can focus on emotion-laden, hard-hitting stuff that sounds rhetorically powerful.
Not everything can be fact-checked in real time.
Sorry, Jamie.
That puts the good guys at a bit of a disadvantage there.
I know.
I also want to highlight that...
This contradiction just so annoys me, Matt.
Joe Rogan was in the ownership position of some description for Onnit, the supplement company that he helped to find with Aubrey Marcus.
They sold it last year, I think it was last year, to Unilever for an undisclosed amount, but estimated to be $100 million plus for the company, and potentially much higher.
And undisclosed how much of that goes to Rogan, what his particular role in the company is.
But the point is, they sold a supplement company to this large multinational global company, right, to make money.
And Rogan's already a millionaire making whatever million, a hundred million deal with Spotify.
Peter Hotez, in comparison, is someone who spends all of his time promoting public health and actually trying to develop.
Or successfully develop an alternative low-cost vaccine to offer in low-income developing countries and whatnot.
And you're just like, him being vilified by the rich millionaires who are shilling supplements, it's immoral.
It's disgusting, frankly.
And people don't call Rogan on that aspect of it much.
They kind of accept his framing and even whether, you know, But I think it should be focused on that Rogan makes tons of money from multinational companies and then he rages against the machine and presents himself as this guy fighting back against the mainstream.
Who else is the part owner of a multi-million supplement company in this discussion?
This is obviously a classic element of conspiratorially minded people, which is that extreme suspicion of A certain type of group, right?
The people that are the target of the conspiracies.
But this amazing naivety and total credulity when it comes to the motivations of the people that they're listening to.
Like, it never seems to cross anyone's mind or any of their fans' minds that maybe what they say are their motivations and not entirely...
You know, the right ones.
Like, is Lex Fridman really motivated by extending the amount of love in the universe?
Is that why he's invited RFK Jr. on?
Or maybe he's interested in the metrics of his podcast, and maybe he likes the large amount of money he makes from his podcast, and that's why he's doing it.
See, I do think that, though, I retain the view that, like, with people like Lex, that they are sincere in that they justify decisions that they make.
No, I totally agree.
And to clarify, this is connected to the thing that you often talk about, which is that lack of self-awareness.
I agree with you.
I don't think they themselves are aware of entirely of the mechanics that underlies their decision-making.
Like, you know, they legitimately see that a bigger profile, more viewers, more income, more people saying that they're great is an indication that they are doing the right thing and the good thing.
So, yeah.
Yeah, and the last thing I'll say on the whole issue is that so there's all these tweets going back and forth between Rogan and Hotes and supporters and detractors and the various right-wing Pundits,
which are increasing the pot to see this debate, right?
And I think that speaks to a little bit like what this is about.
It's, you know, it's spectacle and it is polemical.
But the other aspect of it is that when you get that kind of attention, Peter Hotez has already had, like, people approach him at his house, right?
And he has already had somebody tweeting at him a box of ammunition or a packet of ammunition.
And then saying, you know, we know what to do with the Nazi Nuremberg people.
So, like, you know, the rhetoric is very high.
And when Rogan and the larger right-wing ecosystem, including anti-vax ecosystem, target someone, it's dangerous.
Like, it can really disrupt the whole life.
And Rogan doesn't get that, right?
Like, he isn't having people...
Like, approaches him at his family house and send, you know, bullets at him.
But he unleashes that ecosystem on public health doctors, and he does very little to, like, counteract it.
Like, he could tweet out now, you know, this isn't okay.
Like, I disagree, but I don't want anybody threatening Peter Hotez, like he's, you know, or any doctor.
He could do that, but he never will.
So, yeah.
And for the people that are conspiratorially minded and that sort of see the world in terms of a struggle between, you know, independent free thinkers looking to help people versus, you know, rich and powerful interests.
I mean, look at all of these people that are on Joe Rogan's side, including Joe Rogan, throwing massive amounts- Throwing hundreds of thousands.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I mean, these people are rich.
Peter Hotas, he's an academic and a researcher.
He's the editor-in-chief of Neglected Tropical Diseases.
He's not one of these rich and powerful bloody tech bros.
His profile and his entire career seems to be that of someone that is...
I think he's a high-profile public health advocate in the US.
So he's probably not just like a standard academic.
But if you compared the bank balances of...
Him and Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, you're going to see a massive discrepancy, right?
Exactly.
I'm not saying he's a poor person.
He's not me, Matt.
No, he's a successful academic, Chris.
Yeah.
Well, that's it.
It's topical because we're going to talk to Jonathan Howard now about the figures in the debate around COVID and the public health measures taken who are not necessarily your hardcore anti-vaxxers,
but those that just, you know, framed themselves as offering the alternative perspective, which wasn't allowed to be discussed in the mainstream and just raising questions about some aspects of the vaccine for certain populations and, you know, potential dangerous side effects and whatnot.
And we'll see from the discussion how accurate that framing is.
Yep, it was an excellent discussion with Jonathan, so let's hear from him now.
Okay, so with us we have Dr. Jonathan Howard, Associate Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at New York University Langold.
Is that right?
Am I pronouncing that right?
It was terrible.
Langone.
Langone, he's a big donor.
Langone, yeah.
And the Chief of Neurology at Bellevue Hospital.
That's another thing that you've done.
And you have written a book recently, We Want Them Infected, about COVID contrarian doctors during the pandemic.
But I also saw, when I was looking around your bio, that you wrote a previous book called Cognitive Errors and Diagnostic Mistakes, A Case-Based Guide to Critical Thinking in Medicine.
And you're a contributor to science-based medicine blogs.
So, you've done a lot.
I've been writing for a while, yeah, and it's funny.
You know, what I'm kind of most proud of is my neurology textbooks.
No one reads those, but that's where I've really put forth the most effort, so.
I'll tell you, Joven, I think this is a secret sauce, though, to be an unseen person online.
When you have actual, like, life worth achievements, which isn't all based around, you know, the online drama.
I mean, actually, probably.
We'll talk about that a bit with the COVID contrarians and doctors and what appeals to them.
Yeah, so I think it's good that you have textbooks that people don't read.
They have no idea.
Yeah, some people read them, but you know.
Well, not too many people know they exist, but that's okay.
They're kind of niche.
I think the issue is neurology is hard.
It's very difficult.
It's a difficult topic.
So yeah, popular science books tend to be.
Tend to be a bit, you know, easier to digest, maybe.
Well, also, but also, like, students don't read textbooks.
Why do?
Because I test them.
Yeah, they should read them more.
Look at this.
Professor's completing a vice student's lack of reading.
That's all true, but we'll probably touch on a whole bunch of other stuff, but in particular, we wanted to talk to you, Jonathan, because of...
Not just your book, but actually during the pandemic, you've been someone I've followed online, read your articles and followed your Twitter feed.
And it's fair to say that you've been pushing back on the kind of contrarian doctors as well as the outright anti-vax crowd throughout the pandemic.
So I'm curious, like just first of all, is that something that primarily began with the COVID pandemic?
You know, long term being fighting back against anti-vaxxers and that kind of stuff.
I've been doing it long-term, probably a little bit more anonymous.
I first got interested in the anti-vaccine movement probably in about 2010 when an old friend of mine, someone I trained with at Bellevue Hospital, and really the only doctor in the book who I've met personally, a woman by the name of Dr. Kelly Brogan, became one of America's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors.
And when I worked with her and trained with her, you know, she was nice.
We were friendly.
You know, she kind of had a rebellious streak, but, you know, she still had to...
We treat sick patients and therefore couldn't recommend coffee enemas and gluten-free diets to everyone.
But when she left, you know, kind of like a lot of people, I started seeing anti-vax posts on Facebook.
And it was a little bit surprising to learning that they were coming from her because she's smart.
She went to MIT.
She went to Cornell.
I mean, she's not stupid.
And at first they were very convincing.
I didn't know exactly what was wrong with them and this sort of thing.
For example, her...
Ex-husband wrote an article in 2013 called "200 Evidence-Based Reasons Not to Vaccinate Your Children" and one of the articles was about a measles outbreak in a highly vaccinated population and that's how he Called this article.
When you read the article, essentially what it said is that you can have measles outbreaks in areas where most children are vaccinated, as long as the 1% or 2% of unvaccinated kids all live in the same neighborhood or sort of cluster together.
So it was really a very pro-vaccine article.
But he rearranged the words, he rearranged the title of the article to trick people.
And that was sort of really kind of an awakening moment for me, just to realize how mendacious these people were.
And I was never really interested in vaccines, which one's live, which one's inactivated, etc.
But really, now it actually has to go back with cognitive errors and diagnostic mistakes and the brain.
Why do smart people?
Believe these sort of weird things.
And I got very fascinated by the anti-vaccine movement in particular.
And I learned, thanks to a lot of people who taught me, how to rebut all of their arguments.
I wrote a book article, a book chapter, in 2018 called The Anti-Vaccine Movement, A Litany of Fallacies and Errors with Law Professor Dori Reese.
So I've been doing this a while.
And I think it, unfortunately, prepared me well for what we're going to talk about next, the pandemic.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And I think it is something that is worth, like, emphasizing that people who can get caught up in not just anti-vaccine movements, but also, you know, other types of conspiracy movements and that sometimes they're presented as very credulous,
gullible people.
