Episode Summary
After two years of a global pandemic, most people have no interest whatsoever in COVID-19. And that's completely understandable, given all the hardships and inconveniences that everyone faced as a result of the pandemic.
Almost everyone is ready to move on from covid, but there is one subset of people who are obsessed with still talking about it. And that is the same paranoid activists and politicians whose weaponized ignorance prolonged and exacerbated the pandemic to begin with, making it so much worse for everyone even as they insisted it was no big deal.
How the pandemic was prolonged by ignorant and wishful thinking public policy is a story that still deserves to be told, even as almost everyone would just like to get back with our regularly scheduled lives. And it especially deserves to be told because the covid contrarians who made things so much worse are trying to rewrite the history of what happened.
And for that reason, I was very pleased to learn about the new book of today's guest. His name is Jonathan Howard, and he is an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at New York University. And the book that he has written is called “We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace Anti-Vaccine Movement.”
He's also a blogger at the great medical blog, Science Based Medicine.
The full video and audio of this episode are available for free, but the audio transcript is for paid subscribers only.
Video
Transcript
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Jonathan.
HOWARD: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Matthew. I sure appreciate it.
SHEFFIELD: All right. So before we get into the book, let's maybe discuss there's kind of two different categories of people here that I think you're correct to sort of differentiate [00:03:00] between each other on some of this wishful thinking, public policy and covid.
Tell us what these two groups are and what your focus is here.
HOWARD: Yeah. So I have been studying the anti-vaccine movement for about a decade. And the first group of people were, and I've always been fascinated by anti-vaccine doctors in particular, to me they're sort of like arsonist firefighters spreading the very thing that they're supposed to prevent.
And the first group of doctors would be anti-vaccine doctors. In 2019, for example, these would be doctors who were opposed to the polio, measles, HPV vaccine, all of the routine childhood vaccines. Some of these names became a little bit famous during the pandemic.
You may have heard of some of them. Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, for example claimed that vaccines made people magnetic. The only doctor in the book who I know, my old friend, Dr. Kelly Brogan, who morphed into one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors during well before the pandemic and during the pandemic. And these people are for the most part [00:04:00] doctors who you and all of your Now, for those of you who of recognize as not trustworthy sources.
They are germ theory deniers. They do not believe that HIV causes AIDS, for example, in all sorts of crazy stuff. And you will not find them in hospitals treating sick people. The second group of doctors, these are the doctors who I talk about the most and call them contrarian doctors. These are doctors who were widely respected, some of them before the pandemic as paragons of evidence-based medicine.
I even discussed a Nobel prize winner. So these are people who are definitely not quacks before the pandemic, and they mixed good advice with bad advice. So the good advice would be covid is very dangerous for grandma and very dangerous for someone with obesity and a lot of medical problems, but it's harmless for the vast majority of young people, for example.
And these doctors were very famous and influential during the pandemic. They advised President Trump. They advised Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. They advised [00:05:00] Ron DeSantis in Florida. They were ubiquitous in the media. They have very large social media presences. They were in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the Atlantic, really just downplaying the pandemic and spreading misinformation about it in a way that was very hard for people to pick up, again, because they mixed good advice with bad advice, and they didn't say obviously crazy things that covid is all a 5G hoax, for example.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it is important to note that, because the mainstream media, it wasn't just the right-wing media that was platforming some of these people. So let's, for some of these mixed advice doctors, maybe let's talk about some specific people that you do discuss their work and some of the things that they were doing.
HOWARD: Yeah. So one of the doctors who I talk about the most and start the book with is a man by the name of Dr. John Ioannidis, [00:06:00] who is a world-famous researcher. He works out of Stanford University. He's an epidemiologist, and he wrote a paper called Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, about 15, 20 years ago, which is one of the most famous papers in the history of medicine.
And he really made a name for himself, calling out bad science and promoting better science, wanting medicine and doctors to do better, so that we make the right decisions for our patients.
