Taking Biotech 479- Everybody Else is Lying to You - Dr. Jonathan Howard

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Hi everybody, and welcome to this week's Talking Biotech Podcast. There were many lessons from COVID-19's pandemic first year and then in the time since. And 2020 was a year of seeing how a national crisis could bring together short-lived unity, followed by mass disassembly into fractured groups, and many of them ideologically pushing back against public health and medical institutions and the government in general. And one of the physicians at ground zero was Dr. Jonathan Howard, and he's been on with us before. And while he was treating patients and doing his normal physician duties, he was observing the effect of COVID on hospital function, but also had a direct role in patient care. He also had a finger on the pulse of social media and the disinformation ecosystem that was there and has been documenting it ever since. He had the book We Want Them Infected, which came out during the pandemic, or at the very tail end of the early stages of the pandemic, I should say, and documented the social media environment. And how disinformation was shaping the COVID response. Now he's here to talk about his follow-up book to that, the second one of the trilogy, I think, Everyone Else Is Lying to You: How Our Medical Establishment Weaponized Doubt to Spread COVID, Normalize Quackery, and Undermine Public Health. So welcome to the podcast again, Dr. Howard.

Well, thanks so much for having me again. I'm sorry that I had to write a second volume. I was kind of hoping that I wouldn't have to, but, but here we are.

Yeah, I also neglected to mention you're the chief of neurology at Belleville Hospital and other affiliations as well. So yeah, it's a bummer that you gotta be here, but I'm glad you are because this is such an important topic, not just because of the contents of the book and the way and where it goes, but how it fits a theme that we're seeing showing up over and over again about disinformation around contentious issues and probably the most important one of our time. So, you know, let's start at the beginning. Could you just give us a little introduction to Your role during COVID and how your normal gig as a physician took a turn towards something radically different.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think I bring kind of 2 qualifications to this space. One that you mentioned already is I worked here at Bellevue Hospital throughout the pandemic. And I always describe my experience correctly, I think, by saying, I'm not sure that I did a lot. Like, I don't think there's anyone out there who can say Now, during COVID Dr. Howard saved my life, but I saw a lot. I saw what the virus could do when it was left to spread unchecked. And I read my other physicians, none of whom who worked in hospitals, say things about COVID that no one who worked in a hospital would say. Things like it spared young people, or that death was the only bad outcome, or that the virus could be easily contained if only we took minimal efforts to try to slow the spread. So no one who worked on a COVID unit would say those sorts of things. And the second thing is starting in about 2010, I developed a very weird kind of niche obsession with the anti-vaccine movement after a doctor I trained with, a woman by the name of Kelly Brogan, became one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors. And I started learning everything that I could about the anti-vaccine movement and how to refute their arguments. And in 2018, along with law professor Dori Reiss, I had written a book chapter on the anti-vaccine movement. So I was accidentally very prepared for what was about to happen with COVID What I was unprepared for is how the anti-vaccine movement would become mainstream and how respected doctors from Stanford and Harvard and UCSF and Johns Hopkins All the guys who are in charge now screwing things up, you know, embraced her ideas about vaccines and viruses. They didn't do this consciously. For example, in 2014, she wrote an article saying the best way to protect yourself against HPV is to get HPV. And that sort of thinking became mainstream with regards to COVID. And that really shocked me. So I was very unprepared for that.

You know, it is definitely Has been an evolution watching the anti-vaccine movement over the last, you know, what's it been, almost 30 years now. But, you know, I wanna, I, well, we can talk about this later, but I blame Oprah for a lot of it too, because she gave traction to people like Jenny McCarthy and Oz who turn out to now, Jenny McCarthy, she's in the where are they now file, but Oz is front and center in the administration and he got his traction from mainstream TV. And it just goes to show you like how dangerous promoting poor science can be.