But in many cases, it's actually people that are, like, quite creative and intelligent and they're able...
In a way, to create more intricate explanations and alternative understandings of how the world works because of that.
So Kelly Brogan, I became aware of because of the Conspiraturality podcast covering her.
But it's interesting that you had experience with her before the turn towards kind of hardcore anti-vaccine thing because I think...
She was married and recently divorced to another guy, Sire G, who was like another large anti-vaxxing output.
So, yeah, I'm curious just before we kind of move on a bit, is there anything from that personal experience that like particularly stands out to you about kind of in hindsight?
Warning flags or things that, you know, afterwards kind of saw as pointing to a susceptibility?
Or is it more that actually there wasn't and it could apply just as much to any other colleague that, you know, you wouldn't have singled her out as especially likely to go that route?
I wouldn't have signaled her out.
You know, at the time, I didn't really think about the anti-vaccine movement.
It was kind of like the Bigfoot movement.
I mean, whatever.
Some people thought about this sort of stuff.
You know, she was a little bit sort of rebellious, which is not a bad trait.
But, you know, like I said, when I knew her, we...
Treated sick people together in the hospital.
And you can't use magical thinking when you actually have real-world responsibility.
But I also witnessed her sort of escalation.
When she first started out, it was sort of, you know, vaccines cause autism.
Ooh, oh my gosh, what a crazy, wild thing for a doctor to say.
Fast forward a few years, she's denying that viruses even cause illness.
She is saying that vaccine campaigns are a depopulation.
And I'll also say it really engendered a...
Passionate dislike for anti-vaccine doctors in particular.
I sort of became, obsessed is a strong word, but I got to read about all of them and learned about all of them.
Sherry Tenpenny, Suzanne Humphreys, Bob Sears, Larry Pawewski, and obviously Andrew Wakefield.
And I just developed sort of a bitterness almost in the sense that I think they're sort of like arsonist firefighters, which are a real thing too.
And so I had a very strong dislike for...
Doctors who spread anti-vaccine misinformation.
I came into the pandemic with that fully formed.
Yeah, Chris and I share your disdain there.
Like with a lot of the people we cover, you know, sometimes they could have all kinds of personality problems, but if they're doing harmless things, you can give them a pass.
But with the anti-vax stuff, and you can point to actual...
Large numbers of people dying as a result of it.
It's hard to have a sense of humour about it.
But before we get into the COVID stuff, Jonathan, I wanted to ask you about what's your personal opinion in a nutshell as to how and why intelligent, well-educated people can become so deluded about things that would seem to have a clear-cut,
evidentiary basis.
Chris and I joke to each other that...
It's highly educated.
People just get the skills to be wrong in more complicated ways.
But what do you think?
I don't have a great satisfactory answer.
I mean, I think, you know, exactly what you said, that you kind of have to be smart to come up with some conspiracy theories.
I think a lot of it just has to do with the sort of...
Psychological need to feel different.
That if everyone else is saying A, you have to say B. In other words, let's say vaccines were banned tomorrow.
I predict that there were, you know, or let's say they had been banned, you know, in 2010, you know, Dr. Brogan and her ilk would be saying, oh, they're a suppressed miracle cure because doctors make more money treating disease than preventing disease.
So I think it's a little bit just about being different for the sake of being different because...
Nothing is more boring than saying you should vaccinate your children against measles, HPV, and polio.
No one came up to me and patted me on the back and said, oh, wow, you're such an amazing, brave, independent thinker for doing that sort of thing.
I didn't get spoken to by Gwyneth Paltrow, which she did.
You know, become sort of a mini-celebrity up until, other than my books, this is the only thing I've ever sold.
You know, I don't have an online store, an online course that people can take.
She does.
She has all of that sort of stuff.
So I think it's a combination of just the satisfaction of feeling that you're smarter than everyone else.
You know more than everyone else.
Well, being able to monetize that is kind of a nice side effect.
None of these people, and this is a big theme of my writing, really have any real-world responsibility for the consequences of their words.
Dr. Brogan is not the one in the hospital treating children who got sick with measles in New York City in 2019, and very few of the doctors that I mentioned treated COVID patients.
Yeah, and of course, Jonathan, you were at the front lines in a New York hospital treating the first wave of COVID patients, weren't you?
Yeah, you know, so that experience was brief, but intense.
You know, I volunteered to work on the COVID unit.
And, you know, as did tens of thousands of other people, this was sort of nothing heroic.
I mean, people traveled from all over the city to be here.
You know, the only reason I say...
I stress that I volunteered is one of the doctors who I write about reacted to my book by saying that doctors were selfish for trying to stop the spread of COVID during the first wave because we were doing it to protect ourselves and keep ourselves safe.
And, you know, we were surrounded by COVID.
We were, you know, you know, a couple extra patients here and there weren't going to keep us safe.
And, you know, so I volunteered to work, you know, on the COVID unit.
I wasn't doing anything to keep myself safe.
You know, and looking back, a few things.
I'm not really sure that I did a lot, to be honest with you, for my patients, other than be nice to them, which was very important because they were alone and they were without their families.
So, you know, I spent time and hopefully a friendly face behind a mask and glasses.
That's what I did, number one.
I made some really hard decisions, which were...
Probably not right.
I mean, whether, you know, there's a 70-year-old man who had a blood clot in his leg and we decided to amputate that and he died a few days later and, you know, that...
I still think about that because it was probably the wrong decision.
But I'm a neurologist and a psychiatrist.
I treat multiple sclerosis.
What do I know about amputating a man's leg who has a blood clot in it?
I mean, that's what was going on at the time.
So I don't really know that I did a lot, to be honest with you, but I saw a lot.
And I think that makes a big difference because the people who I write about say things that no one who worked on a COVID unit would say.
Just over and over and over again, say things that if you spent a day on a COVID unit, you would not just say what you just said.
Yeah, and it's kind of ironic, isn't it, that the conspiratorial narrative is that all of these doctors like yourself, though tens of thousands of you, were brave enough to volunteer in COVID wings when the rest of us...
When there was a great deal of reasonable fear about getting infected, there was no vaccines or anything.
Supposedly, this is the same cohort of professionals that are too afraid to challenge the orthodoxy and the lies around COVID.
I also think, Jonathan, I'm going to editorialize in a way here, but your intuition or impetus to join...
Play, you know, the significance of what you did, you know, you're just a doctor who was one of many who were volunteering and your expertise is actually, you know, slightly different.
It's interesting how different that is to all of the people that we cover and most of the people that you cover have covered contrarians where they would, they're very clear that they are at The forefront and could save the world if only...
You'd make a terrible guru, basically, Jonathan.
That's not a career path you should go for.
Well, let me tell you something.
That has served me very, very well.
And let me tell you why.
Because my critics level charges at me like, he wants us locked down forever.
He wants schools closed.
He wants to force vaccines on people.
And they can go through everything I've written and everything I've tweeted and not find one statement of mine saying we need to lock down, we need to close schools, we need to have mask mandates, we need to have vaccine mandates.
All of the things they hate and try to say that I'm in favor of, they can't actually quote me on any of those things.
Because I've been very careful, I hope, I'm sure there's...
Some stray examples out there, but I've done my best not to try to talk about stuff that I don't know about.
So I don't, you know, I don't know a lot about the effects of luck, you know, especially three years ago, exactly what the right thing to do was.
So I kind of kept my mouth shut.
So my critics are kind of coming up empty because they can really sort of, they can put words in my mouth, but they really can't quote me on saying all of the things that they hate.
And so watch them flounder.
I've got a question, Jonathan, that I think will be useful.
So I think for a lot of our audience, they're familiar with anti-vax rhetoric, and maybe to a certain extent, the kind of COVID contrarian position.
But how would you explain to someone who doesn't know, what exactly is the kind of approach of the people that you're criticizing?
What distinguishes them from?
Outright anti-vaccine, and how come they are not just, for example, reasonable minority position within a field?
Like, what made you want to specifically write a book criticizing them and single them out their perspective for criticism?
Yeah, so the book is not about people like Kelly Brogan.
Other than to sort of say her ideas pre-pandemic about measles and HPV kind of won the pandemic with regards to COVID and young people.
Because the behavior of people like Andrew Wakefield and Kelly Brogan and Sherry Tenpenny was very predictable that these anti-vaccine doctors were going to do exactly what they did.
But the doctors who I write about, number one, had stellar...
Pre-pandemic reputation, some of them world famous, a Nobel Prize winner.
That's number one.
Number two is they were very influential.
They influenced Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and the UK and Sweden.
They had a lot of influence.
People like Kelly Brogan, they saw their media footprint shrink.
These people were all over the media, writing editorials for The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Washington Post, The Atlantic.
They were made dozens.
Thousands of podcasts and YouTube videos.
So they were very influential.
The third main difference in why I chose these doctors is they mixed good advice with bad advice.
So the good advice would be, you know, we have to protect grandma's very dangerous for nursing homes.
You know, Kelly Brogan wouldn't say that.
She would deny that the virus even caused illness in the first place.
So they mixed very reasonable sounding advice, which what I think is very bad advice, which is where the title of the book comes from.
And at this point, I would pause to my hypothetical listener and say, I'm about to sound like a crazy conspiracist myself, but there was a very large, coordinated, well-funded, successful effort to...