And he's someone who I famous favorably quoted in some of my earlier writing. And during the pandemic, starting in March 2020, he really underestimated the virus saying that it would cause many fewer fatalities than the flu, for example, and he was a ubiquitous media presence, and he made all sorts of statements that three years later turned out to be wildly underestimating the virus, but they were obviously wrong at the time.
I will give you an example. On April 9th, 2020, he gave an interview [00:07:00] to the Washington Post in which he predicted that 40,000 Americans would die of covid this season. By April 9th, 2020, 20,000 Americans had already died and 2,000 Americans were dying every day. So unless covid vanished, his prediction was going to age very poorly, very quickly, which tragically is what happened within eight days. His estimate of 40,000 deaths this season was surpassed.
And what did he do? Was he chastened? Did he revise his estimates? He did not.
He gave an interview to right wing Fox News firebrand Mark Levin, in which he said that the fatality rate of covid was one out of a thousand Americans. Or one out of thousand people who contracted it.
And that too was pretty obviously false. By that point in the pandemic, 10,000 people here in New York City had died.
If the fatality rate was one in a thousand, that would require 10 million New Yorkers to have already been [00:08:00] infected with the virus when in fact only 8. 3 million people live here in my city, New York City. So it was just this obviously mathematically impossible claim. And how did he get around this?
Well, he started spreading what I can only describe as conspiracy theories that have become gospel truth amongst the QAnon set that people were dying with covid, not of covid. That it was the lockdowns that killed people. That doctors killed patients through premature intubations, that death certificates couldn't be trusted.
And the people who did die of covid, they were just 80-year-olds with multiple medical problems who were just about to die anyway. So it's really not that big of a deal. And rather than admit that he underestimated the virus, he just started spreading these conspiracy theories, and these became very popular, and his ideas were taken to the White House by probably the most famous of all the doctors I write about, Scott Atlas.
And the title of the book, We Want Them Infected, comes from the plan [00:09:00] that some of these doctors developed to purposefully infect hundreds of millions of unvaccinated young Americans in the hopes that spreading the virus would get rid of the virus.
And obviously that didn't turn out to be the case, unfortunately.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and Ioannidis, he also was involved with this controversial antibodies study that was done very early on in the pandemic, which claimed that many thousands of people had already, or tens of thousands, had already contracted the disease in the San Francisco area. And that turned out to be completely bogus research.
And it's important to note also, though, that people at the time were questioning this research. So it isn't that people got it-- because here's this, we're in this kind of strange after effect, which I did talk about in the introduction here, where that the people who had said [00:10:00] it was no big deal, that they want everyone who was engaging in a more scientific approach to the pandemic, they want them to be liable for every mistake that they made. But the let's do nothing or we want them infected crowd, they don't want to have accountability for their own mistakes.
And I guess that's part of what got you interested in this, right?
HOWARD: Yeah, what got me interested in this is, as I said, I've been interested in the anti-vaccine movement for a decade after my old friend, Dr. Kelly Brogan, the only doctor who I mention in the book, who I know personally, or knew personally, I haven't spoken to her in 10 years morphed into one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors, and it was a real shock. It took me a while to realize this, but it was a real shock to realize that everything she said about the HPV vaccine and the MMR vaccine, for example, was being plagiarized by famous doctors from UCSF, from Stanford, from Harvard, from Johns Hopkins, top universities in [00:11:00] order to discourage young people from getting the vaccine.
And let me just, I'll defend Dr. Ioannidis a little bit in that he didn't completely downplay the pandemic. He recognized that it was a big threat to nursing homes and to older, vulnerable people. But in some ways, in my opinion, that made him a little bit more dangerous is because he was mixing the good advice, we have to protect nursing homes, with the bad advice, which is for everyone else it's no more dangerous than driving to work back and forth. And one infection will lead to permanent immunity.
But yeah, these doctors who declared the pandemic over from day one, essentially are very, very eager to beat up on Fauci and all of his mistakes.
