Episode Summary
Amid the constant contradictions of Donald Trump’s second administration, some of his policies have been remarkably consistent, especially those out of the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert Kennedy Junior has been ripping up decades of scientific consensus on many areas, including vaccines, diet recommendations, and transgender care.
But as a lifelong politician and lawyer with no actual experience as a doctor or medical administrator, he has needed to develop a staff of people with at least some medical experience in order to tear and destroy. What kind of doctor would want to work for a parasite-ridden lawyer who brags about eating roadkill, seems to not understand how viruses work, and advocates eating lots of saturated fats? The answer is: almost none of them. But, unfortunately, there are always a few people out there with enough personal grudges and crank beliefs to do the job.
Our guest on today’s program, Jonathan Howard, knows all about the new medical establishment after having seen firsthand how they promoted anti-vaccine lies and dangerously underestimated the effects of Covid-19. We had him on the program in 2022 to discuss his first book, We Want Them Infected, and he’s out with a new one examining the policy insanity of Kennedy and his underlings called Everyone Else Is Lying to You.
The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
07:36 — Robert Kennedy Jr. and his allies are the medical establishment, and they are responsible for what happens
16:26 — The “Great Barrington Declaration” was initiated by political activists, not scientistsc
20:48 — After claiming to oppose censorship, the Trumpian medical establishment is conducting it at a massive scale
25:57 — Anti-vax activists have had years to do their own studies, but they have basically nothing
33:34 — The cowardice of Republicans like Bill Cassidy who know better
37:54 — Other people in the MAHA conspiracist movement
44:41 — MAHA figures have more conflicts of interest than the scientists they hate
51:24 — The looming conflict between polluters and anti-vax Republicans
01:03:20 — John Ioannidis and the perils of medical contrarianism
01:08:08 — Why atheist activists teamed up with far-right Christians who hate medical science
01:18:44 — Conclusion
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So, I literally just released an episode catching up with a previous guest who had been on the show who had marked a lot of the negative trends that we are now seeing. And unfortunately I’m in the same spot with you, my friend, that, there’s a lot of bad things that have happened. And there are so many things that I do wanna kind of summarize of them so that we can all keep track of what’s been going on for the conversation.
And as we’re talking today on January 30th, the most recent kind of news headline of this awful medical establishment that is in installed itself thanks to Trump, is that, the measles in the United States are, they are what’s being made great, it looks like.
JONATHAN HOWARD: Yeah, no, measles is spreading out of control.
There’s the largest outbreak in 25 or 30 year, probably 26 years, actually in, South Carolina right now. Measles seems to be. Popping up in multiple other states as well. This is of course, [00:04:00] following a very large outbreak in Texas in the spring of 2025 that killed two children, and another adult.
So these were the first measles deaths in the country in about 10 or 15 years, and the first children to die, I think since 1991. and our current medical establishment is trying to control it with vitamin a cod liver oil, and by spreading disinformation about the measles vaccine as was eminently predictable.
SHEFFIELD: It was. And what we’re really seeing, I think, consistently is that, that these guys are kind of across the board are, they have these old fashioned medical viewpoints. Like that’s what really what they’re doing. And they have these ideas that really have been debunked for about 80 years roughly. but they want to try again on everything seems like.
HOWARD: Yeah, I was gonna say, it depends how old fashioned you’re talking about because, the measles vaccine has been around since 1963 and, probably all current members of our medical establishment, except for maybe RFK would say that they think the MMR is a very important vaccine, but if they actually felt that way, they would not be working for RFK, who has spread more misinformation about the measles vaccine and all vaccines and probably any other American in the past 20 years.
And what we are seeing is that. Disinformation about the COVID vaccine is very predictably bleeding into all vaccines. So all vaccines are kind of connected in, in that if you trust the doctors who recommend them people are more likely to get the measles vaccine if they’re also told accurate information about the COVID vaccine, which they weren’t.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And they weren’t. And this is part of when, if you look back at the history that there has always been suspicion about vaccines. People have always had it since they were first [00:06:00] invented. So it’s, I guess it’s understandable even though we don’t agree with those viewpoints for people to, it does seem on the face of it on the surface that a little bit counterintuitive.
You mean you’re telling me that. Injecting diseases into myself is good for me? And it’s always been a challenge, right?
HOWARD: Yeah. The history of the anti-vaccine movement is as old as vaccines themselves. Even preceding Edward Jenner, as far as I know, the first known vaccinator was an English farmer by the name of Benjamin Esti, who vaccinated his children against smallpox in the 1770s or something like that.
And everyone can go read about him on Wikipedia. And he faced great backlash from his community. And then when a smallpox epidemic ripped through the community, his children were spared. But all, everything that we’re hearing about vaccines. Now, all I should say, all anti-vaccine disinformation, none of this is new.
It, all goes back to this idea that vaccines are in pure in some way, whereas catching a virus is natural and therefore there’s no problem with it. Or that vaccines have never been properly tested or that they are just being given by pharmaceutical companies to pad their bottom line. So no, nothing that we’re hearing now is new.
What’s changed is who it’s coming from, top government officials and top doctors who came from Harvard, Stanford, UCSF and Johns Hopkins. That’s what’s new.
Robert Kennedy Jr. and his allies are the medical establishment, and they are responsible for what happens
SHEFFIELD: It is. And they still constantly talk about the medical establishment and all that, but they are the medical establishment.
They are the ones with the power. They are the ones with the money, and they are the ones who are responsible for the deaths of these children and the other people that will die.
HOWARD: Absolutely. So our current [00:08:00] medical establishment, and I love that you called them that way, they, rose to power kind of portraying themselves as these outsiders who would have controlled COVID perfectly.
So they became famous not for their on the ground accomplishments, but because of their social media content in which they said they would have protected the vulnerable, they would have kept schools open, or the fact that they proposed things and they argued for things and they called for things. But now that they are in power and have been given the opportunity to prove their re real world competency they’re failing.
And it is, of course not just measles. Last year we had 28,000 cases of whooping cough in this country. We had a record number, not a record, but a very high number of pediatric flu death. And of course not all of this can be laid on the hands of our current medical establishment who had just been in power for a few weeks at this time.
But they’re showing that they are totally inept at controlling viruses, and I shouldn’t say even inept, indifferent to controlling viruses. They’re not making any or bacteria in the case of whooping cough, but they’re not making any attempt to do that. And they are improving incompetent leaders at the agencies that they run, the NIH, the FDA, and to some degree the CDC as well.
And I say only to, to some degree because I don’t think the current director is a doctor, but, they’re proving inept leaders who are loathed and mocked by the people who work for them.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and you talked about this idea that it seems like a lot of them really actually do not want to do anything to mitigate disease.
And that was the title of your previous book that We Want Them Infected. I mean, so what is this? I mean, I think the idea that doctors would want people to be infected with viruses, it seems so absurd that it’s almost [00:10:00] unbelievable that a doctor would say such a thing, but what is the idea behind this here?
HOWARD: Yeah, so the title from the book, We Want Them Infected, came from a pretty low level, A person in public health in the Trump administration by the name of Paul Alexander who literally said that we want them infected. But this idea originated best. I can trace it back to in March, 2020, and it was really formalized in the Great Barrington Declaration, which was written in October 20, 2020 by three people, two of whom are now very high up in the Trump administration. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who leads the NIH and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who is a, vaccine advisor at the CDC and recently off the authored a, memo, actually both of them did to decimate the vaccine schedule, but. If you listen to what they have to say about their pandemic vision today they kind of just cherry pick the most unpopular mitigation measures and say, we were only against that.