Purposely infect unvaccinated children and young people with COVID in the failed belief that this would lead to herd immunity in three to six months and the pandemic would be over.
And this continued even after successful, not perfect, but safe and effective vaccines arrived.
And that's where I sound like a crazy lunatic, but it's all true.
And is that in the U.S. specifically?
It's not in the US specifically.
This influenced, as I said, the UK and Sweden for sure.
You know, our pandemic response was a little bit mixed.
You know, you kind of had these two confiding forces.
You had people like Fauci and a lot of, you know, governors, you know, who took the virus seriously.
And pretty much everyone did at the beginning, by the way.
You know, there weren't too many people, you know, as refrigerated trucks were needed here in New York City to store the dead bodies, there weren't too many people.
Hey, this is all a hoax type thing.
Although all of the doctors who I write about vastly, vastly underestimated COVID at the start of the pandemic, but their rhetoric about it hasn't changed one single bit.
What they said in March 2020, it only affects old people and it's all going away, is exactly what they say today.
Nothing has changed.
A million bodies didn't change anything.
So tell us a little bit more about this fallacious version of herd immunity that was getting pushed and enacted upon.
Just for the listeners, herd immunity is usually what we refer to with respect to vaccinations, right?
So if you can get, say, 98% of the population vaccinated, then there might be 2% that can't be vaccinated for whatever reason or might be particularly vulnerable, and they'll be sort of protected by extension simply because it can't spread in the community.
So what's the bizarro version of herd immunity that...
Yeah, so this plan was articulated pretty early in the pandemic.
The title of the book is a direct quote from a Dr. Paul Alexander, who is a Canadian epidemiologist and official in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration.
And on July 4th, 2020, before anyone had been vaccinated, he said, infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle age with no clinical, etc., have zeroed a little risk.
So we use them to develop herd.
We want them infected.
So again, it was this plan, this idea that if enough young people, and what do they mean by young?
I mean, sometimes under 60 and even 70, to be totally honest with you, went out and contracted COVID while older people and vulnerable people stayed home and presumably had food delivered to them.
I don't really know.
I'll just use American numbers.
We have 330 million people here that once 250 million were infected all at the same time, herd immunity would arrive and the virus would be gone.
So it was this idea that you could get rid of the virus by spreading the virus.
That was the plan, this sort of worship of natural immunity.
And on that point, Jonathan, although I think this maybe became a dominant narrative a little bit later, but You often hear people point out that the risk profile varies according to,
you know, health profile and demographic features, but in particular, age, right?
And it's a very dangerous disease for old people and very non-serious, non-dangerous disease for young children and infants.
And so part of that...
Strategy or that position, I think, was that essentially we should protect the old people, but allow young people and healthy people to go about their lives pretty much unmolested.
And I think that strikes a lot of people as a very reasonable position.
I think that's kind of the part of Joe Rogan's message and so on.
And maybe the other COVID contrarians that you feature that a lot of people...
We'd have sympathy for.
So I'm curious to hear why is that wrong or what is that kind of narrative missing?
Well, so a lot of it's right in that COVID is much more dangerous for older people than it is for younger people.
There's no question about that.
You know, an 80-year-old with cancer has, you know, a huge risk.
A healthy 10-year-old has a very low risk, but not zero.
And this is one of these things where sometimes I think the numerator matters more than the denominator.
So a very, very rare event multiplied by 73 million American children has added up to...
You know, around 2,000 children dead, potentially 200,000 children hospitalized.
About 10,000 children with this condition miss multisystem inflammatory syndrome.
And I don't have a good grasp on the exact numbers of children with long COVID, but suffice it to say it's not small.
So I think COVID's toll on children has been...
Pretty dramatic as a whole.
And of course, here in America, we have about 200,000 orphans as well.
So the risk of any individual child with COVID is almost certainly going to do very well.
My children had it, my nieces and nephews and I was not worried about that.
But the idea that to purposefully infect these children, to use them as human shields after a vaccine was available, that's where I sort of really, my sense of offended comes back, my disdain.
Even after a safe and effective vaccine is available, to continue to use children, to propose the idea of using children as human shields to theoretically protect grandma, which we all know is ridiculous now, I think is an abomination,
to be honest with you.
Yeah, agreed.
It also seems like a very impractical way.
Of trying to stamp out COVID, right?
Because reinfection occurs, obviously.
And it just seems totally unfeasible apart from being unethical.
So to return a little bit to the motivations and the sort of psychological and social factors that are driving this new wave of anti-vax feeling.
I mean, like you, Chris and I have been very interested in anti-vax long before COVID.
and I very much liked what you said about the, about essentially the emotional drivers, right?
You can have people that are very cognitively smart, well-educated, well-informed, but even if you are clever, then you're driven by, I guess, emotional drivers as much as the next person.
So now what we're seeing is, is it kind of dovetailing into, I guess a more generalized right-wing, reactionary, conspiratorial, popularized,
Populist political opinion.
Back in the day, anti-vax was sort of associated with the crunchy sort of hippie type natural woo counterculture, but that of course too has seemed to move right in terms of being politically violent.
So this is a meandering question, but my question to you is what's your take on how this is evolving?
Because it seems a little bit new to me.
Yeah, no, it's new to me too, and it's a very scary time.
I mean, some of the worst that we have to offer really influenced our COVID response here in this country and seems poised to gain more power.
I mean, look at the normalization of Robert Kennedy Jr.
I mean, it's a disgrace.
The man is a disgusting human.
And one of the main people who...
It influenced our COVID response by sort of formalizing this plan known as the Great Barrington Declaration.
I'm sure everyone has probably heard about this, but this was the document which was signed on October 4th, 2020, essentially saying, you know, end all measures to control the virus except for older people who are going to magically seal in a bubble for three to six months while everyone else gets infected.
Anyways, the organizer of this was a man by the name of Jeffrey Tucker, who was this sort of anarcho-capitalist type.
And again, this...
This is where I'm going to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, but he, before the pandemic, was and still remains, I think, overtly pro-child labor.
You know, he sort of saw pictures from 100 years ago of kids getting out of the mines and was like, hey, that's great.
And he is overtly pro-child smoking.
He encourages teenagers to smoke cigarettes because they can do it while they're cool.
It looks cool and they can do it, they can stop before it causes damage.
So, you know, this almost sort of cartoon type villain, you know, really profoundly influenced our COVID response.
And the day after this document was signed on October 4th, 2020, It's three authors.
We're talking to the head Trump U.S. health and healthcare person, Alex Azar, in the White House, but whatever.
They had private audiences with these people and influenced them greatly.
So yeah, it's really scary to see that these people are in charge.
And of course, Ron DeSantis and the state of Florida is officially anti-vaccine, and his Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, is faking data on a scale like Andrew Wakefield.
And there sort of seems to be...
Kind of a collective yawn.
Like, okay, we're used to this now.
We're done with high standards.
As opposed to, you know, every doctor sort of saying, how can this man keep his job after having faked data?
Which is the worst thing a researcher can do.
I don't know the details of that, Jonathan.
So, was he, like, irrefutably caught to have manufactured data?
Pretty much.
Pretty much so.
He put out a report probably about three months ago saying that the vaccine caused more heart damage than the virus.
I forget exactly what it was, but essentially the vaccine was too dangerous for young men, this sort of thing.
And it was later found that he removed data showing that the virus caused a lot more heart problems and a lot more death.
And it went through five sort of writings and people took their name off the report.
You know, the Florida health officials, it was never published in any sort of scientific journal.
But yeah, I mean, he...
Pretty much blatantly manipulated the data to get the answer that everyone knew he was going to get, which is the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus, which is, of course, not true.
Yeah.
So, you know, you mentioned Ron DeSantis and obviously the Stanford epidemiologist, is it, Jay Bhattacharya?
Correct.
Also has been long-time kind of collaborating, but now I think has an official...
Position associated with DeSantis.
And I noticed from our neck of the woods, Brett Weinstein, somebody who was strongly promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric, showed up on his post-COVID council of great minds.
So the thing which I think is quite clear is that a lot of the figures that you cover, despite claiming...
To have been, you know, silenced and persecuted throughout the pandemic, a whole bunch of them gained national profiles and received very positive coverage, not just from, you know, partisan, polemical,
conservative media, which they were receiving coverage and invitations from, but also from websites which are seen as more, like, balanced, like, you know, Barry Weiss's The free press, or you would see a lot of the heterodox fear kind of concerned that somebody of Jay Bhattacharya's standing was being silenced as promoted by the people who released the Twitter files,
for example.
So I'm just curious about if you could speak to that, the silencing of Jay Bhattacharya and the extent to which it's an accurate presentation.
Yeah, it's not accurate.
One of my articles for Science Based Medicine was called Loud Silenced Doctors, and it just sort of listed all of the publications and podcasts that they had been on claiming to have been silenced.
Of course, this is a technique itself to silence critics, because what they're essentially saying is, anytime you disagree with me, you're trying to silence and censor me.
I don't want to be seen as a censor.
Holy smokes.
In their defense, YouTube removed one of their videos, and that seems to be one of the most important moments of the pandemic for them, the same way...