Any one of his mistakes, any one of his misstatements. The man who spoke thousands and thousands of words on the pandemic got a few things wrong, and he shouldn't be given a free pass. But you're absolutely right that they feel they want to be absolved of their mistakes and they don't really, don't seem to feel that they've made any.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it is [00:12:00] important though, I think to acknowledge that a lot of the people who are criticizing a sound medical approach to dealing with the pandemic, that they don't understand that science, the literal process of it is trial and error and that it's inevitable that you will have some things which might not end up proving very effective. Was it weird to see so many people who did have scientific training kind of forget this basic tenant of scientific reasoning?
HOWARD: It was weird again precisely because of the doctors who I write about who I had heard of I admired them all and I, they have excellent pedigrees and some of them are famous, and it took me a while to realize that they were kind of just making it up as they went along. I didn't really consider the fact that they were just kind of.
How do I say this in a non-vulgar way, but you know, just. Talking out of their ass, essentially. And I'll tell you why, because one, one thing that I have that [00:13:00] basically none of the doctors who I write about have is experience working with covid patients. I worked throughout New York city's covid experience.
And during the first three months of the pandemic, we probably had it worse than just about anywhere else in the world. I think the next three years after that, we had it relatively. Easy compared to a lot of the rest of the country. But as I was witnessing our hospitals being deluged and overwhelmed with covid patients, and as I was witnessing more people dying a single day than in my entire career, I was simultaneously reading these smart doctors from Stanford and Johns Hopkins and other places, essentially saying that the whole thing was overblown, and I couldn't quite put two and two together because I figured that these smart.
World famous scientists and epidemiologists must know something I don't. And I remember when that Santa Clara antibody study came out enthusiastically telling my wife that, hey, we might be closer to the end of this pandemic than the beginning and wouldn't that be wonderful. So [00:14:00] I certainly wanted. Everything that they had to say to be correct.
And it was only after a few months passed that I really began to revisit some of their earlier work and try to meld it with what I had seen in front of my own eyes and realized these things were totally incompatible. And they were just making these statements based on their own wishes, not reality.
The Santa Clara antibody study that you talk about was led by researchers from Stanford. John Ioannidis being one of them, another one, Jay Bhattacharya, and. They used that to claim that covid was 50 to 80 times more prevalent than was already known, and they spoke about covid as a disease that was mild for the vast majority of people.
They said that the vast majority of people probably don't even know that they had been infected. This is what they were saying in April 2020. Yet these same doctors in March 2020 we're saying that the virus wasn't going to spread very quickly, very far because it was only spread [00:15:00] by close conduct. Post contact.
So whether they thought the virus was not going to spread very far or that it had already spread very far. They were very consistent. Don't worry about it.
Doctors preaching a "do-nothing" about covid message got rich
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I do want to get into the kind of larger framework that a lot of them seem to have been operating from. But let's before we get to that, go focus on your earlier research about anti-vaccine advocates.
How did you get interested in that as a topic, and what was, I guess, what were some of the you, you mentioned Kelly Brogan,
HOWARD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Matthew Remski discussed her too, a few weeks ago on your show. It was interesting.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, and so you mentioned her as somebody who you had known, but you've seen this up close from both a sort of research perspective, but also a personal perspective.
There seems to be a very large demand, a market for a doctor who [00:16:00] will tell people that vaccines are terrible and evil. I mean, let's talk about that.
HOWARD: Oh, yeah. No, I absolutely could have gotten world famous this pandemic and probably been flown all over the country and the world giving speeches and my social media profile would have exploded had I come out against vaccines.
But there's always been a small number of doctors who have been opposed to vaccines. This is hundreds of years old, as old as vaccines, and I never really thought about vaccines much until my old friend, Dr Brogan, started posting messages on Facebook shortly after she left NYU where we trained together against vaccines, and I've never really been interested in vaccines per se as much as I have the anti-vaccine movement, and this actually goes back to my fascination with how people think with neurology and psychiatry, what could lead a doctor to take medicine's most amazing achievement and trash it.