So they’ll say, we just wanted kids in school. We just cared so much about education of, poor children and minorities in the working class. We just didn’t want toddler horse to wear masks. But in reality what they wanted in 2020 was as many people to get infected as possible. At least if you were in what they.
Considered the not vulnerable category, which was essentially everyone under age 60 or 70 who didn’t have some significant medical comorbidity. And their idea was that you could get rid of the virus by spreading the virus. So they proposed a world of zero COVID for vulnerable people, older people in nursing homes, and a world of pure COVID for basically everyone else.
And they claimed that if you let the virus spread within three to six months, we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would end. This was brought to the White House by Dr. Scott Atlas, [00:12:00] who was one of Trump’s Coronavirus is ours at the time, who worked very hard to undo mitigations,
SHEFFIELD: Who also, sorry, I, we should say, had no epidemiology background whatsoever. He was a, he is a radiologist.
HOWARD: Correct. And, all of these doctors who I mentioned were, none of them saw what COVID could do with their own eyes. So they constantly said things that anyone who worked on a COVID unit would never say that the virus spared young people, or that death was the only bad outcome from COVID.
Or even though it wasn’t really known, in the time of course, but they claimed that one COVID infection led to. Decades of immunity, even though the virus was just 1-year-old. So they were wrong, basically about everything. And all of them drastically underestimated COVID. So Dr. Jay Charia at the start of the pandemic predicted that COVID would kill 20 to 40,000 Americans.
He will deny that he wrote that, but he did. And anyone can go read his essay in the Wall Street Journal is the coronavirus as deadly as they say in which he said that. He said that New York and Sweden had reached herd immunity by June, 2020. His co-author on this document, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, claimed that Stockholm and Sweden was, had almost reached herd immunity in April, 2020.
So it was a very, so they drastically underestimated what COVID could do. But if you hear them talk today, they say that they will say that their pandemic vision has been vindicated and that it was everyone else who broke trust in public health, except for.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. and they were the ones who were the most wrong.
I mean, let’s be clear about that. they, want to say. That, the original experts who are now dislodged in epidemiology and are not the establishment, the medical establishment they want to say that they were [00:14:00] wrong. And look, the reality is nobody was perfect in the predictions or the observations that they made.
but ultimately it was the people who were saying, oh, it’s gonna be over. In two or three months. And not very many people would, I don’t know how you could be more wrong than that.
HOWARD: Yeah. And it’s the, things that they were, right about weren’t things that were uniquely right to them.
So they will say that school closures hurt children, for example. And I don’t know anyone who argues differently. I think what they did, however, is they portrayed every single mitigation measure as a choice. So what they did is they erased the virus and they essentially claimed that if only the people in charge had made smarter decisions, schools could have, remained open and functioned totally normally in this sort of thing.
And again, we don’t have to speak about this in a hypothetical sense because we can look at what, again, what they are doing now that they are in charge and they’re. Failing to stop viruses and diseases from spreading. And when they helped run the show in Florida during 2021, especially during Florida’s Delta Wave, what happened?
Schools closed and vulnerable people died in huge numbers and so did not vulnerable people. So we don’t have to speak about anything in the hypothetical sense. We can just look at what actually happened and they didn’t do a single thing that they claimed they would have done, and these guys are stuck in 2020.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya just gave a recent interview to the New York Times, I think just yesterday with Ross. Duch had, however he pronounce his name, one of their conservative columnists. And he spent the first half of the interview not talking about what he’s doing at the NIHA topic I’m sure he’s desperate to avoid but trying to re-litigate what was, what happened six years ago, the lockdowns of six years ago.
he tries to answer every question by referencing, lockdowns. And this isn’t just something to laugh about because he is using this as a [00:16:00] pretext to help dismantle public health here in the United States. So if you ask him why did the United States withdraw from the World Health Organization, his answers is that they promoted lockdowns.
So we’re really seeing this anger and this grievance over COVID manifest itself now by people whose aim was always to take a wrecking ball to everything.
The “Great Barrington Declaration” was initiated by political activists, not scientistsc
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that’s right. And, this is a, the their viewpoint here also, it doesn’t it, it, was never supported by, any kind of logic.
Like when they’re talking about, oh, well we, this, whole idea of we want them infected or, let, the virus rip. It was completely incoherent. This Great Barrington declaration that they signed, which was basically the, it was initiated by a right-wing libertarian group. Not anything to do with medical establishments or doctors, anything like that.
they didn’t have any plan in place of, well, how do you know? About somebody who has a co comorbidity and they don’t know it. Like, what do you, what happens to them? And, that really was, I think one of the biggest headlines outta the Pandemic from what I saw is that, that there were so many people who had conditions and they didn’t know that they had conditions because they had not had, symptoms.
But in fact they still had ‘em. And we have, we saw a lot of people that were becoming chronically ill or dying as a result of being infected. And that was never even addressed at all in the Great Barrington Declaration or subsequently by any of its advocates.
HOWARD: Yeah, I’m glad you brought up the origins of the Great Barrington Declaration because it was organized by a man by the name of Jeffrey Tucker, who sounds like a cartoon villain.
He is and
SHEFFIELD: Looks like one.
HOWARD: He does. He wears a cape in public crazy stuff. So [00:18:00] he is a proud child labor advocate. He wrote an article in 2016 called Let the Kids Work, which is exactly what it sounds like. So all of these guys who are so concerned about children in schools have nothing to say as child labor laws are being rolled back across the country now.
He advocated teenage smoking because he thought it would cool. Kids could break the habit that it wasn’t truly addictive. And I encourage everyone, if they have any questions about the Great Barrington Declaration to go and read it. It’s just one page long. Because again, the 2020 revisionist history of this document is that it was just about poor kids in school.
This sort of thing the, these almost le liberal and leftist ideas. But in reality, it was all about herd immunity via natural immunity, which again, they claimed would end the pandemic in three to six months. That comes from the frequently asked question section. And you say that they had no plan. I mean, they would say.
That they had a great plan to protect the vulnerable. But again, if you go to the frequently asked question section and read it’s just the most bare bones outline.
So, for example their plan, if you even wanna call it that, to protect older people living at home was four sentences long. And it contains suggestions that were already pretty obvious. Like, if you’re having guests over, you should meet outside or suggestions that were completely impractical, such as. the, government should set up a national delivery service for groceries and other essentials as if it was in the power of Fauci, for example, to set up a, national home grocery d delivery service for 60 million home bound seniors.
And for what it’s worth, I recently wrote my own declaration. I called it the Murray Hill Declaration. And I published this on science-based Medicine a couple weeks ago, and it basically calls on all of these [00:20:00] guys to actually do everything that they said that they were going to do. So they now, I mean obviously it’s not 2020 anymore, thank God, but they still have an opportunity to protect the vulnerable they can now do.
Everything that they previously called for and proposed and argued for and would have done but they refused to do it, which shows that it, that they can’t do it, they’re incompetent, or it never could have been done in the first place because it was entirely impossible to just protect the vulnerable.
I mean, it’s one of these things that isn’t wrong. but I, kind of liken it to a coach telling his team, the game plan is to score more points than the other team. Well, that’s not the wrong plan. It’s the perfect plan, but it’s not a very good one.
After claiming to oppose censorship, the Trumpian medical establishment is conducting it at a massive scale
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and one of the other things that has been really inconsistent also now that they have the levers of power is that before the Trump second administration, they were constantly claiming to be against censorship and letting people say what they think at all times in all places.