One of the most important moments of the pandemic for me was seeing a healthy 23-year-old die the first wave.
So, you know, if I had to pick my sort of sole pandemic moment, that would be it.
And I think that they would pick YouTube removing one of their videos or maybe Francis Collins calling them fringe in a private email.
They were really upset that someone called them fringe.
But no, these people have been, you know, ubiquitous.
They've become mini-celebrities, for goodness sakes.
There have been doctors who have been silenced this pandemic.
There was a vaccine expert by the name of Rick Bright who accurately predicted the worst part of the pandemic, winter of 2020.
And December 2020 and then early 2021, you know, he accurately predicted that and was silenced by the Trump administration for that.
And of course, the doctors and healthcare workers who have been the most silenced are those who died of it.
We never hear from them.
Their voices are completely...
So anytime anyone claims to be silenced, you know, my thoughts go to, you know, my co-workers, and I knew several who died of COVID because I don't hear from them anymore.
Yeah, that's, I think, a very important point to emphasize.
And it does bring up something that I wanted to ask you about, Jonathan, in regards to, there's a...
Large cast of characters who fit into the COVID contrarian space, right?
You have just to name a few like ZDogg, MD, Vinay Prasad, Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, a whole host of people.
But in some respects, they do differ, right?
And like, I'm...
I'm a little bit curious about the contours of, you know, as you say, the mixture of like good and bad advice, because I'm thinking back to, I saw ZDoggMD and Vinay Prasad do a breakdown of Robert Malone and Peter McCulloch,
their appearances on Rogan, right?
Now, I thought for a start that they were very far to both sides have valid points, right?
I think they at some point said, you know, 50% of what they...
I would say is accurate, which was completely wrong because Matt and I went through Malone and McCulloch's appearances in depth and they were really, really dramatically conspiracy prone.
It wasn't a kind of 50 /50 thing.
But to at least ZDoggMD's credit, there is one point where when McCulloch was alleging that doctors were scared and they were just trying to avoid getting sick and they didn't really care about their parents.
Visibly annoyed, right?
And he's also been annoyed at Brett Weinstein and I believe told him to shut the F up and stuff like that.
So I'm curious about the kind of divisions within the people that you look at and are there figures that you would single out where they're not doing as much harm as the other people?
Or do you think, you know, that basically it's just a matter of time that everybody Actually does become more extreme over time and they could start out better.
Because I remember Vinay Prasad at the start of the pandemic kind of warning about people who just want to appear on media and give hot takes.
Yeah, boy, that's all sort of heat turned into.
I mean, I think so.
First of all, let me let me get the discuss there.
Critique of Malone and McCullough.
I admit I didn't hear it, but I think that this was a kind of disingenuous attempt to position themselves in the middle, right?
It's a sort of fallacy in the middle, right?
You know, if one group says the earth is flat and one group says the earth is round, well, then the earth is probably an oval.
Something, you know, something like that.
You know, and again, I think that's what made these guys sort of extra dangerous, is they didn't say obviously kind of crazy things.
They called themselves alt-middle.
I think that sort of led them to be trusted more.
So that's why they got platformed, again, not just by Barry Weiss free press, but in the Atlantic, in the Washington Post, in stat news, in mainstream press and organizations.
I definitely think that some of the doctors that I write about came from different places.
I think some of them were very actually well-meaning.
I mean, there's a woman whose name appears.
Frequently, in a couple chapters, Dr. Monica Gandhi.
And she appears very often.
About 20 pages are just doctors declaring the pandemic over.
Basically, starting March 2020 and ending when I ended the book, December 2022, about 10 quotes per month.
And her name appears very frequently in that section, starting about two years ago.
We're going to have herd immunity.
Don't worry about the variants, you know, over and over again.
You know, I don't think she was getting paid by sort of shadowy right-wing things.
I think, you know, she, you know, really just wanted the pandemic to be over and, you know, almost thought she could kind of will it with her force of mind.
I do think all of these people got a lot of feedback from social media.
So if you look at some of her tweets from two years ago, you know, saying, don't worry about variants.
This was before Delta arrived.
This was before Omicron arrived, etc.
You know, there's hundreds of messages, you know, oh, we love your optimism and your boundless, you know, positivity and don't worry about the doom and gloom people, etc.
So you really sort of see it be sort of a feedback loop.
And I think...
People like Vinay Prasad and Marty McCary have really been victims of this audience capture.
You know, they have kind of blocked on social media any sort of voice who can disagree with them.
And their sort of comment sections are just filled with some of the rankest, you know, anti-vaccine and even virus denial type stuff.
And you can really sort of see in real time, slow motion, you know, over the course of the past three years is how they take positions now that would have Astonished them before the pandemic.
So, in 2017, for example, Vinay Prasad rightly criticized a doctor who was anti-vaccine for the flu by calling him a quack.
That was the correct thing to do.
Now he is suggesting that the flu may have hidden health benefits and maybe we shouldn't try to prevent every infection in children because that might lead to autoimmunity and cancer later in life.
And, you know, this is funny.
This is something that I have to be ongoing.
Because for the first three years of the pandemic, you know, my Twitter handle was just joeho, my profile picture was a cat, and my entire bio was just nothing but insults from this one epidemic.
Virologist, I don't know what he is, Francis Ballou, over in the UK, you know, he just, you know, loved all these sort of funny...
Oh, he doesn't like me, Eli.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You know, so my hope, you know, he just called me shouty and idiot and moron, so that was my hope.
You know, for three years, you know, but now it's my face and my picture, you know, and I'm getting all these people saying these nice things about me and getting, you know, and it's nice, I like it, I can sort of, you know, see how it can get to someone's head and, you know, so all of these things that, you know, that these people have heard the whole pandemic,
oh, you're so wonderful and brave.
I'm getting that every now and then.
And it's nice.
You know, you can see how it can kind of become intoxicating.
And I think you're going to have to be constantly on guard against that.
Yeah, the inclination is, we've experienced this, you know, from having a podcast and stuff as well, like these dynamics, but also just from following your content.
Jennifer, whenever you unmasked, so to speak, I think a lot of people knew who you were anyway.
Oh, no, no, no.
Listen, I was not trying to be anonymous.
I was trying to be fake anonymous because I want my words to be associated with my name and all of my science-based medicine articles are my name.
No, I wasn't trying to hide, but I wasn't trying to put myself out there.
No, but there is a difference because, for example, the QAnon anonymous host, Travis View, his real name is all over the internet.
And he was quite clear it was a pseudonym and not his profile picture.
But it doesn't matter.
But one thing just to say is that I do remember this quite Schadenfreude-esque video of Monica Gandhi being questioned by, I can't remember who the reporter is.
Mehdi Hassan.
Yeah, Mehdi Hassan, who basically pointed out all the mistakes she's made and asked, maybe you should...
Matt, I know that you have an example, perhaps of the kind of radicalization dynamics,
and in particular, as they apply to YouTube, that might speak to some of the points Jonathan is raising.
Yeah, it's interesting, Jonathan, the stuff you talk about, this gradient and the evolution of public figures of whatever kind.
And I think this UK YouTuber, John Campbell, is a great example of that.
He was making very normal, uncontroversial nursing-type lectures for his YouTube.
Video, the videos for a long time, was not attracting any kind of audience, you know, wasn't very popular, but, and then started commenting on the COVID thing.
And I actually first heard about him from a colleague, a professor at my university, who said, who recommended him to me.
So this guy's really good.
He provides a nice, clear explanation of what's going on with COVID.
But he obviously changed, didn't he?
He evolved.
I almost think that these people can be kind of more dangerous than the kind of more florid, conspiratorial, overtly wacky people because they can draw in people sometimes with good information and good content or just very,
very reasonable sounding content.
But those nuggets of lies can be very bad.
So I'm just inviting you to talk to that because I'm very curious about it.
No, I have nothing.
I mean, other than the fact that I completely agree.
And that's why I chose these doctors to write about.
I mean, I could have written an article about the doctors who claimed that COVID vaccines made you magnetic, but they probably didn't influence anyone this pandemic.
I don't want to minimize the harm that they did, but their audience was built in.
They didn't grow.
They didn't reach new people for the most part.
The people who they were speaking to and heard their voice weren't going to take the vaccine to begin with.
When the pediatric vaccine came out, it could have gone one or two ways.
If all doctors, aside from the outright quacks, had sort of banded together and said, yeah, listen, it's really important to vaccinate children, that we could potentially save hundreds of lives of children per year, which isn't as bad as for old people,
but hey, you know.
Saving 200 to 300 or 400 children per year is no small potatoes, right?
You know, why not do it?
You know, we really could have had a very positive influence, but these folks who mix the good advice, vaccinate grandma, were very, very credible then when they gave the bad advice, let children get COVID.
And that made them much more dangerous.
So, you know, one of the points that often gets brought up, Especially around that, is that the vaccine side effects, in particular myocarditis for young men, right, is the reason not to vaccinate young children because the risks outweigh the benefits that can be gained.
And this is also the logic that you hear with a lot of the booster shots, right?
I just heard...
Sam Harris talking about diminishing returns and how he doesn't think he'll get any more boosters.
So I know you've done a lot looking into this, Jonathan, and I'm just inviting you to answer that point that the vaccines are more dangerous for particular age groups than the infected.