You know, there's a lot of blame to go around. You know, the anti-vaccine movement is, as I'm sure you know, is as old as vaccines themselves, as old as Edward Jenner, even actually before Edward Jenner, because the first known vaccinator, as far as I know, is an English farmer by the name of Benjamin Jesty, who vaccinated his children against smallpox in the 1700s, and he was reviled for it. And then a smallpox epidemic ripped through the city and his children were spared. But what's interesting is if you read anti-vaccine arguments from 200 years ago, they're actually not that different than they are today, just about putting bodily impure things into your body and avoiding natural infection, this sort of thing. But there's a lot of blame to go around, not just Oprah. I think during the pandemic, I think my profession, doctors, we showed more courage running into the room of COVID patients than we did in policing our own and calling out disinformation from, from other doctors, which was until now. Now that it's a little bit too late, now people are speaking out. But I think members of my profession, and I wasn't the only one, there was a small army of us, but we were kind of this loose-knit group of unorganized people are doing our own things. But I really think that we should have spoken out starting in 2020, starting in March 2020, when doctors were saying that COVID was not as bad as the flu, it would kill 10,000 Americans. These sort of obviously absurd statements, but because they were said by famous doctors from Stanford who wore suits and spoke the language of evidence-based medicine, they got a free pass. And that's unfortunate.

So as you're watching this unfold back in 2020 and 2021, you know, what is the genesis of this book? I mean, what inspired you to want to write this down and actually compile what you were observing?

Well, I didn't appreciate the amount of disinformation in 2020. It kind of went over my head. I, you know, what's interesting is starting in 2021, I've been a nonstop writer. I only wrote one article in 2020, which was about my experience volunteering in a vaccine randomized controlled trial. And I remember hearing some of these statements from famous doctors, namely Dr. John Ioannidis, giant of evidence-based medicine, in April and May of 2020, when he was saying that he thought the worst of the pandemic was over, that half of the country had already been infected and they didn't even know it, this sort of thing. And I remember telling my wife like, hey, this seems great. You know, this, this world-famous researcher and epidemiologist really thinks that, that it might be over. And it wasn't until May 2021, believe it or not, that I really started to revisit some of those early statements in the pandemic. And this is when pediatric vaccines came out and a lot of doctors started to oppose vaccinating children. And I—

Why?

And I started seeing the arguments that I had seen anti-vaxxers used about the MMR, about the polio, about the HPV vaccine be repurposed with regards to the pediatric COVID vaccine. And when I started delving into some of the early COVID output of these guys, it was just wildly wrong, which is okay. People make mistakes. Dr. Paul Offit famously underestimated COVID in March 2020, and by April 2020, said, oops, I was wrong. I mean, so that happens and that, you know, we all make mistakes, but these guys kept insisting that they were right and that the best way to spread, get rid of the virus was to spread the virus. So that was the title of my first book, We Want Them Infected. And if you listen to these guys now, they'll say, oh, we just cared about poor children in schools and we just cared about education. We just cared about, you know, masking toddlers. And in reality, They tried to spread the virus. So they objected to mitigation measures, not because they thought they failed to slow the virus, but precisely because that's what they did. So that was the topic of my first book, We Want Them Infected. And I'll just say one more thing. It wasn't a different approach to the pandemic necessarily, but these guys routinely botched basic facts. So probably the most stark example, Because they would say things that, like, that the flu killed more children than COVID at a time when COVID had killed 1,000 children and the flu had killed 10. So we're not talking about different opinions and different approaches to the pandemic. We're approaching, we're talking about basic facts, and that's what We Want Them Infected is about. The sequel, Everyone Else Is Lying to You, is about how these guys obtained power. Because one, another thing that I got very wrong is I kind of thought that the pandemic would kill the anti-vaccine movement, or at least further marginalize it, right? If I told you at the start of 2020, a pandemic is going to kill 1.2 million Americans, a vaccine is going to be developed in record time. It's not perfect at all, but it still saved millions of lives and hundreds of thousands of people died because they refused it. You might think that the people who spread anti-vaccine disinformation would be marginalized, would be hated, would be loathed, would be pariahs. But instead, their vision of the pandemic won out and they are now running the NIH, running the FDA, running the ACIP, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. So how did that happen? That's the story that I try to tell in a second book.

And you mentioned all these major areas in which these folks have been integrated. Who are we talking about? If you can give us a little back-of-the-envelope sketch on just some of the major players and how they went from being folks who were generally wrong to people who now are in charge.