And Kelly Brogan is not stupid. She went to MIT. She went to Cornell. She trained with me. [00:17:00] So, so what fundamentally went wrong with her after she no longer had to care for sick patients in the hospital, she decided viruses and bacteria don't even cause disease. I don't really know that I have the answer to that, but the very first few times I started reading her Facebook posts about the anti-vaccine movement and about her anti-vaccine ideas, I couldn't really refute them.
I wasn't super familiar with the history of measles or pertussis or this sort of thing. It was only reading some of the, my fellow co-authors on science-based medicine, Steve Novella and David Gorsky, and a bunch of other people that I really began to see the flaws in, in her ideas. And in 2018, I wrote a book chapter with Law Professor Dorie Reese, and a book called Pseudoscience.
And the book was about the fallacies and flaws of the anti-vaccine movement. And prior to the pandemic, my interest in the anti-vaccine movement was kind of seen as a quirky thing. And, but it really prepared me for this moment. I was really [00:18:00] ready to see and to recognize all of the covid minimization and recognize that it's parallels to pre pandemic minimization of measles and other vaccine preventable diseases.
So unfortunately, I was ready. But even I vastly underestimated its scope and its influence. I did not predict that hundreds of thousands of Americans would refuse vaccination. Well, millions did, but hundreds of thousands refused it and paid for it with their lives.
How Trump's conspiracism has brought anti-science people of left and right together
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they did. And it's unfortunate. And it's also the case that all of this sort of, well, let's step back because originally there were people who were Democrats, Green Party, who didn't like them and there were hardcore Christian conservatives who didn't like them, and there were secular libertarian types who didn't like them either. It was kind of spread out over time.
And that's one of the [00:19:00] political manifestations of the covid pandemic is that because Donald Trump was the president—and I think that's probably the main reason this happened—is that he did kind of draw this conspiracy-oriented thinking over into the Republican Party such that, and I've talked about this on some other episodes.
And so maybe hopefully you have seen this graph before. Do you recall this at all? I don't want to. I'll cut this part out if you don't know it.
.
HOWARD: I've seen versions of this. Yes.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. All right. So, so on the screen that basically the way that the political system kind of originally work before coven before trump was that conspiracism disbelief in sort of non-evidentiary based thinking it was a system that kind of pervaded both the right and the left and then over through coven and trump.
Things basically, conspiracism has sort of metastasized into a specific right-wing ideology. And Trump [00:20:00] has done that. And that's why you do see now a number of people who had some sort of identity as vaguely left wing. Are now engaging in full scale, super Trumper love stuff. And people who before were like somebody like Jimmy door, who was made his career as a left leftist political commentator now is out there saying how great Trump is.
How terrible vaccines are, and the Democrats should just leave him alone.
HOWARD: I think he made a video specifically about me, to my credit.
SHEFFIELD: That's right, yeah. Yeah, and of course we've got the presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, that is kind of basically recycling all of these things as well, and I maintain that he basically is The Trump 2. 0. That's him. 2. 0 and you've got to be careful.
HOWARD: Or maybe he was even Trump 1. 0 in that he's been doing this for a long time. He got his start in the anti-vaccine movement in 2005 and has just for [00:21:00] the past 20 years almost been America's leading anti-vaccine voice with tragic consequences wherever he goes.
Measles follows the most famous and deadly being a measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019, where I think 83 people ended up dying and including 50 or so children under the age of four. And he just has a long record of being sort of the Pied Piper of viruses and bacteria. Is that the right analogy? Maybe the Pied Piper takes was, maybe he was the person who took the snakes out of Ireland.
Anyways, he's the Johnny Appleseed of virus and covid. So, so maybe even he was really Trump 1. 0.
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University as an incubator for far-right viewpoints
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, I think that's a fair point. That's a fair point there, Jonathan. And well, so, but I guess beyond Trump though, there, there was. There were preexisting right wing political institutions as well that all of this anti vax [00:22:00] stuff and covid, covid contrarianism fit into and originated from as well.