And yet now inside of NIH and, other, scientific research institutions of the federal government, employees are being fired constantly or being censored. and they even have a, a issued a list of words that are prohibited that if you put them in your grant proposal, including basic words like women it’s kind of hard to do medical research if you’re not doing it on women among many other absolutely neutral things that that, again, you can’t do medical research without, studying things in these different ways. I mean, this is there. I don’t, and I’m not a, I’m not a, doctor and I’m not involved in the medical field, but to me, the amount of censorship and control from the top down that [00:22:00] we’re seeing right now under Bhattacharya and other officials in the administration, there’s never been anything remotely like this.
And there are cer and there was certainly, nothing like how it was during COVID.
HOWARD: Yeah. So one of the ways that these guys rose to power helped rewrite the history of the pandemic was to portray themselves as the pandemic’s chief victims, because they were silenced and they were censored. And this is one of the ways also that they, kind of staved off any sort of criticisms that anytime anyone disagreed with them, they were trying to silence and trying to censor them. So what are the facts? I don’t know all of the details of this because it’s entirely about social media content, like the fate of a couple of tweets, for example.
Or a single YouTube video that was removed-- in a pandemic where over a million Americans died. I just can’t really muster so much energy about the fate of a couple tweets and Jay Bhattacharya, and I think Martin Kulldorff as well, even took their case to the Supreme Court where they lost, they were slapped down because they were found not to have any standing.
They were found, I think that no one has censored them. Essentially, they, weren’t harmed in any way. But if you listen to Jay Bhattacharya, for example, type his name, into YouTube, along with the word censorship or free speech, you’ll find an enormous amount of content devoted to his supposed censorship.
A matter of fact, in the spring of 24 when Kennedy was still a presidential candidate, Jay Bhattacharya spoke at one of his rallies in front of a thousand people into a microphone, claiming that he had been silenced and censored. And he promised that when he got to the NIH, he would change things and silence, scientists would finally be able to free to speak their mind. In reality, as you alluded to, what happened is they’re being silenced and censored. So several NIH officials have resigned due to censorship. The most prominent being a food researcher by the name of Kevin Hall. [00:24:00] Several others have been purged.
There was a signer of something called the Bethesda Declaration, which was a document written by. And signed by hundreds of NIH employees, essentially declined censorship at the beginning of summer 2025. And one of the leaders of that Jenna Norton, was recently put on administrative leave.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Who actually has been on the podcast. So we will link to that episode.
HOWARD: Oh, great. Yeah. No, I’ll have to listen. And another high up FD NIH official g let me find her exact name. Gian Marrazzo, I think her name was. she, was actually purged for pushing back against yeah, Gian Marrazzo for, pushing back against some of RFK junior’s anti-vaccine disinformation.
Just today actually, there is a MAHA Summit where Jay Bhattacharya is participating, and he kicked out several journalists from leading scientific, publications such as, nature and Science. Because they have been critical of him. So even though he claims to value free speech and to be against censorship and to value debate, that is the essence of science.
He refuses to take questions from anyone who might answer, might ask him a hard question. He only goes to his safe space and is censoring science. and I, just read an article a few days ago that 10,000 scientists have been, lost their jobs at the federal government in the past year, as you alluded to with word bans.
he is banning any kind of research that he considers DEI. It’s unclear who gets to define that and, how those decisions are made. But it’s a, it is sort of a vast scientific censorship regime, especially compared to the fact that, he got famous because he lost a single YouTube video in 2021.
That was just a, that was censorship according to him, not what’s going on now.
Anti-vax activists have had years to do their own studies, but they have basically nothing
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, [00:26:00] and really what they’re I think if we kind of dig beneath their rhetoric, and their actions, what it seems to be is that the viewpoint, their viewpoint is, if I am criticized, that is censorship.
And because I mean, the reality is they don’t have the research to support their ideas. I mean, that’s, they’re, they are not releasing studies of their own. And, several of them, not just, Bhattacharya, but others, they have had affiliations with very well funded institutions.
They could have done studies to prove their viewpoints or, at least argue for them. And they don’t really have studies to, to put forward. All they have is their crank opinions, it seems like.
HOWARD: Yeah. there, there’s one exception to that, which is actually Jay Bhattacharya did do one study at the very start of the pandemic.
It’s kind of become infamous, in, in, in the fields. It’s called the Santa Clara Antibody Study. And yeah. Initially these guys argued that COVID wasn’t gonna spread that widely, that it wasn’t that contagious, so we didn’t have to worry about it. Then they did a study just a blood draw study of people in Santa Clara County, California and found something, and this is very early on in the pandemic.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
HOWARD: March, April, may, something like that. And they reportedly found that about 5% of people there had antibodies, even though maybe only one of them actually remembered having COVID or had symptoms consistent with COVID. And they used that to con collude kind of the opposite, that COVID was very widespread and that the vast majority of people who had COVID, didn’t even know that they were infected or they just had sniffles.
they said at the beginning at that time that the virus is 50 to 80 times more common than we previously thought, which was also used. To [00:28:00] minimize COVID because if 90% of people hadn’t been infected, and we didn’t even know it yet, like, hey, maybe we were closer to the end of the pandemic in spring 2020 than towards the beginning as it turned out.
so that’s an example of how, and, there were many flaws with the study ranging from the antibody tests themselves to how they recruited people this sort of thing. And it didn’t turn out to be the case that the vast majority of COVID infections are asymptomatic. Unfortunately, it would’ve been nice if that was the case.
But they’ve been coasting on that study for the past six years almost. But as far as I know, it’s really the only. Potential, if you even wanna call it that research study that they did themselves. Other than that, it was just what we’re doing now, podcasts, YouTube videos, opinion pieces and they were content creators above all.
Fox News appearances. So for doctors who were silenced and censored they wound up in a pretty good place. Head of the NIH, head of the FDA, head of the FDA are other very high ranking positions in the federal government right now.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I guess I was thinking about the non COVID research as well.
Like they, they don’t really have much to point to on that regard either. And
HOWARD: yeah.
SHEFFIELD: and we keep hearing from, Kennedy and others in his orbit that, oh, we’re gonna do these things. We’re gonna do these things. and they’ve had, they’ve already had a year, like you, they could have had something out by now.
And or, and again, like even, but even before that, like, there are not studies that, again the anti-vax movement of which, Kennedy has, really been the leader of it for quite a long time. They’ve had a lot of time, decades. To come up with something that people can look at and, and, they do kind of sometimes point to a couple of things here and there, but the way that they’re reading it is just [00:30:00] not correct.
but you want to talk about some of that.
HOWARD: Yes. So they are in fact impairing research into vaccines. even though one of their biggest complaints is that vaccines haven’t been studied, and especially in randomized double-blind placebo controlled trials the head of the Moderna recently made a statement that they are not going to be doing nearly as many vaccine studies coming up because the US market won’t support it.
They have proposed a couple of, at least one that I know of a double blind placebo controlled study, but this was of the Hepatitis B vaccine, a vaccine that has been in use for 30 to 40 years and been given to billion people over the world. They are trying to do a randomized double blind placebo controlled study of that vaccine in a small African country whose name I will probably mispronounce Guinea Basu.
And this is basically Tuskegee Experiment 2.0 because there’s a very high rate of Hepatitis B there. And so they’re essentially condemning. A certain number of children to getting this chronic disease that can lead to liver failure and liver cancer. I do think that probably in 2026 they are going to produce several studies, which I say in air quotes proving that vaccines cause autism.