Yeah. So I already mentioned Dr. John Ioannidis, a world-famous epidemiologist at Stanford. Some other names that are in the book are Scott Atlas, who was Trump's COVID virus czar in the fall of 2020, where he tried to spread COVID as much as he could. He now denies that he aimed for herd immunity via mass immunity, but there's dozens of video clips of him saying exactly that. Those guys are not in power. Current doctors who are in power are the head of the NIH, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, another doctor who treated zero COVID patients, who spent the pandemic in his office, as I'm doing now, making podcasts. Who was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was written on October 4th, 2020, and again, it was all about herd immunity via natural immunity. And they claimed that they could end the pandemic in three to six months if only the virus was allowed to circulate freely amongst people under age 70, none of whom who were vaccinated at the time. His co-author on that, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, another doctor who treated no COVID patients, is now the head of the advisory. Committee on Immunization Practices. And even though these guys claimed that they were more powerful than COVID and that they would've tamed the virus, when given the opportunity to lead, they are failing. So Martin Kulldorff, for example, he can't even run a single meeting of the ACIP without embarrassing himself. He had this quote, we are rookies. That, by the way, is gonna be the title to my third book. We are rookies. You know, and Jay Bhattacharya is, is reviled. At the NIH, and again, seems to spend most of his time making podcasts. Then we have the head of the FDA, Dr. Marty Makary, who claimed that one infection to COVID led to decades, if not lifelong immunity, and that we had herd immunity in the spring of 2021, and that anyone who disagreed with him about herd immunity at that time was trying to manipulate the public. He later went on to laugh at the Delta variant. He called the Omicron variant nature's vaccine and Omicold. And then his right-hand man at the FDA, Dr. Vineet Prasad, who was a hematologist at UCSF, who began his campaign against the pediatric vaccine months before there was a pediatric COVID vaccine and has spent the past 4 years treating vaccine side effects, rare vaccine side effects, even mere abnormalities normal lab values in children who feel fine is a fate worse than death. So how did these guys gain power? And they did it using tried and true techniques of the tobacco industry, of the fossil fuel industry, of the anti-GMO industry, which you know everything about, by essentially claiming everyone else is lying to you, that we are the only ones who are telling you the truth. And they didn't hide this. I mean, so VNA, it wasn't subtle. Vinay Prasad made podcasts called You Should Stop Trusting Public Health. An alternative title for the book is Trust in Science Should Be Down Rationally, which is a quote from Vinay Prasad. We didn't want to use that because people would think that it was— I was advocating that. But he said, stop trusting scientists. These guys all said, stop trusting the CDC, don't trust the FDA. And again, those institutions are not perfect. I'm not here to defend every decision that they made during the pandemic. At all, but their criticisms were all in bad faith. They only criticized these agencies for any attempt, maybe outside of nursing homes, to limit the virus. And now that they're in charge, you know, trust is plummeting. There's basically a public health secession at this point where red states are going to do one thing and blue states are going to do another. And in order to achieve power, they were willing to elevate Robert Kennedy Jr. And whenever I discuss what his beliefs actually are, I feel gross and dirty. I feel like a crank just listing all of his beliefs. But all 4 of those guys wrote pro-Kennedy articles. And I bet if you had told them in 2020, you are going to be describing RFK Jr. as the savior of vaccines, which they did, they wouldn't have believed that about themselves.

Yeah. And then the funny part about this is that all of these folks you mentioned somehow think of themselves as victims. And, and, and, and, you know, can you touch on that just a little bit?

Yeah. So the last chapter of the book is devoted to some of these techniques that they used to deflect criticism. So Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff made countless YouTube videos describing how they had been silenced and censored. I even have a video clip of Jay Bhattacharya speaking at an RFK rally. This time, or actually it was in April 2024. So he's speaking in front of, in front of a huge crowd into a microphone saying how he has been silenced, even though he became world famous. He met with President Trump. He advised Ron DeSantis. So it was this sort of DARVO techniques where they would sort of accuse the other side that of which, which you're guilty. It's true. YouTube took down one of their videos in 2021, and after the loss of a single YouTube video, they held a roundtable with Ron DeSantis to decry big tech censorship. And, you know, Twitter also deprioritized some of their tweets. Jay Bhattacharya took this all the way up to the Supreme Court where he was smacked down. He lost his case, but they had all these techniques where Again, they would not only just cry censorship, it was impossible to disagree with them without being accused of writing a hit piece or slurs or slander. So every time anyone made a factual criticism of them, they responded as if they were personally attacked the whole time saying, we just want to have, we just want to have discussion. We need to avoid ad hominem attacks. You know, even though Jay Bhattacharya called me inane, he called me unhinged on social media. He wrote a long review of We Want Them Infected only to later admit that he hadn't read it. And had he read it, actually both books, he would've seen half of it is just quoting him and these other guys. I described both books as sort of half books that you should read and kind of half reference books. Because it's just collections of quotes and lists of articles, and no one can argue against it for that reason. I mean, 25 pages of We Want Them Infected are just quotes of doctors saying the worst is over starting in April 2020. So no one has tried to argue against my work, and I'm confident at this point no one will.