Is there any validity to that point or is it complete?
Bullshit.
It's complete bullshit.
And I could probably spend the next hour explaining why, but I'll try to do it in the next five minutes.
So, first of all...
Everything that we're going to talk about is pretty much looking backwards at this point, meaning the risk of myocarditis is highest after the second vaccine dose in young men.
There are probably not too many young men about to get their second vaccine dose.
So this vaccine myocarditis does not occur in children under the age of 11 or 12. And who's going to be vaccinated moving forward is mostly going to be infants, to be honest with you, who actually have by far By far,
the highest risk of any children.
Anyone who claims vaccine myocarditis is not a reason to vaccinate children, they had better be very pro-vaccine for infants.
If they're not, that gives the game away.
Okay, so when we talk about vaccine myocarditis, there's two things that matter.
How often it happens and how severe it is.
And then, I guess, three things.
How does that compare to the harms of COVID?
So, you know, the numbers for how common it is, they're a little bit all over the place.
Between 1 in 5,000 is kind of a high.
Between 1 in 20,000 or 30,000 is a low.
So, you know, if we just...
Estimated it's about 1 in 10,000, but there's a wide variety.
And then in terms of how severe it is, well, I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but pretty much...
I could list about 25 studies right now and just read what they report, and they all say that the outcome is favorable and mild in about 95% of people with it.
There was a recent study from Korea which just got a lot of attention because there were 21 deaths associated potentially with the vaccine.
Out of a population of 44 million, so the risk of death was about 1 in 2 million.
Zero children died.
The youngest death was around a 22 or 23-year-old.
There were about 12 young adults between the ages of 20 and 50 who died.
And I don't want to minimize that.
It's horrible.
It's terrible.
Every life matters.
That's one of the themes of my writing, that you shouldn't minimize the death of people just because it's a small number of people.
But the people who are scolding me for minimizing vaccine myocarditis have spent the past three years minimizing death from COVID.
And I mean this very literally, telling young people, don't live in fear of death.
More young people die of suicide.
I mean, these sort of irrelevant statistics as if that's a reason not to vaccinate children.
And so I'm not going to let someone who has minimized the death of 2,000 children That's how many children in America have died.
Tell me to worry about a vaccine side effect that has killed zero children.
When we're talking about young adults, about 70,000 young adults have died here in the United States.
And in this Korean study, there were 12 deaths.
So which is worse?
And that number of 70,000 young adults would have been a lot higher if none were vaccinated.
So we don't even have to compare what did happen.
We would have to compare what would have happened if every American was vaccinated versus if every American was vaccinated.
You know, infected.
And it's just not even close.
And this is something that if in 2019, you know, I said, you know, we need to worry more about, you know, falling, you know.
Asteroids than we do about car crashes.
You know, people would have looked at me like I'm insane because that would have been an insane thing to say.
But it became very, very common for doctors to treat rare vaccine side effects as a fate worse than death.
And I do mean that very literally.
I mean, Vinay Prasad was very, very worried about subclinical myocarditis.
So what that means, basically, is a child who gets a vaccine, feels fine, Has no symptoms.
They do a blood draw and they find an elevated troponin, which is a marker of cardiac injury.
He was very, very worried about that.
And listen, maybe he's right.
Maybe this is worrisome.
But he mocked anyone who spoke about children killed by COVID.
He called them breathless, you know, and said it was fear-mongering.
So he's elevating this theoretical vaccine harm over...
Death, you know?
And by the way, COVID causes subclinical myocarditis too, if that even is really such a thing.
There was a couple of studies where they drew blood of children who had COVID and they found an elevated troponin.
Children who have missed this multisystem inflammatory disorder, 80% of them have very severe myocarditis and there have been 10,000 cases of those.
So it's just this ridiculous elevation of...
You know, a severe side effect.
Again, I don't want to minimize it.
It's serious whenever a child goes to the hospital or feels unwell, but I'm not going to be lectured about minimizing the side effect by someone who has minimized death.
It is not a worse fate than death, and I'm willing to die on that hill.
Well said.
Yeah, cases of very selective attention and selective concern.
Okay, well, we often get...
Criticised, probably like yourself, for being mindless defenders of the institutional orthodoxy.
So I'm going to score some heterodox points here by asking you whether you think any mistakes were made at all by the authorities during the pandemic, any things that in hindsight could have been done better.
Absolutely.
And I kind of end my book with a suggestion for books other people should write.
And one of them is on the failure of our health organization, such as the World Health Organization, the failure to recognize that COVID was airborne.
Our own CDC here famously botched tests early on.
In the long run, it probably didn't make a difference, but we were flying blind in February of 2020.
Our healthcare agencies became, they had a very hard job.
One theme of my writing is that people with no real-world responsibility should be very careful when lecturing people who actually have real-world responsibility because it's very, very easy for me to sit here and say, here's what I would have done.
Actually doing these things is a lot harder.
With that in mind, you know, our healthcare agencies became very, very politicized.
There was direct influence by the Trump administration in some of the CDC's reports.
I think a lot of our healthcare leaders, our head of our National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, admits that he was caught blind by the deluge of medical misinformation.
And I definitely, you know, underestimated how much there was.
But there was really sort of no campaign to deal with this.
And I'm not even talking.
Talking about censoring people.
I'm just saying, you know, if they had a massive campaign with celebrities, you know, to get out the vaccine, you know, and the booster rollout has been horrible as well.
You know, I think what is leading to the confusion is that, you know, we're having to deal with a pandemic in real time, right?
We're having to make decisions with incomplete information about these sorts of boosters and this sort of thing.
And I think that the CDC could sort of...
Jonathan, related to that, I have a question which might be difficult to answer.
I don't think I have a fantastic answer to it myself.
So, there are people in the pandemic who had a lot of Credibility, and still do in various sectors, like John Ioannidis, the epidemiologist, and kind of famed for his papers talking about questionable research practices and misreporting of results.
He was a kind of celebrated figure in the open science movement.
Then, during the pandemic, released papers that were widely criticized because they...
I can't remember the exact error, but maybe you can fill in the blank there.
But I want to say that, you know, heuristics that people might apply is does this researcher have a history of being a critical voice in science and a respected figure?
In John Ioannidis' case, he has credentials, he has a bunch of publications, he's got a reputation.
For being a critical-minded science reformer.
So how does that, like, what are the public to do when someone like that comes out, gets a lot of coverage, and is essentially saying, you know, that people are making too much of this and continues to persist with that throughout the pandemic?
Any advice for how to distinguish, you know, the information that people...
Are receiving?
Because a lot of the fairly straightforward juristics would seem to feel the Ioannidis test.
Yeah, so that's one of the reasons I wrote my book is how off guard, you know, I was by Ioannidis, right?
He's the anti-Kelly Brogan in my mind, or at least he was, you know, that he's entirely evidence-based.
He's a genius.
He's a guru.
He's world famous.
You know, he featured very positively a couple of times as did Vinay Prasad in my past book on cognitive errors and diagnostic mistakes.
But yeah, you know, he really Underestimated COVID at the beginning, and he did so in ridiculous ways, which were very easy to say how ridiculous they were.
So for example, on April 9th, 2020, he gave an interview to the Washington Post where he said he predicted that 40,000 Americans would die this season.
By that point in the pandemic, 20,000 Americans had died and 2,000 were dying per day.
And so unless the virus Vanished.
His prediction would age very badly, very quickly, which is exactly what happened.
Eight days later, we surpassed 40,000 deaths.
On that date, he was minimizing the virus, which is what he's done the entire time, saying he thinks we're past the first peak.
It's only dangerous for people over the age of 65. For people younger than that, it's driving back and forth to work every day.
And as the death toll piled up, he started spreading what I can only describe as conspiracies, that people were dying with COVID, not of COVID, that death certificates couldn't be trusted, that it was premature intubations that were killing people anyway,
and it was lockdowns that were killing people.
And the people who were actually dying of COVID were just, you know, 95-year-olds with metastatic cancer who had two days left to live anyway.
And these themes persist to today.
So how can you tell who's reliable and who isn't?
Well, it took me a year to figure out that John Ioannidis was kind of...
Not someone to trust.
And most of that was just his reputation.
It was a very cognitively dissonant time for me because, you know, here this very brilliant world-famous epidemiologist making these very confident predictions.
And what do I know?
I'm just a neurologist.
I can look at a brain MRI, that's for sure.
But what do I know about an epidemiology during a pandemic?
But, so, you know, I was reading his statements on the one hand and hoping they were true.
Oh my God, I was hoping they were true, that the pandemic was almost over in April 2020, but then sort of seeing, you know, how do I square this with what I see in my own eyes?
And it took me a year to write my first science-based medicine article.
And I think to answer your question, and this is one thing that I have observed about all the people that I write about, I didn't make this explicit, maybe I should, but is that they feel comfortable commenting on everything.
Every aspect of the pandemic, on masks, on vaccines, on lockdowns, on mandates, on steroids, on remdesivir, on every aspect of the pandemic, they can speak about it.
At length, right or wrong, you know, childhood speech development patterns due to masks.
They're experts in that now, you know, and I think that's, you know, back to what I was saying about me not being a guru.
I don't talk about masks.
I don't talk about ventilation.
I don't talk about school closures or lockdowns or really anything because I don't really know that stuff.