Kennedy has brought in several of his right hand man and men and women, who have a history of doing cherry picking fraudulent, horrible research into vaccines. And invariably they’re going to scour some CDC data bank and they’re gonna find, the children named Billy, born on a Tuesday to mother’s named Lisa who got the MMR vaccine.
On a Friday have doubled the rate of autism of some other group of children. but that’s not how science works. I’m afraid we’re gonna be having to rebut some very poorly done so-called studies very soon. And these are gonna be one can imagine RFK junior standing next to Trump, having a major [00:32:00] sort of press release about this sort of study and turning it into event.
Hopefully I’m wrong about this, but so far all of my predictions have been off only in the other direction that I underestimated how bad things would get.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and I mean they, they pretty much did exactly what you said with regard to Tylenol and autism. Re release something that was not a study and we’re very confident about it.
And when the entire rest of the world pushed back on it and said, this is junk, what you put out. They kind of had to sort of walk it back, but they still believe it. They still believe it.
HOWARD: Yeah. I don’t know that they’ve walked it back. There was a major study,
SHEFFIELD: well, trump did. I’m sorry, I should say.
HOWARD: Oh, did he?
I didn’t know, I didn’t know that. Good for him. I never saw that.
SHEFFIELD: Well, I said he sort of walked it back. He didn’t fully, he was like, well, if you really need it, you should still take it.
HOWARD: I see. Yeah. And they’ve also, the FDA is working on approving a quack treatment again in air quotes for autism leucovorin, which is probably harmless.
but that’s not how medicine is done. And the FDA has taken off several of its previous pages that warned against quack autism treatments, which Kennedy has long favored. And some of these things are very nasty, like bleach enemas, for example. And one can imagine that this is what the future holds for us in 2026 and 2027, along with more measles and pertussis and flu and COVID.
The cowardice of Republicans like Bill Cassidy who know better
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, it’s really awful. And a lot of the responsibility for this happening is on people who, outta partisan, I identification and loyalty have had decided to just go along with it. and, there’s the, worst offender by far, but there are many, is Bill Cassidy, [00:34:00] the Louisiana Senator, who very clearly did not like Bobby Kennedy Jr.
When he was up for the for his post. And, but nonetheless, he’ll try to vote for him or voted for him anyway, presumably based on the idea that, well, if I vote for him to be the HHS secretary, that Trump will endorse me when I run for reelection. And Well, huh. Look at that. Trump has betrayed him. And, despite that betrayal I haven’t seen Cassidy, really go hard after. I mean, I mean the reality is just based on the measles outbreak that we’re seeing, Kennedy should be impeached just for that. And irrespective of all of the other horrible things that he is done like this guy is literally imperiling the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, probably more.
And Bill Cassidy was fine with that because, I gotta support my party.
HOWARD: Yeah, there should definitely be an annual award, the Bill Cassidy Award in cowardice. He was a doctor. He is a doctor a GI specialist who, spoke about treating patients who had liver failure due to hepatitis B and the success of that vaccine.
And several children have died in Louisiana, his home state of pertussis. And yeah, he caved and gave us Kennedy and is now complaining about all of the things that he, enabled. I think he may have been fearing for more than just a Senate seat. I think a lot of these guys got death threats and maybe their families did too.
I think there was a lot of pressure on Cassidy. I, don’t say that to excuse him. Nothing justifies putting Kennedy in charge, but he was just part of a massive support network that helped all of these guys gain power. They couldn’t have done it on their own, and it wasn’t just people like Cassidy.
it’s an extremely long list of people who enabled MAHA doctors who [00:36:00] defended them. Who treated them as good faith actors who published their work and who supported them. So this includes top universities again, Harvard, Stanford. Actually Harvard was okay, but Stanford, UCSF, Johns Hopkins, for example, all promoted their disinformation spreading faculty publications such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Hill Stat News.
I could just go on and on. Even several medical journals such as JAMA and the BMJ all promoted these guys, only to later realize. That, but after it was too late, what they really were, even though they didn’t hide their intentions to wreak havoc. So all of these guys openly campaigned for Trump.
They openly campaigned for RFK, but they were treated as good faith actors by broad swaths of the medical community. I, think, my profession doctors showed more courage running into treat COVID patients six years ago with a lot of us paying for it, with our lives and, our health, than we did in calling out bad faith actors in, our own profession.
And again, a lot of that is because if you tried to do this as I did, you were invariably called a censor and someone who doesn’t wanna hear other opinions and doesn’t wanna debate this sort of thing, or just called. The number of juvenile insults I received I was gonna say it, it could fill a, book chapter, but it did fill a, at least part of a book chapter.
And, just the way that, that those of us who, warned about this were treated not to make this about me, but it was really unfortunate, but it had the effect of trying to stop people from speaking out. And if I was a little bit younger, my beard wasn’t quite so gray and had a little more hair like there, I might feel I probably would’ve been intimidated too, intimidated or unsure of myself to speak out.
Other people in the MAHA conspiracist movement
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and there are a lot of people here. I mean, so we’ve [00:38:00] talked about Bhattacharya, but there are several other people that you discuss in the book. but let for people, let, can you just run through that? Some of them for people who don’t know who they are, ‘cause they definitely should know.
HOWARD: So a couple other names. people who are prominent now. Marty McCarey, who is head of the FDA, who spread volumes of COVID disinformation. this time in 2021 he was claiming that the pandemic was. Basically over, he wrote an article in February, 2021 called We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April, and then when April came around and we didn’t quite have herd immunity, he went on Fox News and said in May, 2021, he said we had herd immunity to CID.
Then when Delta came around. The Delta variant in the summer of 2021. He called that a, a flu-like illness. When the omicron variant came around a couple months later, he called it omic cold in nature’s vaccine. He claimed that one COVID infection led to decades of immunity or lifelong immunity.
He vastly overhyped the vaccine in the spring of 2021, claiming that it would block transmission and offered perfect protection. He drastically minimized pediatric COVID falsely saying that zero healthy children had died of COVID I, and treating rare vaccine side effects is a fate worse than death. And now that he is at the FDA, it, it’s like a junior high school every week.
There’s some sort of drama there. he is blending. Having all these sorts of conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies and wellness devices, he’s attacking trans people, of course. So it’s just kind of chaos. At the FDA, his right hand man, there is someone by the name of VNA Prasad, who was a very well respected oncologist.
Before the pandemic, but also became attracted to Contrarianism in 2020 2021, he [00:40:00] also vastly overhyped the COVID vaccine at that time, claiming that it would end the pandemic and that it blocked transmission. He was also actively very anti-vaccine for children and in fact, it was pro infection.
He wrote an article in Unheard Magazine in, I think it was published in February, 2022. This was right after the worst month of the pandemic for children January, 2022, when about six children were dying per day, and at the peak a thousand were going to the hospital every single day. In January, 2022, during the Omicron wave, he wrote his article called Should We Let Children Get Omicron, which was full of this pro infection rhetoric, that it was natural and healthy and it’s best to let children get this virus while they are young, and that infecting children would help protect vulnerable people, this sort of thing.
and he is also now at the FDA where he is, People hate him. He is a horrible manager. Two months ago he leaked a memo that 10 children have died from the COVID vaccine and has still not produced a shred of evidence that’s the case. so these guys, rose to power just spreading disinformation and they were very emotionally manipulative.
I think that’s a very important point to make is they weren’t neutral science communicators. They talked about any sort of mitigation measure as just this draconian government overreach, and they made it seem as if we tried to control COVID that we would have troops in the streets just attacking innocent civilians.