Yeah, that's what— that's the beauty of this work and the previous one is you give them enough rope. I mean, it is, it is literally their words cited throughout. And, and that's what I think makes it so compelling is that it is so condemning, but you're allowing them to beat themselves with their own arm.

Yeah. I mean, it's not my fault that Dr. McCary wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal titled, We'll Have Herd Immunity by April. It's, it's not my fault that Jay Bhattacharya said we basically have herd immunity in May 2021, or that he said New York and Sweden had herd immunity in, what was it, July 2020. But they want these sort of statements forgotten.

They—

it's funny, they claim to be censored and silenced, but they do not want their old statements remembered. You know, it's kind of funny, a very Mild side note to everything that's been going on now is I had a small YouTube channel, which had about 400 clips or so of just dumb things these guys had said. And Vinay Prasad complained to YouTube about it and they took it down for about 10 days or so until, thanks to a First Amendment lawyer who volunteered to represent me and a lot of media attention, you know, YouTube restored my channel. I mean, the fate of my YouTube channel is a very small thing. But it just shows that they did not want their own words out there, at least when I presented them to the public, that's for sure.

And one of the other things that I thought was really compelling about the work was you have a list of strategies that were used to spread doubt. And this is really important because I've always wanted to do the anatomy of a pseudoscientific claim where you had a list like this that you would highlight in any given claim, like all the different tactics that are used. And could you kind of run through some of the ways in which folks who are opponents of science and reason are able to install doubt in the general population. Yeah.

So this list that you're talking about comes from a paper by Rebecca Goldberg and Laura Vandenberg. And let me see if I can find the exact name of their paper, The Science of Spin: Targeted Strategies to Manufacture Doubt. With detrimental effects on environmental and public health. So they had a list of like 28 studies or 28 sort of techniques, which maybe I'll just read some of them to attack study designs that, that studies that, that they, you know, that show results that people don't want, that smoking is dangerous or that vaccines work. Gain support from reputable individuals, misrepresent data, suppress incriminating information, contribute to misleading research, hold conferences or seminars. Avoid or abuse peer review. Employ hyperbolic or absolutist language. Invoke liberty, censorship, overregulation, et cetera. It goes on like this. Pose as a defender of public truth. This sort of thing. Attack opponents. Make strawman arguments. Abuse credentials. So all of these things were, were, were exactly what the head of the NIH, the head of the FDA, the head of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices did. They, they just repeated all of these sort of techniques. And it's not only that I discuss them as well, but I also discuss with the help of journalist Walker Bragman, who's done incredible investigations into this, all of the right-wing money that was behind these guys and the cowardice of institutions and the complicity of the media who published their articles We'll have herd immunity by April. That was published in the Wall Street Journal, but liberal organizations are so supposedly liberal publications. The Atlantic, the Washington Post also published a lot of their disinformation as well, publishing articles in March 2020 by Dr. Lucy McBride that the end of the pandemic is here, this sort of thing. And, uh, you know, I also discuss how MAGA politicians enabled these guys. And even though they would say, you know, medicine and politics should be totally separate, you know, they testified before both branches of Congress. They testified in courts. They advised Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, as I already said, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. So they're, they, they, these guys were everywhere except the hospital with me. And one of the, you know, the, the book is kind of long, but in one way is One of the points that I try to get across is the volume is the message, that Americans were deluged with this message of doubt every day from all angles for years. And these guys portrayed themselves as sober science communicators who just are following evidence, who are just following data. And when they gave formal talks, that's how they would present themselves. But they used emotionally manipulative language to try to Enrage their audience to— and they were very successful in doing this. If you read the comments on their social media feeds or some of their articles, you know, it'll be, you know, Fauci should be in jail. And, you know, anyone who tried to mask a toddler should be in jail. And this is what is being used now as a pretext to decimate the FDA and the NIH. Every— everything that All the anger and rage that they manufactured, that they generated, it's coming full circle. And this is what Kennedy is using to fire the head of the ACIP, you know, everyone at the ACIP, for example. So there's obviously real-world consequences to this. And what's funny is I write in the book that had the election gone the other way, I would be accused of hysterical fearmongering, which I was many times, when in fact I vastly underestimated the threat. Uh, you know, I, I was warning a lot. along with many others about Kennedy this time last year at Science Based Medicine. But my warnings were not nearly hysterical enough. I didn't think things would get this bad this fast.