So, like the people we've been discussing, especially Jay Bhattacharya, they all predominantly were affiliated with not just Stanford University, but also the Hoover Institution, which Is a Republican think tank, which I guess sort of ended up being established there under the sort of the custodian of Herbert Hoover's presidential papers after he left the office and it's basically sort of been kind of a.
Well, an incubator for right wing fanaticism on the campus of one of America's best-known universities. And they played an enormous role in promoting a lot of these ideas, including getting them directly to The Trump White House. Let's talk about that.
HOWARD: Yeah. So Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was one of two authors of three authors of a document called the great Barrington declaration.
The others were Martin [00:23:00] Kuhldorf, who was an epidemiologist and vaccine expert at Harvard at the time. And the third is a woman by the name of Sunita Gupta. who is at Oxford and these doctors, none of them treated covid patients and they came up with this document, which again was published on October 4th, 2020.
called the Great Barrington Declaration because that's where it was signed. And this was basically a town in Massachusetts, correct? Those who don't know. And this was basically the idea that the best way to get rid of covid was to spread covid. So I'm going to present their idea as, as kindly as I can.
So they Noticed as did we all that covid was very dangerous for a certain subset of people, again, older people and people with underlying medical conditions. And it was relatively mild for the vast majority of healthy 10-year-olds and healthy 20-year-olds, although some healthy 10-year-olds and healthy 20-year-olds have died of covid.
And they felt that if there was mass [00:24:00] infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated young people in all, in October 2020, that herd immunity would arrive. And all we had to do was establish a wall between vulnerable people and non-vulnerable people. Vulnerable people would live in a world of zero covid and not vulnerable people, meaning you and I, would live in a world of pure covid.
And once enough of us were infected, they estimated that it would take three to six months. Herd immunity would arrive, vulnerable people could leave their isolation and the pandemic would be over. And they use that language. They spoke about the pandemic being over and the three-to-six-month timeframe comes from directly from their frequently asked questions page.
And it's still on there. They assumed that one infection led to permanent immunity. They assumed that vaccines were potentially months or years off when in fact they turned out to be two months off and they did not consider any negative outcomes other than death. [00:25:00] So either you survived covid or either covid killed you or you emerged just fine.
And by this point in the pandemic, they had already met with Donald Trump. They were given an Oval Office meeting with him in August 2020. And they, the day after the great Barrington declaration was signed, they met with health and human services director, Alexander Azar, I think at the white house. So, so they were very influential, and Donald Trump and the Trump administration started echoing their language of protecting the vulnerable and trying to achieve herd immunity to mass infection.
But there were a lot of problems with it. Namely that wallowing off vulnerable 70, 80 million vulnerable Americans from not vulnerable Americans. It is very easy to say, but very hard to do, and they never came up with any sort of plan for this. You can go to their Frequently Asked Questions page, and what was their plan to protect old people living at home during the pandemic?
And it was four sentences [00:26:00] long, and it said things like, Feed older people should have groceries delivered to them. Okay, that's not a bad idea, that sounds nice, but setting up a food delivery program for 80 million Americans for months on end, that’s a little bit easier said than done. And as I said, vaccines became available two months later in December 2020 vaccines are not a panacea.
They're not perfect. We all know that I don't want to oversell them, but it made their declaration become obsolete within months. Despite this, they continue. to be and still continue to be anti-vaccine for young people. They still prefer that young people get natural immunity, even though thousands of young people have died from the virus.
And they minimize their deaths by saying it's more dangerous for grandma. And so these people, I think did a lot of damage and they were definitely some of the inspirations behind the headline we want but. Behind the title, we want them infected and at every stage they minimize the pandemic. So [00:27:00] Jay Bhattacharya wrote an article in March 2020 in the Wall Street Journal called Is the coronavirus as deadly as they say?