Fast forward to today, they are part of an administration where there are troops in the streets attacking innocent civilians.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, and there are, I, guess in, [00:42:00] in recently the MAHA doctors are now trying to say that, well, if you resist our ideas, you are politicizing science not us, the ones who are the political appointees who are making scientific
HOWARD: decisions, even though that has never been done
SHEFFIELD: in the history of these agencies.
No. It is the people who criticize us. Again, going back to this idea, if you criticize me, that’s censorship. Not if I fire people who criticize me. That’s not such ship. Not if I ban people from grant proposals. No, it’s, if you say, put up, tell me your evidence, show me your ideas. That’s politicization.
HOWARD: Yeah, they, were very good at doing that as well. Saying everyone but them was political or everyone but them was tribal. And the only reason that we objected to the mass infection was because we didn’t like Trump, this sort of thing. I will say that finally a little bit too late. It’s very good that people are standing up to them and their fate in some ways the best case scenario.
Right now is that large swaths of the country are just going to ignore them. So a lot of states have banded together to form these public health consortiums, major medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, which they hate. And the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, for example, came up with their own vaccine guidelines.
So it’s sad that the FDA, the CDC and the NIH can’t be trusted now when it comes to vaccines, but basically everyone is onto them. No. For example, they recently cut the vaccine schedule to make it look more like denmark’s. As if Denmark is the top of the evidence-based medicine period. They removed, I think, six or seven vaccines, the meningococcal vaccine, the flu, COVID, hepatitis A and B, vaccine, and [00:44:00] maybe, one more, the Rotavirus vaccine.
But large swaths of the country and individual pediatricians are gonna correctly ignore them. And I, I hope that is the fate for the rest of their careers, is that they are permanently linked to everything that Kennedy does. And really everything that Trump does, these guys, again, openly campaigned for him.
And it’s very possible that without the Union of Kennedy and Trump in August, 2024, Trump would never be in power. I mean, obviously we’ll never know, but if you kind of flash back to then Trump’s campaign was sagging and Kennedy really threw him a lifeline. And here we are with three more years to go.
MAHA figures have more conflicts of interest than the scientists they hate
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and with this. And you touched on this a bit earlier, that the MAHA movement often tries to claim that people who have a science-based evidential view of medicine, that they have people like yourself or other, many other medical professionals that you have conflicts of interest.
but the, then when we look at the people that are coming in the R-F-K-H-H-S and other agencies, the, I’ve never seen more extreme conflicts of interest. Like, I mean, just all down the line. Every single one of these people has massive conflicts of interest, including Kennedy himself. But I mean, these are people.
That the reason that they are, they’re in that position in a very large degree, is to get you to buy things that they are personally invested in and have companies that.
HOWARD: Yeah, so that’s one of the biggest myths about any doctor who promotes vaccines that we are just kinda shilling for big pharma when in reality vaccines save a lot of money by keeping people out of the hospital.
You can [00:46:00] look up any doctor on this website, open CMS payments.gov. I think that’s the URL, but it lists all of the money. That doctors have received from the pharmaceutical industry. I think in the past, since 2018, as far back as it goes, I’ve received 788 from pharma all but 150 of that in the form of sandwiches that they deliver to my office once a month for like the whole office.
And I just can’t resist. I’m, only human after all. but Dr. Marty McCarey took 130,000 from pharma in the two years before becoming FDA director an eye drop company of all things. He’s a pancreatic surgeon. Why? They had him on the board and we’re paying him, who knows? Jay Bhattacharya made about 12,000 from posting on Twitter, not a huge amount of money.
Vina Psad also monetized to social media content and. Probably made oodles of money doing that. Kennedy himself made a lot of money as a trial lawyer, and that seems to be one of the things that he’s trying to do now, is make trial lawyers rich again, this is probably going to be his most serious attack on all vaccines, is if he tries to make them more vulnerable to lawsuits.
The history of this is that in the 1980s vaccine makers were being sued out of existence. So they established this vaccine court, which isn’t perfect, but there’s a small tax on every vaccine to help pay for people who are injured by vaccines. The most common injuries being shoulder injuries due to the inject the needle itself.
And this has always been our, it’s morphed into something that the anti-vaxxers have hated, but if they make, its. So that vaccine companies can be sued, which sounds like a reasonable thing. they’re just gonna be hit with a bunch of frivolous lawsuits and they’re gonna be sued out of existence. It’s not like anyone’s getting rich off of the polio and the diptheria and the HPV vaccine at this point.[00:48:00]
So that is potentially the most dangerous threat to vaccines because it’ll be something that the states may have a very hard if no one’s making the vaccines, it doesn’t really matter what their vaccine schedule says.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and this, idea though, of these conflicts, I mean, it not just with those guys, I mean, like we, we see that, they have these conferences now that they’re doing and they’re just filled with grifter groups selling all kinds of random things.
And, getting, paying people to make these. To promote them. And, the, these are scams. Like, I mean, when we think about it, like it, the biggest pushers of the anti-vax stuff are these supplement companies. Like ultimately that’s who’s doing it. Like, this idea, oh, we’re gonna treat it with vitamin D, or, or, and, fill in the blank vitamin, fill in the blank, herb and spice, whatever it is.
Like, or bleach, like these guys are, they’re the ones who are the most incentivized because I mean, when you look at the, the insurance companies, those are the ones who really have the bottom line and they say, look, we’re still gonna cover these vaccines because it is cheaper for us to do that.
So like you cannot get any possible better endorsement that vaccines are effective. Then the people who actually have to pay for n non-vaccinated people, like they, they, the, right wing often loves to talk about, oh, well show me the money. I’m all about the money. Well this is the money. And you can’t get any bigger of an endorsement than that.
I think
HOWARD: you’re absolutely right, about the supplement salesman as well. Probably the best example of this is Kennedy Advisor. Callie means, [00:50:00] he’s a pretty nasty guy and a conspiracy theorist, but also runs a company called Tru Me, where you can buy all sorts of supplements. And his sister Casey means, who was nominated for Surge in general, made a bunch of money selling these AI wellness wearable devices, which Marty McCarey, the head of the FDA was recently went to one of their trade shows and was kind of almost like an advertisement for those.
He almost made an infomercial.
SHEFFIELD: And Kennedy too himself, sorry. yeah. Also docs up.
HOWARD: Yeah. Yeah. Right.
SHEFFIELD: I want everyone to have a wearable, he says,
HOWARD: right. And there may be some value in learning how many steps you take per day, but this idea that you can just put some device on you, even if it measures, your blood pressure and your heart rate, how do we use that to make people healthier?
Certainly those devices have been tested less than vaccines, that’s for sure. And they’re probably gonna try to deregulate supplements even further. Actually, I don’t know if that’s even possible, but maybe by getting rid of what’s called the quack Miranda Warning, that a lot of these, supplements have to say something along the lines, this product has not been evaluated by the FDA for its safety and efficacy, this sort of thing.
But or to see more examples of this treatment, leucovorin, which are quack treatments receiving, approval of the FDA. So that may be coming down the pike too.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and they, talk about how they are against the pharmaceutical companies, but you know, if you really wanted to hit them where it hurt, you would ban the televised medical commercials.
Like in most countries of the world, those are banned. you cannot advertise pharmaceutical products to consumers because they can be misleading. And you can have all sorts of, getting, people think, oh, this thing will help me. And, it doesn’t. And there’s no evidence that it would, but they want it really bad because they saw it on tv.
[00:52:00] Like, if you really wanted to go after the pharmaceutical companies. That’s what you would do. But the Trump administration isn’t doing that. Yeah. And yeah, so go ahead.