Yeah. And it brings to mind though, like, what is the endgame here? When you are a— and you mentioned, you know, the political mix, the business mix with medicine, all this kind of is coming together here, but it's, it is a disaster when you You have the United States scientific enterprise, which was the gem of the world in terms of people wanted to come here to study. People wanted to come here to be physicians because this was the place to do it. What is value in dismantling that?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I've, a lot of times people ask me what these doctors' motivations is. I'm not a mind reader. I do have some theories. I think that a lot of them. Did underestimate COVID 5 and a half years ago in a good faith way. For example, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, as far as I know, his first article, the pandemic was, is the coronavirus as deadly as they say, which was written in the Wall Street Journal in March 2020. And he speculated that COVID would kill 20,000 to 40,000 Americans and that it had 1/10 of the mortality rate as the flu. And things didn't turn out that way. But I think that he had trouble admitting error. I think a lot of these guys had trouble admitting error. I've never actually seen any of them do that. They are now in the process of trying to deny their own words and rewrite the history of the pandemic. I have a whole chapter on that, the COVID revisionist history project. I think that they saw frontline doctors getting treated as heroes and clapped for, and they wanted some of that attention, right? It's no fun to sort of be sitting on the sidelines and You know, Dr. John Ioannidis realized that people wanted to hear from him if he said COVID was massively overblown and it was all going away. I think a lot of them had right-wing libertarian political leanings and were just offended that the government had the power to shut down society. And they didn't want to see that. I think some of them monetized some of their social media content. For especially, well, Dr. Vinay Prasad, you know, monetized his YouTube and Substack and, you know, that created other insensitive, other insensitive incentives. You know, when you, when you write an article and you see that it gets shared 10 million times, that provides an incentive to further produce that content. So this is something called audience capture where influencers become radicalized by their audience and we're all vulnerable to it. It's not like I'm above this and immune to that, of course. But if you look at their social media feeds, especially over the past— maybe not today, but over the past 5 years, it's just this cesspool of sort of rage and hate and accusations. And they banned anyone from participating or commenting who might contradict them. So again, I think if you had told them in 2020, You're going to be standing next to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he dunks on the MMR vaccine, they wouldn't have believed it. They would have reacted in horror and outrage. But you can see how sort of step by step that there was no one there to tell them no and put up these guardrails that they turned into enablers of America's number one most dangerous quack, an anti-vaccine disinformation agent who doesn't even believe in germ theory.

Yeah. And you mentioned, you know, social media effect, but how much has traditional media enabled the same thing?

So I have a chapter on that and I think the traditional media, you know, did their sort of false balance shtick quite a bit. They continued to platform people like Dr. Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya and Vinay Prasad. Long after their COVID predictions had already been shown to be false. So I think certain doctors gained a reputation. It was like, oh, you know, this is the COVID expert that we turned to. And some of them deserved it, right? I mean, Peter Hotez, for example, you know, a real hero, but others, you know, just became famous almost for being famous. I'm thinking of Dr. Monica Gandhi in particular, who I think has a good soul, And I don't think she had some of the ulterior motives that I've spoken about with some of the other doctors, but she's an infectious disease doctor at UCSF who started declaring the pandemic over in February 2021, if not even before that, and kind of mocking people who tried to avoid the virus, saying they were just living in fear and full of anxiety. And, you know, she was interviewed on Slate and the Washington Post and dozens, countless articles. about COVID are someone who I already mentioned, Dr. Lucy McBride, a concierge physician in Washington, DC, who, you know, coined terms like coronaphobia and fear of normal to kind of mock people who tried to avoid COVID and starting in the spring of 2021. And she was all over CNN and MSNBC and the Washington Post. So I think that the media, I mean, they have a hard job, right? I mean, who, if I hear 2 experts discussing some topic on astronomy, I know nothing about, like, how am I supposed to tell who's telling the truth or not? But I think once these guys declared the pandemic over in spring of 2021 and it wasn't over, the media should not have kept going back to them as sort of trusted sources. But unfortunately they did. And these guys are still quoted in the papers all the time.