All I really talk about is vaccines.
And again, I think that's one of the reasons that my critics are having such a hard time coming at me is because I quote them at length.
They can't quote me back.
And this might even be the most important thing, is the ability to admit air.
So Dr. Paul Offit, a world-famous vaccine researcher who developed the rotavirus vaccine, hasn't been perfect this pandemic, but he's been pretty good.
I'll cut him some slack.
Anyways, March 2020, he said, I think this virus is going to kill about one-tenth as many people as the flu.
Okay, that aged very badly, very quickly.
And so what did he do?
He said, he kind of made a joke, well, if you're going to be wrong about something, you might as well make an ass yourself in front of the whole world.
You know, I mean, he admitted he got it wrong.
And that's the only reason that it's worth remembering is that this is, you know, this is a model of how scientists should be when they just botch something.
So his credibility was enhanced.
These doctors who I write about...
Don't do that.
So Marty McCary, who famously predicted we'll have herd immunity in April of 2021 in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and then declared that herd immunity had arrived in May of 2021.
You know, did he ever write a piece of self-reflection and say, you know, geez, what did I get wrong?
How did I underestimate this?
How can I do better in the future?
No, he's just out there.
Bashing Fauci and vaccines.
So, all the doctors that I write about will speak about the importance of admitting air and of humility and following the data.
Again, that's what makes them more dangerous than Kelly Brogan, but they don't do it.
They'll never, ever admit air.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think Chris has a question for you, but I just want to underscore those two points that you made, which is these two red flags, which is one, professing to have this unique, special insight.
That is, you know, everyone else is wrong.
I'm telling you how it really is on a wide variety of topics, becoming supposedly an expert on an overnight or, as someone like Brett Weinstein would claim, using his unique evolutionary biology perspective to solve every single puzzle and that infallibility of never admitting being wrong.
And in a situation like COVID, we should expect...
People to be wrong all the time, even because it's a novel situation, it's a fast-changing situation, every virus is different, and so on.
And you see the other side of the coin, which is that any misstep or any inaccuracy or any public health advisory that isn't perfectly on point is held up as an indication that the authorities are lying to us about everything.
Chris has a question.
I just wanted to underline your question.
Let me just answer Chris's previous question about some of the papers that Dr. Ioannidis wrote and some of the ones that got panned.
First of all, in March 2020, he told us not to worry about the virus because he didn't think that many people were going to get it.
He wrote this article in Stat News and he's like, if we assume that just 1% of Americans are going to get it and it kills 1 out of 1,000, then 10,000 people are going to die.
He reiterated that point in another journal, a paper published in a journal in March 19th, 2020, where he talked about, you know, exaggerated community spread, this sort of thing.
And this was a theme that people treated this brand new virus from day one as this very predictable sort of well-known entity.
Anyways, back to the papers that he wrote.
So a month later or so, he published a very controversial antibody study out of Santa Clara, California, which found a pretty high rate of antibodies, about, I forget exactly what it was, about 5% or 6%, something like that, even though there were only two or three documented cases.
And they concluded that the virus was...
Very widespread.
So Dr. Ioannidis in March 2020 said, don't worry about the virus.
No one is going to get it.
In April 2020, he said, don't worry about the virus.
You know, half the country's already had it.
And he didn't say half, but you know, but he said the virus is much more widespread than we know about.
50 to 80 times more common than people think.
The vast majority of people don't have any symptoms at all.
So whether he thought no one was going to get the virus or everyone already had it, the core theme was...
Don't worry about it.
And he also published numbers that I think were impossible.
For example, he published a study not so long ago claiming that the death rate for children was about 1 in 300,000.
Something like that, based on a survey of about 20 countries, including some with unreliable porting, like Afghanistan.
Anyways, so if you do the math, that's 3 per million.
And there are 75 million children here in the United States.
So what's 75 times 3?
225.
So that would mean a maximum of 225 children could die in America if every single one of them was infected.
And in fact, about 2,000 children have died here, as I've said already.
So he just made these calculations that would require America to have about 3 billion children.
Just these impossible...
Sorry, I hope I went through that.
Not too quickly and everyone can pay attention and my numbers are right.
But just these calculations that required more people to exist in a given area.
That's how much some of these people underestimated the virus.
Yeah, and I think that is a very important detail to give because I've tangled with people online.
Who simply retreat to Ioannidis' reputation and kind of say, who are you?
To question him.
And the comment that I was going to make that Matt was alluding to was actually a heuristic that I think was helpful to spot a potential problem with and possibly with, you know, a lot of the people that we're commenting on is his reaction to the criticism from Gideon.
Marowitz Katz, right?
Somebody who critiqued his paper, was to respond very personally, highlight the kind of imbalance in credentials because Gideon was still a PhD student at the time, and he wrote a kind of scathing rebuttal,
right?
But one that really came off as like more of a kind of guru-ish.
That this is low-cult criticism that someone of my stature shouldn't have to deal with.
And I think those flashes where you see the ego and the narcissism, the kind of buying into your own legend kind of thing, that you saw that throughout the pandemic and you see it throughout the guru sphere that we look at.
And it just is a kind of indicator, unlike...
As you rightly contrasted, Paul Offit's response, because Paul Offit is somebody who, at various times during the pandemic, anti-vax people have looked to, right?
Because he was skeptical about the need for, you know, additional boosters and so on.
But he's always very clear about what he is arguing.
And he comes back and says, you know, where he's been wrong and is also...
Constantly clear that he is not ever advocating that people don't vaccinate.
He's talking about specific cases, FURD boosters or whatever, but he's always been very clear that in terms of getting vaccinated versus not getting vaccinated, the evidence has always stacked up in favor of vaccines.
So there's just such a clear contrast in that kind of response.
Yeah, no, he's been a staunch advocate of vaccinating children, and at least with the first two doses, and I think now the first three doses, but he was initially skeptical of the booster.
I think that he a little bit did inadvertently give some ammunition to the anti-vaxxers.
You know, he probably should have known a little bit better.
I think at one point, you know, he spoke about voting for this.
He's part of the FDA advisory board, and he said something like, the fix was in.
Something like that, you know, a little bit kind of, you know, and he has been on ZDogg's podcast, which I think is problematic because ZDogg has definitely platformed people like, you know, Jay Bhattacharya and Marty McCary and, you know, ZDogg has declared the pandemic over many times and he has employed the technique of mockery to a perfection,
just mocking people who have tried to avoid the virus.
So I think it was a mistake to appear on his podcast.
But, you know, he's admitted air, you know, I don't...
I don't think he meets your criteria for gurus at all.
He's not, you know, out there saying, you know, everyone is wrong about everything except for me.
And, you know, I think when he has made errors, he's admitted it.
And, you know, let me be very clear that one thing that my writing in my book is about is not silencing heterodox voices.
Attacking people who question the conventional wisdom.
And probably the best example of this, if you really want an anti-guru, you should discuss this woman, Karina Kariko.
I'm probably butchering her name.
I've said it enough times.
I really should know it by now.
But this is the Hungarian scientist who really did the pioneering work on mRNA vaccines at the University of Pennsylvania.
And no one believed her.
Everyone kind of called her a quack, and she was just kind of ignored and shunted away in her own lab.
But lo and behold, her research and her findings paved the way for the mRNA vaccines.
And she was very briefly celebrated as a hero, but she hated media.
I don't know if she hated it, but she didn't want any media attention, and she's crawled back into her cocoon.
She's just a scientist who wants to work in the lab bench and make discoveries, you know?
That's an anti-guru for you right there.
And we need those sorts of voices.
Holy smokes, we need people to think outside the box and make brilliant discoveries.
And they shouldn't be silenced.
But the people who I talk about, again, made these very basic math errors.
Or there's really sort of no room for subtlety.
Or, again, you know, the pandemic ended two years ago type stuff.
Don't worry about variants.
Or they even spoke about the virus in very positive ways.
The triumph of natural immunity.
That's an article written by Martin Kulldorff or Marty...
McCary tweeted a few years ago, natural immunity wins again.
Vinay Prasad wrote some very pro-viral pieces where he talked about immunity is built through illness.
It's healthy and natural when children get sick and recover.
So, you know, it's a really sort of very different sort of thing.
And sometimes I have seen those voices just be called thinking differently when, you know, no, it's not thinking differently when you conclude that 2,000% of American children have contracted COVID.
Yeah, it sounds like the researcher you're describing, who I think I had remembered or heard of previously, is like the anti-Robert Malone downplaying the level of credit and attention for their contribution to the mRNA vaccine development.
So one thing that we've noted, and a friend of the And I actually think you can see this in Joe Rogan's initial content was,
you know, fear.
People were afraid because we didn't know how severe it was.
We didn't know what the trajectory was going to be.
And it was spreading all around the world and, you know, people were dying.
And there was a lot of legitimate fear out there.
And then over time, it felt like for some people, it came a point where, like, the vax, it's kind of that they're stating they're not afraid of the virus,
right?
The virus isn't a kind of threat to them because they're healthy and robust people.
So maybe older sick people need to be afraid, but they don't.
And that getting a vaccine...
The conspiracy guys have talked about this too, is seen as like a kind of taking the weak thing.
You know, it's the weak-willed, like sheeple response to the virus.