HOWARD: I mean, they’ve talked about that may be on their power because of free speech concerns. I don’t know. You’d have to speak to a, lawyer about that.
I suppose to his credit, I think Marty McCart, the FDA has sent a lot of warning label or warning letters to companies that they’re overselling some of their products. I don’t know if those come with any sort of enforcement, for example, but they are making changes to make it easier to get drugs approved.
And some of these things are of questionable legality. So they’ve come up with this voucher program where they are trying to just approve drugs in record time and speed up the process and use ai. And it all sounds very good. When you hear them talk about it again, kind of like the Great Barrington Declaration, it sounds perfect on paper.
But a lot of people involved in that program are questioning its legality. A very high FDA official who worked there for 25 years. He was. Head of the CDR Center for Drugs Evaluation and Research for one month before he resigned in protest. A guy by the name of Rick Pader, not exactly a household name, and I’ll be honest with you, I hadn’t heard of him until a couple years ago, but he is a, legend in the field of, drug re regulation, especially in oncology.
And he essentially said, this program is a disaster. It has it, it’s ripe for exploitation and for corruption, and decisions are being made by a small group of political appointees behind closed doors without any sort of transparency. So I think that the FDA and, actually it’s interesting because some of their rhetoric about getting drugs approved faster and easier.
Hasn’t always matched some of their actions. Some of the drug companies are very frustrated with the FDA because the current version of the FDA has changed the rules as they go. I’m not super duper expert in this. I [00:54:00] only know what, FDA reporters tell me. But one thing that drug companies do have to have is stability in the FDA and some sort of predictability about whether their drug is gonna get approved or not, if they meet certain milestones.
In other words, if I have a, an idea for a drug today, the earliest it might get approved is gonna be the year 2036. I mean, it takes a decade or 15 years to, for a drug to go from idea. To finish because it has to be, subject to all sorts of testing and this sort of thing. And one thing, the current version of the FDA seems to be doing is just changing this regulatory framework at a whim.
It’s called regulatory whiplash. And so drug companies, they’re not perfect, but without them, I couldn’t do my job. And they’ve certainly transformed several fields of medicine, namely the one, the main one that I treat. Multiple sclerosis, a totally different disease than when I first started treating it in 2010, thanks to drug companies and basic researchers.
but the, these drug companies are complaining that the current version of the FDA is, just totally rewriting the rules and upending a lot of what they’ve been working for, 10 years or more, this sort of thing. So there’s no predictability and stability there.
SHEFFIELD: And there’s no consistency in the approach either, because like you have also Republicans are, look, looking to amend the Toxic Substances Control Act, which would literally allow companies to pollute much, more.
And this is a big thing that they are, are preaching for. And they just had a, hearing about it. And so like, again, if that’s, if you are concerned about people having toxic things in their body, what’s, what is worse? an FDA branded, branded red dye or, FDA tested red dye or toxic chemicals [00:56:00] pumped into the drinking water.
I wonder which one is worse.
HOWARD: Yeah, no. You hit on an important point. I mean, there, there are a lot of tensions in the MAHA MAGA movement that are gonna come to a front at some point because, there’s a very sort of strong anti pharma streak to MAHA obviously. but there’s also a very sort of libertarian streak that people should be able to decide what they put in their body and take any sort of drug as long as they feel it has promise.
So, for example, during Trump 1.0, he signed something called the right to try law. Again, I’m not an expert in this, but essentially said, if you have some sort of fatal disease and you wanna try some experimental treatment, the government shouldn’t stand in your way. So that’s, tension number one.
Another, tension is regarding COVID vaccines. So. Pretty much everyone in the current administration is against COVID Vaccines for young healthy people. But I think some of the more senior leadership, some of the names who we’ve already mentioned recognize that the COVID vaccine is important for older, vulnerable people, and they don’t wanna take it away from that population.
They don’t wanna take it away from every single grandmother and grandfather in this country. And, read about people dying next year because they couldn’t get a COVID shot. But there are parts of the MAHA Coalition and they feel very strongly that the FDA should take every single COVID vaccine off the market.
And the third tension is gonna come up with this abortion pill, which I can also never pronounce. Ms. Tiff. Ms. Tiff Perone. We’ll just keep going it the abortion pill, because obviously a lot of MAGA folks are against anything that can help a woman get an abortion. Some of the more science-based medicine people at the FDA, and I’ll include VNA Psad in this rec, and I don’t think he is against abortion knows that this pill is safe and that’s an effective, and that’s his charge at the FDA is [00:58:00] to make sure that drugs that are approved or remain on the market are app appro are safe and effective, and not take them away for political reasons, but they’re gonna be facing a lot of pressure to do that.
They already are actually, and they’re trying to postpone that until after the midterms for entirely political reasons. But there are all these sort of tensions that are, have already started sprouting themselves or showing themselves, revealing themselves that are probably gonna be, that in some ways I almost hope, yeah, that’s the phrase.
Thank You hopefully we’ll pull the coalition apart in the next year.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and ultimately, I mean, these tensions arise because. They’re not believing in evidence-based medicine. I mean, that’s really what they’re believing in politicized medicine or, religious I, religious inflected medicine.
Like if you can even call that medicine, it’s not like, and so once you’re removed the idea of science and empirical evidence as the standard, then anything really does go. And so whatever standards end up is just a matter of political power and, and, survival of the fittest, which sadly is also what they want to do to the rest of us.
HOWARD: There definitely is a sort of survival of the fittest vibe with this. I mean, to circle sort of back to measles, one of the myths that they started promoting in 2025 was one of the myths that they used with COVID that only vulnerable children died of measles are only children with severe medical comorbidities died of COVID, which is both false and kind of gross.
I’ve heard this described by, I think Derek Baris at the Cons Spirituality Podcast coined the phrase, soft eugenics to describe this, just this idea that we should let these viruses rip through the population and if you survive. Then by definition you were fit. And if you died, well, you had some sort of underlying medical [01:00:00] comorbidity and were there for, and you would’ve
SHEFFIELD: died anyway, so,
HOWARD: Right.
You expendable, But yeah, there’s gonna be a lot of political battles that are gonna be fought coming up, and it’s gonna be unclear, especially over this abortion pill. how our DA is gonna navigate that. I mean, I hope that they make decisions as they’re tasked to do, based only on science and data and evidence, and don’t take that pill away.
but they may, the political pressure may get to them. I mean, we’ll see, they’re lucky that’s one thing that Trump and probably even Kennedy doesn’t care anything about. and Kennedy may even officially describe himself as pro-choice. We’ll see. But some of the true believers Mike Pence, for example, not that he has any political sway anymore, but is really gonna put a lot of pressure on them to get rid of that.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and really what’s kind of shaping up is that I think we’re headed for this, I mean, we already see to some extent that, there is a lower life expectancy in the red states and a higher left life expectancy in the blue states. And I think that’s, that gap is going to grow further and further, as time goes by.
Because, as Kennedy, or at least during this administration as they relax federal standards on various things, then these red states are gonna lower them. and they’re doing that with insurance as well. So, trying to push these, junk. Insurance policies that don’t cover things.
And the, I mean, ultimately, like, that’s the, tragic irony of these PO positions is that the people who are going to be hurt the most by them or the people who like them, like that’s who’s being put at risk the very most here. But of course, a lot of other people, unfortunately, who didn’t vote for that.