Well, it's one thing to say that the media should be a little better at policing itself, but what about the broader discipline itself? I mean, I don't I can't find it hard to believe that so many physicians are silent and keeping their heads down, that physicians in social media, with the exception of some, are not overly critical, or the agencies like AMA and other large organizations. The AAP has been pretty good here, but how do we, how do we get the major influential organizations, physicians' organizations, to really step up and start saying, hey, this is bullshit. You know, how do you, When does that happen?

Well, it's happening now. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology are releasing their own vaccine recommendations. They are properly treating the ACIP as this non-entity, but it did, it's, it's a little bit, I don't wanna say too little too late because it's important work that they're doing now, but it's stuff that they should have been doing many years ago. Again, someone like I was definitely not the only doctor pushing back on misinformation, but I should have been one of thousands, I think. And a little bit, we all have to pick our own battles. I mean, there's many misinformation fights that I haven't joined because other people do it better than me. I'm not qualified to really speak about it. For example, you know, abortion disinformation or drug policy disinformation. So not everyone can do anything. But there's this sense in medicine, which is very unfortunate, that trying to engage with the public in this sort of way, it's almost unprofessional and inappropriate and beneath the profession. There's a sense that correcting other doctors this way is kind of rude and inappropriate. I was told a lot of times I needed to watch my tone, for example, even though my tone was totally fine. And And there's a sense that it kind of doesn't really matter. And I, and I think there's a long tradition of professions ranging from police and clergymen and whatever, of kind of not policing our own. And as you already alluded to, these guys had very good defense mechanisms to prevent anyone from criticizing them. And we do have to be careful about what we label disinformation and misinformation. Like you don't want people who just have different ideas out there to be criticized. I'm thinking specifically of the woman who won the Nobel Prize for the mRNA vaccines, Karina Karikó, who was largely dismissed and brushed off until all of a sudden she saved tens of millions of lives around the world. But again, the doctors who I write about, the people who are now our current medical establishment, they weren't just thinking They were botching basic facts constantly and all the time. And basic facts should not be up for debate, but because they had credentials and they spoke in often professional and measured tones, a lot of medicine was unable to say the emperor has no clothes. They looked at a naked emperor and said, he's just thinking differently. He's heterodox. He has valuable opinions to share. And it's, it's unfortunate that But, you know, they've only woken up until it's too late. And a lot of people just don't want to get involved in the fight, right? I mean, it's easier just to say nothing. I mean, I mean, think about someone like Peter Hotez who has received death threats. And when he, when he speaks, I've seen videos that he's posted of police dogs sniffing out the auditorium to check for bombs beforehand. And people have showed up at his house. So there's a lot of disincentives to be quiet. And you know about this.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and conversely, there's no incentives to really speak up, right? I mean, I'm not looking for a pay raise and a pat on the back from my boss and leadership, but you know, there's none of that support is there. And you know that better than anyone.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot. I didn't want to interrupt there, but a lot of that was resonating. I mean, my standing, I did it because it's the right thing to do. And that, that, that at least in studying biotechnology, and the reason this podcast has happened now for 10 years is because we need all tools on deck to feed the feed insecure, for our problems here with the environment, for farmers to stay in business, all the good reasons. And that's why I always did it. And what happened to me 10 years ago, it changed the course of my entire career. And I'm still dragging the anchor from that. I don't know that I've gotten a federally funded grant since then. You know, and, and have been eliminated from many opportunities and speaking gigs. You know, I mean, that I'm on the schedule and people will complain that I'm on the schedule. So, and, and, and all I tried to do was do the right thing. So it's not something that you ever walk away from very easily, but at the same time, we got to turn the ship around. And so how do we do it at this point? I mean, the NIH has been defunded. We've had lots of research that's been taken apart. The CDC and all these federal agencies have been dismantled. People that have been fired have other jobs now. They're not coming back. And so how do we turn this around? And do you think that we actually can turn it around?