And he felt it wasn't. He said that the coronavirus likely had one tenth the fatality rate of the flu. He predicted that it would cause 20 to 40,000 deaths. And even he at the time said That if it's true, the coronavirus would kill millions without quarantine and shelter in place orders, then such drastic measures are surely justified.
That's not a direct quote but close enough. So they just wildly underestimated covid at the start. They minimized all of the variants they repeatedly declared the pandemic over and were completely sheltered from the consequences of their world, of their words.
And since, since I know you want to focus on some of the right-wing ties, the Great Barrington Declaration was signed and written under the watchful eye of a man by the name of Jeffrey Tugger, who [00:28:00] is this sort of anarcho-capitalist type person, and I'm going to make him sound a little bit like a cartoon villain because it's true. He is and was overtly pro child labor. In 2016, he wrote an article called Let the Kids Work, and the title gives it away. He wanted children to drop out of school and join the workforce. He suggested that at least some children, he suggested that Walmart and Chick fil A would be wonderful places for children to work.
He also felt that children should smoke. He thought that smoking was cool. And teenagers could look cool and smoke and they could enjoy it, and then they could quit by their early 20s before it did any damage. He did not believe that cigarettes were addicting, and he also had some ties to racist organizations 20 years ago, something called the Sons of the Confederacy.
So these people who wanted children to work and children to smoke had a profound influence on our course of the pandemic, and especially with regards to [00:29:00] children and young people.
How creationists worked with Republican donors to oppose sound Covid-19 policies
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and another aspect, and unfortunately, I guess you hadn't seen my article when you were writing your book, was that these people, Jeffrey Tucker and his colleagues at the American Institute for Economic Research, as they call it, are also strongly and closely affiliated with the Creationist.
HOWARD: I did not know that.
SHEFFIELD: Well, you remember I sent it to you and you actually, you read it and you said, oh, I wish I had seen this. Yeah, yeah, no, I didn't know that at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, but no, I'm like, because so I, so basically. This Jeffrey Tucker actually comes from a political tradition called paleo libertarian, and it's like it's older than kind of the modern day libertarians who are might, you know, not be religious and might have some more centrist social viewpoints like they might support same sex marriage or transgender rights, for instance, he's from the paleo libertarian tradition, [00:30:00] which What basically is their viewpoint is that the government, the best government is what's in the Bible, the Bible is the only government book you need, and they don't explicitly, they don't wear that on their sleeve a lot, these guys, but they also employ some of the top creationists.
Advocates are people who were working closely to get this Great Barrington Declaration passed. And Scott Atlas had been on the podcast of the Hoover Institution guy named Peter Robinson, who has just been a kind of relentless creationist propagandist over the decades. I mean, like, I am guessing that people who are, were trying to affiliate with these guys who had some inkling of science, they probably didn't know that they were getting in bed with creationists to push this stuff, but they were.
HOWARD: Who knows what they knew? I certainly haven't seen any of the authors of the Great Barrington [00:31:00] Declaration. Expressed disgust with Mr. Tucker's pro child labor, pro smoking views, the number of them went to work for him after the pandemic or a few years later, and something called the Brownstone Institute, which has become one of the major spreaders of medical misinformation and even Threats against frontline healthcare workers.
Mr. Tucker published an article called who will be held responsible for this devastation with a picture of a guillotine on it. And that was retweeted by Martin Kuhldorf, one of the doctors who helped author the great Barrington declaration. So they don't seem particularly uncomfortable with some of this stuff that I think would horrify most normal people and normal Americans.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it's, it is really disturbing, but it, and that's why it is important to, to highlight this information because, like, the closeness between reactionary right wing extremism and conservatism, people who have conservative viewpoints, they are, I think there's a [00:32:00] temptation, and I can say that having been one earlier in my life, that there's kind of a temptation to think, oh, well, those guys are just harmless.