HOWARD: Yeah, no, we’re gonna have a, as I alluded to, previously, we’re gonna kind of have a civil public health civil war where [01:02:00] certain states are seceding essentially from the public health union. I think California, for example, recently joined the World Health Organization. meanwhile, states like Florida under the direction of.
Awful. Ron DeSantis and even worse, Joseph Ladapo, who is their quack surgeon General, who kind of mixes, mysticism, religion and medicine, and even anti-vaccine data fraud. they’re celebrating trying to get rid of all sorts of vaccine mandates in Florida, which no matter how you fe and we’re talking about not COVID mandates, which have been gone for a long time, but that in order to send your child to school, they have to be vaccinated against measles and vaccinated against polio.
and that’s a recipe for even more measles outbreaks. Although some of these things may take several years, if not decades, to manifest themselves. In other words, if we stopped vaccinating for polio today, it would probably take. Who knows, five to 10 years before polio would become widespread are other diseases like HPV and he, hepatitis B.
Those viruses don’t cause harm until decades, after the initial infection. So we’re gonna be seeing these effects for the rest of my career, the rest of my life, unfortunately.
John Ioannidis and the perils of medical contrarianism
SHEFFIELD: How is it that these people with these, ID, the, these people with a public health policy of, well, let’s not do anything about pretty much everything. How is it that they have been able to be burrowed so long in the medical establishment even before Kennedy?
and I think, the, longtime Stanford, medical professor John Ioannidis, he’s the kind of patient zero of this, in my view, but I, want to hear your thoughts.
HOWARD: Yeah, so he’s not a quite a household name, but I would describe him as America’s potentially most famous scientist. After someone like, [01:04:00] Tony Fauci, he was a, and is a, giant of the field of evidence-based medicine.
He didn’t do a, ton of what we would call primary research, meaning he wasn’t out there in the field or the laboratory collecting data himself. But he did what is called meta research, which is kind of researching how scientists do research and was constantly saying, we need to do better research.
We need to do more research. And he was convinced very, strongly in the start of the pandemic starting in March, 2020 that COVID was overblown. He predicted that it would cause 10,000 deaths, that it would cause 40,000 deaths. that we were close to the end of the peak in in, in April, 2020 that the flu was gonna be worse, this sort of thing.
He also, I think, was the person who originated the we want them infected movement. He wrote an article in Stat News in March, 2020, which contained the line. I’m gonna paraphrase it a little bit, but that school closures may also prevent children from getting COVID and developing herd immunity. So these guys objected to mitigation measures, not because they thought they didn’t work, but because they pr because they knew that they did work, that they knew that they slowed the virus, they just didn’t want the virus to be slowed.
and he was a regular on Fox News at that time, saying that COVID was harmless for people under age 60. And while he talked in these very calm. Reassuring ways about COVID. He talked in this histrionic way about all sorts of measures to contain it, warning that they would lead to financial collapse and civil strife and civil war, the collapse of society, Yeah. Look if Lockdowns lasted five years, he would’ve been right about that. but he was saying this sort of thing in March, 2020, and nothing that [01:06:00] the virus did changed his mind. So he predicted COVID would kill 40,000 people in the Washington Post on April 8th. 2020. And, the death toll for COVID exceeded 40,000 people in the United States a week later.
And he was still going on podcasts and Fox News appearances, saying that it’s over and the worst is over, and we’ve contained the virus. So the fact that mitigation measures were reasonably successful in large parts of the country in April, 2020 and March, 2020 was then used as evidence that they weren’t needed.
And he is at Stanford, which is sort of the hotbed of COVID and disinformation, and now kind of MAHA disinformation. There’s a lot of good people at Stanford, don’t get me wrong, but they gave us John Ioannidis, Scott Atlas, who we’ve already mentioned, and Jay Bhattacharya, who we’ve already mentioned, and John Ioannidis was in regular contact with Scott Atlas when he was Trump’s coronavirus czar. He is apparently in regular contact with Jay Bhattacharya now, and is saying things along the lines of, yes, we have he, portrays himself as sort of this elder state, this elder statesman of science who just wants to protect it from being politicized. When of course every accusation is a confession, no one has politicized science more than people like John Ioannidis and the people he’s enabled, Scott Atlas and Jay Barria.
So, hi. His legacy will, it’s, a sad way for him, I think to kind of end his career, wind down his career. but will, I think he will only be known and he only deserves to be known, in my opinion, for his wild COVID disinformation and for enabling all of the people who are now currently attacking science.
but he says that if we don’t listen to them, he gave an interview to Science Magazine that if we’re not careful, and, let Jay [01:08:00] Bhattacharya make reforms at the NIH, then we risk science becoming politicized, which is just absurd.
Why atheist activists teamed up with far-right Christians who hate medical science
SHEFFIELD: It is. And let’s maybe end on kind of a not directly science related topic, but, so you do a, lot of writing at the Science-Based Medicine, blog, which is a great resource for people who are interested in these issues.
And one of the things that I think is notable about it is the ownership that it’s owned by the New England Skeptical Society. And one of the unfortunate things during the pandemic is that some of the people who had made names for themselves as as, atheist or skeptics of religion, they became some of the worst disinformation spreaders that these are people who claim to believe in evidence, claim to believe in rationality.
And yet they went completely off the deep end and promoted all sorts of ridiculous ideas and, got in, got in league with, religious delusional people like, Joseph Ladapo but not just him. Lots of these MAHA people, their, you go to their conferences, they’ve got, oh, you can get, you can heal your cancer from crystals, or if you pray away your, illness, you can, get a, I mean, like, I, myself, I have a brother that has a schizophrenia and, my parents for a long time, they resisted
HOWARD: getting medical treatment for him because
SHEFFIELD: they thought that they could heal it through religion.
HOWARD: and these are
SHEFFIELD: really harmful ideas
HOWARD: and
SHEFFIELD: unfortunately a lot of them are being supported by people who made a name for themselves as the atheists. It skeptics.
HOWARD: Yeah, so I don’t know if you’re, bringing this up because of my article there today, which was about a very famous skeptic, Michael Shermer, who is editor of [01:10:00] Skeptics Magazine and, portrays himself, it’s.
We all kind of like to do right as rational and reasonable and science-based and evidence-based. I mean, very few, probably no one, that we’ve talked about today. Maybe with the exception of Joseph Ladapo w would say that prayer and religion and crystals are their inspiration for their scientific views, for example.
but yeah, a lot of these people started taking a very hard right turn even though they would deny that. but my article today was about how Michael Shermer has embraced all sorts of anti-trans views how he has just become obsessed with strangers gonads in their genitals. And the idea that someone.
Might, might say the words men can get pregnant is just a huge catastrophe for him at this moment. but yeah, he interviewed Jay Bhattacharya, a very friendly interview. I didn’t listen to the whole thing, but the quips that I listened to with Jay Bhattacharya and this summer of 2024. so he was part of the, what I call, he was just a big player, but part of this MAHA support network, for example.
He functioned as a MAHA public relations expert. And a lot of these guys actually got together and wrote a book called The War on Science, which sounds like it should a perfectly appropriately titled book for this moment. and this was edited by Lawrence Krauss, kind of a disgraced physicist who.
I don’t wanna say got caught up in the Me Too movement, because that makes it seem like he was an innocent victim of it. But his, he was
SHEFFIELD: accused by a lot of women of harassment and assault.
HOWARD: That’s right.
SHEFFIELD: but he denies it. We have to say that.
HOWARD: And was, good, friends with Jeffrey Epstein as well and defended his relationship with him.