Yeah, We Want Them Infected had suggestions to turn it around, which was basically that the medical profession should not tolerate misinformation in its ranks. You know, that didn't happen. It's not like I expected my book to change the world. That didn't happen. So the second book is a book of It's a book of defeat. It's a book of failure. It's a very dark, it's a very pessimistic book. And I say, I have no solutions. I don't know what to do. Scientific, you know, countries have destroyed their scientific infrastructure before. There's a sad precedent for this. The most famous one being Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, I guess in the '40s and '50s. You can speak on that more than I can, I'm sure. But they destroyed their whole genetics. Division because that was associated with Nazis. And so geneticists were marched off to the Gulag and shot. Hopefully we're not going to reach that point here in the United States. But I don't know if the US will ever truly recover from this, at least in the next decade or so. I mean, the future's always very unpredictable, I suppose. In the best case scenario, things kind of limp along and these guys are out of power in 4 years and some decent people replace them and funding is restored. And enough sort of nameless bureaucrats. I don't want to call them that because that sounds like an insult, but the nameless kind of day-to-day people at the FDA and CDC and NIH stick around, keep their head down, do their job, and wait for help to arrive in 3 and a half years. But, you know, RFK and these guys can do a lot of damage in that time. Um, so, so I, I don't know exactly what the solution is. Other than just for doctors and really all scientists to grow a backbone, to grow some spine and stand up against these guys when you see obvious disinformation. But we failed to do that and we're paying the price now.

Yeah. And I like that solution. And I've been screaming this for years is that people are afraid, like when I speak with physicians or others, they'll say, well, I don't want to argue with an idiot on Twitter. And no one wants to argue with an idiot on Twitter, but for every person who is engaging someone who's spreading false information, there are dozens and dozens of eyeballs who are watching. And so this is really a battle for trust. And as we start to, and this is maybe my solution thinking is, as we saw with the GMO debate, that as people wore out from disaster fatigue, they kept waiting for, Bill Gates to kill everybody on the planet and all these other claims that were made back then. As these disasters never unfolded and we started to see how biotechnology could actually be helpful, the interest in those things kind of waned. And maybe that needs to happen here, that we need to see that the public infrastructure crumble a little bit. People have less access to the newest technologies. You know, if you can afford to go to Japan to get the newest and best mRNA vaccines for pancreatic cancer. You know, maybe that's what it'll take. But, um, but it does take all of us engaging and continuing to engage on this and, and, you know, do things like share your book or, you know, uh, share the information just to be aware of this. And so if people wanted to buy a copy of this thing, where do they find it?

Uh, so the best place to go is directly from the publisher. Red Hawk Publishing. They're very small publishers, but they're great. I love them. It's also available on Amazon. Directly from the publisher is best.

Right. Yeah. So the Red Hawk and then, and they're somewhere online, you can Google that and get—

Yeah, just Google Red Hawk Publishing. And, you know, both books are hard to read. A lot of the feedback that I've gotten is that people can read 5 pages and then they have to put it down and take a walk and take some deep breaths. You know, someone messaged me the other day that their husband banned it from her reading it before bed because she was just, you know, so it's not easy reading. And I probably could have used an editor. Both books are kind of way too long. But like I said, I treated them as sort of half-reference books, you know, half-readable books, just because I wanted to leave a record, right? Because imagine, This is kind of grandiose of me to be thinking that someone's gonna be reading these in 50 years, but imagine you wanted to answer that question of how RFK obtained power after a pandemic, the, the greatest mass death event in American history. It's the most unbelievable, absurd thing one could possibly imagine, but I hope I've at least explained part of it. That's always been my goal.

Well, let's just say if things continue as they are, it'll probably be burned Yes.

Yeah, that's true.

Probably. And if things continue as they are on this trajectory, you'll, you'll make the burned book list. So in wrapping it up today, you know, you've been really prolific in the last couple of years, as you mentioned, and I certainly enjoy your work and share it everywhere. So something somebody can do to really help if they don't want to create content is share the good work of other people. So could you talk a little bit about that and other places where they could find your, your writing?