Whereas, you know, if you're robust and healthy and strong-willed, you won't just fall in line with what the government and health officials suggest.
You'll forge your own path and you will be able to weather the storm.
And so I know...
You're not a psychologist, but you're a psychiatrist, so what do you think about that suggestion for at least motivating some of the hesitancy around vaccinations?
A kind of macho compensation, in a way, for being afraid.
Yeah, no, it's a very sort of toxic masculinity.
And, you know, by the way, I have a little bit of that.
You know, I didn't want to be seen as a weakling and not volunteer to work on the COVID units.
And, you know, that's one of the reasons I call out all of these doctors who were trying to spread the virus while we were overwhelmed by it because they were sheltered and sat at home, you know, making our life harder.
So I'm not immune to toxic masculinity myself.
But again, I think there's part of that.
And as we've discussed, what someone once called Obligate contrarianism.
You know, again, just the sort of need to be different.
And, you know, let me say this too, you know, I do not begrudge, you know, young, healthy, vaccinated people living their lives.
You know, we can't expect people to give up parties and weddings and funerals and eating inside forever.
You know, I have a...
Daughter who's going off to college, she's 17, she's going to be 18. What am I going to say?
Never be inside around your classmates without a mask?
Of course not.
That's ridiculous.
You just can't expect people to sort of lead these isolated lives.
And sort of back to what I'm saying about me not being a guru, and I make this very clear in one chapter of the book, I don't have all the answers.
I say that very explicitly about how, especially at this point, Hmm.
one as well.
But yeah, you know, listen, we are obviously in a very different place and a much better place.
The morgues of New York city have space for bodies and they've had space for bodies for years.
I'm not going to deny that.
That's obviously true.
Hmm.
Yeah, and there's lots of positives.
Probably the biggest positive of all being the speedy development of the effective vaccines.
So, yeah, I mean, this has been super informative and it's been great to hear from you and also just noting all of the interesting correspondences between the stuff that you've been writing about and talking about and the stuff that we focus on.
I guess one of the themes of what we've talked about is that it's very challenging for a layperson out there who is concerned about an issue.
Like viruses or vaccines and is looking to get information on it.
And we've talked about how we have situations where people that are giving information are sometimes giving good information, then sometimes smuggling into that information.
Sometimes they are good sources of information and then become back.
As Chris said, sometimes they have impressive resumes.
So, for me, this seems like an extraordinarily tough question.
But how would you...
Advise people to stay safe out there and somehow choose the right sources of information.
Yeah, so I don't, you know, I'm not in the business of giving sort of personal advice to people, especially at this point in the pandemic.
I just don't know exactly what the right answer is, other than to say, you know, I don't judge people, especially at this point.
I know some people who have sort of devoted their lives to avoiding COVID, and that's fine.
It's normal to not to want to get sick.
You know, I don't judge these people.
And are they doing everything that they did in 2019?
No.
Do their lives have meaning?
Yeah.
Are a lot of people who decided not to live in fear no longer here to share their experience?
Yeah.
You know, if those people could come back to life, what would they say about living in fear?
You know, other people, again, I don't want to talk about my children, but whatever, you know, they are leading lives that they led.
Pre-pandemic.
And I'm not going to judge them for that either.
Again, we just can't expect people to give up the joys of life forever that way.
So I don't have all the answers.
That's kind of what I explicitly avoid, to be totally honest with you.
But I think that you just have to try to get your advice from people who speak.
On very narrow issues.
So there are certain people who I will trust on one or two topics because that's really kind of all they talk about.
And then people who are willing to admit that when they get things wrong, those are really sort of my go-to points.
And people who sort of aren't looking to build a brand and a personality.
So do they have, are they trying to sell anything?
Again, I know I'm selling my book, blah, blah, blah, but whatever.
I'm not going to become a millionaire based on this book.
You know, so some of the doctors that I write about have very, very lucrative sub-stacks and Patreons, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but you've just got to factor that in.
So people who really sort of aren't trying to become, you know, gurus.
Yeah.
Totally respect your caution in giving firm advice outside of your speciality.
But for what it's worth, the red flags you mentioned there, we wholeheartedly sign off on those.
I don't think there is any magic recipe.
And people who are willing to present information...
That weakens their narrative.
For example, I have been a staunch vaccine advocate for children, especially during this pandemic, okay?
So when vaccine myocarditis came out, it weakened my case to vaccinate children because it was a strike against the vaccine.
But you can read my articles dating back two years where I have presented, they're way too long, but...
Every study that I could find about the rate in the clinical course of vaccine myocarditis and how that weighed against the risk of the virus.
And I have, I hope, not tried to minimize it.
I've repeatedly said that it's a serious side effect and that it should be taken seriously.
The people that I write about will never do that with COVID.
They will never simply say, COVID has killed 2,000 children, has hospitalized hundreds of thousands of more.
You know, they just sort of hide information that disconfirms their position or undermines their position.
All at the same time speaking about their nuanced and their balanced and their middle.
So, you know, try to say, is this person really giving me both sides of an issue as best as they can?
Or are they really trying to push some agenda?
So again, read my articles on science-based medicine on vaccine myocarditis.
I link to and summarize every study that I could find on it.
Yep.
Well, we will certainly link to those articles in the show notes and we'll also put a link in there to your book, 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 for people who are interested in a bit of a look back in hindsight on that.
Is there anything else you would like?
I know your main message is to get your kids vaccinated, but apart from that one, are there any more selfish things you would like to tell people, Jonathan?
Anything else you're working on?
It's not selfish.
I mean, I suppose that I'll just end with the conclusion of the book, which is sort of, you know, how do you sort of fight?
Misinformation and medical misinformation.
And I don't come down on the side of censorship.
I mean, if Ron DeSantis becomes president, I don't want him running a so-called misinformation board, staffed by Jay Bhattacharya and Ladapo.
But I think that there has been a great...
I'll just kind of say it's sort of cowardice amongst some leaders of American medicine who have just sort of seemed to float above the fray as members of their department, spread misinformation, and they didn't want to sort of get themselves dirty.
They didn't want to get some of the hate that I get.
My Twitter feed is filled with people saying, I'm going to go to Nuremberg.
Whatever.
I don't care.
I'm used to this.
But they want to avoid that.
And I get that.
I mean, who wants to invite that into their lives?
I really think that we need to...
Say that as medical professionals and critical thinkers in general, that you do sort of have an obligation to speak out against medical misinformation and certainly just not to tolerate it, not to look the other way or say that someone who says one plus one is three is just thinking differently.
It's just a different opinion.
And there was a lot of that this pandemic.
So I just hope probably most of your listeners are the ones speaking out.
So just know that your voice is valued, your support is valued.
Your kind comments are appreciated.
Even if you think you're just small potatoes not making a difference, you are potentially making a difference.
And it's going to be a long-term fight the rest of our lives.
And it's really a continuation of the fight that's been going on since the day vaccines were developed.
Everything that we're doing now was done in 1918.
It's just a continuation of history, and we just have to keep trying to correct misinformation and provide accurate information.
Very well said, Jonathan.
And I'll just add to that and say I think that obligation extends to academics as well.
There's an obligation to promoting public understanding of science.
It's particularly important with these flashpoint issues like vaccines, but it's important across the spectrum.
Chris, any famous last words from you?
It's nice to see Matt come out as an activist scholar at last.
I have a slightly self-serving note to finish on, Jonathan, which is that I sense a kindred spirit in a sense in your, you could frame it as obsessive, documenting of people's previous statements and what the positions that people have taken.
But I find that so Because what people often don't like to do is acknowledge what they've said, right?
And why people are critical of them.
They want to take a stance which is much more nuanced or, you know, like if in an interview where there's kind of a critical response, they'll kind of adopt a more conciliatory tone.
And I think one of the antidotes to that is just to have the The kind of record to be able to say, well, look, this is what you said.
And a lot of what I see on your timeline on Twitter is, in essence, people being annoyed at having what they've said presented back to them.
So I just want to say that I think that that is an important thing to do because often the easier thing is just not to pay attention to these annoying people that are grandstanding or whatever.
Nobody paid attention, then they'd be able to just waffle away without any receipt.
So I appreciate what you do, Jonathan.
Well, thank you so much.
That's not necessarily a good thing, Jonathan, that Chris senses a kindred spirit in you.
But, you know, take the positive version of it.
Well, and it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you.
Thank you for coming on.
And, yeah, and hopefully...
Despite what you've said, and I know that it will remain a relevant topic, I hope it becomes irrelevant in the next couple of years as the COVID pandemic becomes at least more managed.
So, yeah.
Well, thank you guys so much for having me on, and I've learned so much from listening to your podcast about the sort of techniques that these gurus use and who they are and what motivates them.
It's just fascinating.
So thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
Great to have you, Jonathan.
Well, well, that wasn't that good, insightful journalism?
Is it?
By us?
Yeah.
Well, no, you know, like mainly the insights came from one direction, but we listened to them.
We asked the questions.
We are the quiz masters.
We sat down and listened.
That's an important role.
Somebody's got to do it.
Now, thanks to Jonathan.
That was, yeah, he really is extremely well informed.
That was a wealth of information.
So.
This brings us to the most intellectually rigorous.
It's a battle of ideas.