So he put together a book of, 39 sort of experts and scholars, who wrote about this war on science, which was just this [01:12:00] dispatch from this alternate universe where the woke mob. One and the woke mob is the one who is purging scientists today. And, because someone said pregnant women instead of pregnant people, ah, you’re fired.
that’s how they kind of portray things and what these guys did. Is they numbed people to the real threat by crying wolf about a fake threat, and they rolled out the red carpet to the real threat. I mean, it’s very sad because a lot of these guys did very good work and they could have been allies in taking on the Trump administration.
and a lot of them are now, horrified. They’re all so horrified by everything that’s been going on. When instead of joining us and devoting every single effort, piece of effort to, to fighting it and trying to prevent it, they lost their minds because some, 22-year-old adjunct teaching assistant at some small college that no one had ever heard of again said men can get pregnant, and that’s just a catastrophe in their opinion.
So, very disappointing.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And and, it’s definitely a, a, warning for everybody that you know to make sure you keep your. Your epistemology clean, I think,
HOWARD: and make sure that, you’re, you are,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, keep continuing to look at evidence and, not use your personal prejudices against people that you might not have personally known.
I mean, like, that is one of the things that we saw a lot during the the battle to legalize same-sex marriage is that, people who were the most against it were people who didn’t know someone that to them was, lesbian or gay, and once people started coming out of the closet, they realized, oh, well look at that.
They weren’t trying to convert me to [01:14:00] homosexuality. they, they weren’t gonna molest me. Or, like, ‘cause that was the myth that all of these things had. and the sad thing is that, a lot of these guys who, did support. Same sex marriage rights and decriminalization of homosexuality are, they’re just, they are falling into the exact same arguments, bad arguments that were made during the, that they’re doing the same thing now with, trans people.
HOWARD: Yeah. And I think what these guys do is they prioritize their need to be heterodox and free thinkers. I’m not part of the woke mob. I think for myself, and they all sound the exact same way. They all say the exact same thing. They all say the exact same talking points. And the point that I made in my science-based medicine article today is that the question, can men get pregnant?
It to me at least, the most, the only thing that matters about that question is that it’s asked by malicious people who have malicious intent, who are out to in danger. Trans people. Right. Any, I’ve never talked about trans issues before, before today actually, because, not that I don’t care, but it’s just that I try to reserve my words, at least in public, for things where I feel I have something unique to say and different to bring to the table.
And until today, I, don’t think that I did. But every time that anyone. Every that I talk about trans issues I think I’m gonna have one goal in mind, which is, does it make trans people safer or not? Because trans people are being attacked from all sides at this, not all sides, but from all over the place at this point.
Including obviously from the president and the vice president and all of the people who we mentioned, Marty McCarey and Jay Bhattacharya, because they are victims of tribalism and they have to do whatever their president and their tribe demands. And so anything that I say about trans people, is gonna be with that goal in mind.
Does it make them safer or does it make them more [01:16:00] vulnerable? And if it makes them more vulnerable, I’m just gonna keep my mouth shut.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s,
HOWARD: and that was the goal.
SHEFFIELD: It’s really unfortunate.
HOWARD: That was the goal of my Science-Based Medicine article today. I want all of these guys like Michael Shermer to stop talking about trans people, and I wanna show them I am a living model, that you can be like a sort of older, straight, white dude who doesn’t base your life around the genitals of 1% of the population who you’re probably never even gonna meet.
You can do it, Michael. I can do it.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they’re not affecting anyone, basically. Like,
HOWARD: not in a good way. Oh, I’m sorry. Yes. Trans people are not affecting,
SHEFFIELD: trans people are not, yeah. Like trans people are not affecting them, so leave them alone. Like in the same, yeah, there’s any number of small minority groups that, that you could say that about.
And and, they’re really just picking on it because the right wing media, realize, oh, this is a small group that people don’t know, so we’re going to make them a scapegoat. Like, that’s, all this is. Like you could, there’s any number of, people with who seek medical treatments that are unconventional or, people might not have ever heard of.
And people might think, oh that’s horrible. Why is this allowed? You could do that for any number of things. But the reason that we’re having to talk about this and talking about people who aren’t really affecting anyone is purely political. It’s all politics. It’s not about science. It’s not about concern for for reason or anything like that.
It’s just you were manipulated into being obsessed with this subject and you should realize that.
HOWARD: Right. And even when you talk about sports, I think the head of the NCAA testified that there were fewer last year at the end of 2024, that there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of something like half a million, athletes in general.
So it was just this, [01:18:00] this fake panic. But Michael Shermer has a history of doing this. A lot of these guys have a history of doing this. Dating back over a decade ago, I found an article of his warning about attacks on the science from the far left, from, liberals and progressives.
And again, ignoring the real threat. From the right wing in the GOP whose attacks on science filled cemeteries when it came to COVID. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people died because they refused a vaccine. But again, to Michael Shermer and all of these guys, none of it’s real because they don’t work in hospitals.
To them, it’s just all, you know what brings them attention on social media. Very
SHEFFIELD: disappointed.
HOWARD: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: It is. All right. Well, so let me, just give you a, chance to plug your, book here real quick before we, wrap up here.
HOWARD: Sounds good. Well, I’ve written two at this point. the first one was we Want Them Infected, which was published in 2023, and it told the story of.
The purposeful movement for herd immunity via mass infection. And it explained how it warned about and showed how the anti-vaccine movement was making inroads in mainstream medicine. And then the follow up to that book, which was just published about six months ago, everyone Else’s to you, is about how the history of the pandemic has been rewritten so that the horrific scenes of March and April of 2020 and beyond were replaced only with people remembering the the unwanted mitigation measures and how academic medicine has now completely merged with some of the rank quackery.
and really it’s about the propaganda techniques, the emotional techniques. And none of this is new. This was all done by the fossil fuel industry and the tobacco industries. To manufacture doubt. But that book, really explains kind of how MAHA [01:20:00] won. And both of my books are, very long. but they’re kind of half referenced books, half books that you can read, cover to cover, 25 pages of we Want them infected was just quotes of doctors like Dr.
Idi declaring the pandemic over, starting in April of 2020. so, unfortunately I think the books have stood the test of time. Not that much time has passed, but in kind of the, in some ways the worst things get the more right I, have been proven which is unfortunate. I would’ve rather gone down in history or forgotten to history as some sort of guy who panicked and was hysterical, fear mongering.
but that didn’t turn out to be the case, unfortunately.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is unfortunate, but, I’m glad that you did have, you’ve written it all down and that there is a record that, people can reference to understand the people who were and have been and continue to be the most wrong about medicine in this country are the people in the MAHA movement.
There’s no doubt about it.
HOWARD: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I’ll just say there’s one other kind of interesting resource that I have. I have a very small YouTube channel, I think it’s called, we Want Them Infected, which now has about 650 video clips of these guys, our current medical establishment, just saying one crazy wrong thing after another.
I think I appear in about five of these videos, so it’s not even really my YouTube channel, and I haven’t made a new YouTube video with my face in it in probably a year and a half at this point. but it’s a real archive and it’s just a real collection of. Crazy, horrible things these doctors have said.
So if anyone was, wants to just check it out and skip to a random YouTube video, you can see these guys saying we have herd immunity and vaccine side effects are the worst thing in the world. and on But it just really gives you a flavor of how the history of the pandemic has been [01:22:00] rewritten and how MAHA catapulted itself to power based on disinformation and emotional manipulation propaganda techniques.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Alright, well, good to have you back.
HOWARD: Thank you for having me. Let’s, do this again in a couple years or next year.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, sounds good.