Yeah. So this is a blog created by David Gorski and Steven Novella. I started writing there in May 2021. I remember when they asked me after I submitted a few articles voluntarily to take on a more regular spot. And I thought to myself, boy, I can't imagine producing a column every week or every month, but I've been unable to stop writing since then. And so there are about 270 articles there. Those are all Free. And, you know, it's interesting to go back and read some of those and kind of see my own evolution. Whereas I started out treating these guys as good faith actors who were just motivated by data and science, you could kind of see, as I realized in real time, oh my gosh, these guys are propaganda agents, you know, out to spread misinformation and elevate themselves. So there's that. I also have a very small podcast myself called We Want Them Infected, where we just kind of review the week's horrors at this point, you know, but, but really sort of try to, try to explain, you know, how this apathy and this tolerance for disinformation that began in the spring of 2020 is influencing everything today. So none of this is happening out of the blue. It's all been a gradual process. And I, the final thing I'll add is it's, it was obvious it was taking place out in the open. Nothing that I write is breaking news or secret discoveries or access to hidden documents. Walker Bragman does some of that, and I have some of that in the book, but it's not me. So it was out there in the obvious. It was just ignored, forgotten, and brushed off until now that it's again largely too late.

Yeah. I heard a statement yesterday is that some of us have outrage at the lack of outrage.

Yeah. I don't know that that's me now. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think a lot of so-called leaders of medicine behaved in a very cowardly fashion. Some of them even enabled these guys. Very few stood up. You know, people like Peter Hotez and Paul Offit should not be famous in my opinion, because there should be 1,000 people like Peter Hotez. There should be 1,000 people like Paul Offit. There should be 1,000 people like you. No one should know your name because you should be one of many. But unfortunately you're famous.

Well, I've had, I've had colleagues come up to me at conferences and give me a big hug and say, I'm sorry. You know, they'd say, I wish I could do what you do, but, you know, I got a family and I can't lose this job and I can't, you know, and especially folks in industry, you know, just afraid to stand up and say something. And it really does show how social media and how disinformation and how powerful the agents of disinformation are in squelching the folks who can tell the truth. And, you know, it's, I don't want any special pat on the back for sure, but certainly do acknowledge the folks out there who, who do it like the Paul Offits. And he's so brilliant too in the way he does it, but also your work. I'm really glad that you do it and glad you write for Science Based Medicine. Those are outstanding sources for people to check out. I had my first one there a few weeks ago.

That's right.

That was pretty good.

So I know that was your first, but that was my first there.

Yeah. For with the, but it's science-based medicine, so maybe more in the future. But at this point, I just encourage you to check out the book. Give me the full title one more time with the subtitle.

Okay. So, um, boy, I gotta find it myself. Hold on.

I know it's long.

Well, let me, let me, let me, you know, the, the, the, We Want Them Infected. The full title is 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-19. And that was published in April 2023. So, you know, just to pat myself on the back a little bit, I mean, that book was intended to serve as a warning, right? That it was dangerous for doctors to use the anti-vaccine movement and it was is dangerous for doctors to normalize quackery. And then the second book is how that happened. Everyone Else Is Lying to You, how the medical establishment— and by that I mean our current medical establishment, you know, the head of the FDA, the head of this NIH— weaponized doubt to spread COVID, normalize quackery, and undermine public health.

Yeah, so find one at Red Hawk Publishing, uh, check that out. Put a link inside the inside the podcast episode online. So, uh, Dr. Howard, nice to see you again. Nice to talk to you. And I hope you can join me in my class again next semester. You're always a class favorite. So thank you very much.

Thank you so much. Well, as you know, I'm a native Gainesvillian, so we'll have to get a beer the next time I'm there, probably over Christmas or something like that.

That'd be great. Yeah, come on out and have a, have a cocktail out on the farm too. It's a beautiful space we're on out there. And for the listeners, thank you very much for listening to another episode of the Talking Biotech Podcast. Uh, grab the book, read the book, enjoy the book. It, you know, he says it's a read, but I find it pretty easy to get through because it's all the quotes of the people who said them themselves, laced together with their social media rants, and really just tells a cohesive story based upon their own words, which is really nice. And then threads that together very nice with some analysis. So check it out and we'll talk to you again next week.