I'm talking about the review of reviews.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You're right.
You're right.
That is it.
Yes.
So that's where we are.
And we had an influx of our reviews.
And yeah, so some of them are good, some of them less.
But that's what I want.
I want this mixture.
That's what I need for this segment.
We've got one star, and I have to mention this because it's just...
I feel Philip Marklin, who tries to combat misinformation online, deserves the blame for this.
So let me just read this.
One star.
Because they give cover to liars like Peter Dasig, they're also friends with a guy named Philip Marklin, one of the most useless folks on the internet.
And this is Don't Hurt Spidey.
Give us one star.
So...
Philip!
We hold you responsible for that one star, Philip.
You should take a good hard look at yourself.
One star, because we're friends with Philip.
That's harsh, but you know, what can you do?
That's it.
Hate is going to hate.
Yeah, now, here's another one.
This is a two-star review.
I'm going to, you know, I've got to keep you tough.
I've got to condition you with these critical responses.
The title is...
Two micro-gurus attempt to out-guru larger gurus.
A lot of guru-ing going on.
That's hard for me.
So let's see.
And this is by Nicholas208.
If you're looking for unoriginal thought, you've come to the right place.
Two arrogant midwits tear down other cultural figures, most of which are not there to defend themselves.
They occasionally try to do their due diligence, but it's not enough, and the attempts and efforts are widely inconsistent.
Arguments aside, it's abundantly clear they just don't like some people, and it's wrapped in a gross, gleeful smugness that irreparably tarnishes the whole endeavor.
The tone of this podcast comes across as spiteful, jealous hosts attacking other people, some deserving, in brackets.
To pull them down in order to take their place as the arbiters of motive and truth on subjects people they only tangentially know about.
All with next and no original thought contributed by the hosts themselves.
These two better gurus think they are smarter than everyone when really they are simply parasitical.
They are jealous.
They are not recognized as the alpha gurus they fancy themselves.
As so they try to pull down others to try to eke out a better position.
What do you think about that?
You better guru cuck.
Not better, beater, beater.
Oh, better, beater, beater, beater.
You are in no pronunciation position, Mr. Matrix.
Yes, people in glass houses.
Well, look, he, you know, said we, some of our criticisms were justified.
You know, what's the omega rule?
You look for the 5%.
The 1%.
The 1%.
The tiny sliver of this argument.
Yeah, and he said that some of the people we criticized, you know, they were well-deserved.
We don't do well, but that is something.
But still.
And he also said that we criticize other cultural figures, and I want to emphasize the other.
So they're implying that we are cultural figures too, Chris.
All right, yeah.
We're wannabes.
We want to slay the gurus, climb up over their dead bodies, and position ourselves at the top of the guru pool to extol our truth to the world.
That's very accurate, I think.
In terms of reviewing this critique, a bit unfocused, a bit repetitive in the message.
The conclusion was already stated earlier on.
Kind of cut it by 50% and make the same point.
Again, people in glass houses.
But I'm just saying, if I was to make that issue a critique on iTunes, it'd be a bit more concise.
Yeah, the argument didn't build to a conclusion.
You know, it did circle around a few times.
Very polemical, but I think it was quite well phrased.
Like, I think the English usage expression was pretty good.
Yeah.
Good negative review.
I'll tell you the last positive review.
This is a five-star one by a very smart person, you know, pleasant to deal with.
Probably, just from the number of stars, I can tell that.
Annie Lim, 18. And it says, title is Harsh on Americans, but rightly so.
Then they say, to be fair, I've only listened to one episode so far.
I decided to listen to your show on recommendation from Brittany Page of I Doubt It podcast.
Your QAnon episode jumped out at me and I just finished listening.
It sounds like you're hard up for reviews, so I wanted to help you guys out.
We'll be listening to all your episodes.
Yes, even the old ones.
Deal with it.
The QAnon episode sparked my interest.
Great content.
Well, so there's the request for reviews.
Paying off.
Thank you, Brittany Page, for the recommendation.
Philip Marklin, you need to up your recommendations to counteract the people that you're...
Getting one-star reviews from.
I liked that last review because it came across very much as a review from a totally normal person.
I listened to podcasts.
I kind of enjoyed it.
Not necessarily a fan.
Not a hater.
You told me to review it.
I do what I'm told.
There you go.
That's good.
I like that.
That's a normal person.
That's a good person.
A good-hearted, kind person.
Now, the good thing is we don't do these in-group versus out-group dynamics where, you know, you create people who give you positive feedback.
It's not what we're about here.
Not a bad man.
So that was the review of your views.
There are two bad ones, like bad reviews.
I give them bad reviews as well.
And one good one.
Very reasonable and balanced and fair.
And then, now Matt, speaking of balanced and fair people with good insights to offer, the Patreons!
The supporters.
The wisest in our audience.
People that make it all happen.
We couldn't do it without you guys.
What are the other things people say about their Patreons?
The people with money.
The people with the spokes of all income.
That's it.
Look, I contribute to the podcast, alright?
I do it too.
Right?
So you're not better than me.
That's right.
I'm a patron.
I'm a patron of other podcasts.
I'm a patron of this podcast.
We all do it.
It's an ecosystem.
It's just the money.
We're feeding the economy.
We're just nodes in the economy.
It's all going round and round in circles and Patreon and the credit card companies or whatever are taking their card.
It's a beautiful system.
Yeah.
So, you know, just think about it like that.
Even as you think of that, remember that you do get rewards for coming and supporting us.
But you'll get them mainly in heaven.
You will get them according to any schedule or things like that.
You get them in a very haphazard way.
But today, Matt, today I'm going to go fast.
Watch this.
You'll be shocked.
Conspiracy Hypothesizers.
That's our $2 tier.
Here they are.
We have David A.S., Lauren Leinhardt, Kobe Winston, Dan, Quintus Macias, Pupskill, Joe Gagahan, TW, Aidan Whitehall, Sean Scotland, Jim Vernon, Misha
Kanai, Molly Jacobson, Anton Sumser, Andrew Goff, Ronald Hayden, Runa Brunsvetson, 9 underscore 9, Tim Tripp, Joseph Atrou, M, Adam
Vandele, and Callie.
How is that?
That's a great reward, at least for some of them that get their names mispronounced and some sort of vague mocking of their names.
You're valued.
You matter.
Thank you.
You matter.
Thank you.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Okay.
Now, we will advance conspiracy hypotheses, won't we?
Now, Matt, we have revolutionary thinkers.
These are the people that get access to the coding academia.
That's what makes them revolutionary thinkers.
We do these little episodes about, you know, papers once a month, and, you know, so they get access to those.
And they include Willem Corson, James
Joshua Berrata, Gregory Mangle.
Isn't that the...
Yeah. No, Gregory Mangle.
Mangle, sorry.
Oh, that's not as good.
That's worse.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah, yeah, sorry.
Yeah, that was my fault.
Sorry about that.
Yeah, both significant figures in the history of science.
Joshua G. Ziegler.
Felicia Baucom.
Saul.
Could be Saul Goodman.
Chris Snyder.
Andros Håknins.
Håknins.
XXXAAA.
Guna.
David R. Woody.
Brian Schmeyen.
Matt Salamone and Matthias Bolton.
Oh, and Robert Roots as well.
Those are our revolutionary thinkers.
Thank you, guys.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
What does it say about me that I find it funny every time?
Because it's just such a stupid response.
I'm sorry, but it's impossible to not be struck by the stupidity.
Oh, Fred's reaction there.
That's the thing.
Now, man, galaxy brain gurus, they're a rarer breed.
They are...
It's sometimes hard to spot them amongst the crowd because they're, you know...
There could be more of them.
There could be more of them is what you're saying.
It wouldn't hurt.
Yeah.
They get to come and join us for the monthly live streams if they want burritos or do that kind of thing.
But there are some of them.
I've heard tale of Tom.
He-Man or He-He-Man.
I don't know if that's an actual surname or a joke name, but if it's not a joke name, I'm very sorry.
It's a good name.
Ding.
That one's easy to say.
And then Matt.
Again, you know, they're kind of...
Is that them lurking over there?
Who do I see out of the corner of my eye?
Oh, yes.
I spotted one.
A wild Timur appeared.
So there, we had a Timur.
And last, just furtively scooting around the bushes, there's a Brian Young and an Amidaeus Lesiekko.
Lesiekko?
There's another genetics related.
It's not, but it's kind of close.
Lesiekko.
I'm sure I got close enough.
So thank you, one and all.
You beautiful, shrubbery-themed galaxy brain goers.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard, and you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
I know you should not, Scott.
You're right.
Keep an eye on them.
Matt, that's us for this week.
We've done our duty for the discourse.
We will now retire.
And what is it they say in Lord of the Rings?
We'll retire and feed or...
Diminish.
Diminish.
That's right.
We'll go into the West.
Yeah.
Diminish.
Yeah.
But we'll be back.
We'll be back.
I wish I was diminishing.
It might make it easy to do those pull-ups, but I'm doing the opposite of it.
Well, get your green juice.
Sorry, no more bacon and egg.
I think I'll just accept being fat.
That could work for me.
Yeah, well, it's been a pleasure, Matt.
That's all I can say.
What a treat it was to spend this time with you, Chris.