They don't, they're not relevant, people don't pay attention to them, but that's not reality. Like, these people are significant, and as we've been talking about here, they had direct ties into the Donald Trump White House and were setting policy. And a lot of that policy basically, it kind of boils down to that, I mean, if you look at the kind of the right-wing viewpoints about sort of public policy, generally, a lot of the thing is, a lot of the sentiment is just simply, well, we can't do anything about it.
Let's just leave it how it is. These are problems that are unsolvable like racism or poverty or. Things like that are already in other countries. Let's build a wall. Let's keep them out. Let's not try to help them with their own country or their law enforcement. Like, that's the default approach is to do nothing.
And people were just [00:33:00] sort of applying that carte blanche to something and they had no, I mean, Jeffrey Tucker spearheading A medical response in a lot of, and Scott Atlas, I mean, he has a neuro, he is, if I remember right, an x ray technician, like that was his job. He's a neuroradiologist.
HOWARD: He's a neuroradiologist, so he looks at MRIs and CTs, which is also my sort of secret passion.
I love doing that too, but no, he had no expertise and he was discovered by Donald Trump because he was on Fox News saying what Donald Trump wanted to hear and what the great Barrington declaration proposed and what these people proposed was, as I said, it was this idea of mass infection of unvaccinated youth by getting rid of all attempts to stop the spread of the virus.
Except this sort of mythical protection of the vulnerable. So they wanted everything open. They wanted everyone to lead a normal life. And they spoke about it almost as [00:34:00] an obligation. So Martin Kuhldorf wrote about how our grandparents went off to World War two to fight and they sacrificed themselves for the good of their country.
And that's how we spoke about young people getting covid. He said, you essentially have a duty. To contract the virus before you're vaccinated so that it will, you can protect grandma and it will go away.
What's interesting is they speak about themselves as the sort of heroes of the working class. They feel that the lockdowns were just as utter devastation of working-class people. They say it was the worst assault on the working class since segregation in Vietnam. So comparing lockdowns to those historical horrors, I think is a little overwrought. I do want to say that no one claims the lockdowns were harmless. Everyone knows that the lockdowns did have a lot of harms, and the same way I call out these doctors for being sheltered for the [00:35:00] consequences of their words, because they did not and do not treat covid patients.
I'm always trying to be careful to recognize how I was privileged, and I never missed a paycheck. I never was lonely because I was at the hospital every day. My children's schooling was obviously affected, as it was everyone else, but I was protected from the harms of the lockdowns for the most part.
And I just want to be open and honest about that. But I think if you were to Go to some factory today or are certainly some meat packing plants and ask people, do you feel that the lockdowns were the worst part of the pandemic for you? Most of them will probably say no. It was someone who lost a loved one that I lost.
The conflicting messages of covid contrarians
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and then, of course, the same people who were there, their approach is completely incoherent as well, because. They were simultaneously saying that covid was no big deal, but then also it was a Chinese bioweapon. And it's like, well, if you're going to make a bioweapon, that's probably not a very good one.[00:36:00]
And it doesn't even jive with China's response to covid either, because the country that stayed in lockdown and re engaged it repeatedly and extremely, you know, viciously in a lot of cases, unfortunately, was China. So like they unleashed a bioweapon to destroy their own economy. That's basically what they're saying, but it's no big deal.
HOWARD: Yeah. That was one of my science-based medicine articles, a satire article called let's repeatedly expose unvaccinated children to a virus that came out of a Chinese lab. So it was essentially the, these sorts of things that Chinese are to blame. For this virus, which is just the cold.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
And but, and they're continuing this approach. A lot of these people as well by going after the coven vaccines now currently. And now they've a lot of them. I wouldn't say all of them, but a lot of them have also kind of shifted into larger [00:37:00] anti-vaccine. Advocacy against other diseases and the public opinion surveys, actually I'll put a link into the show notes for those who want to read it, but actually Republicans became more anti vax for MMR vaccines than they were before covid.
And it's directly related to all this misinformation. I mean, but what's, so like, I mean, guess the, their big thing now is carditis. What is that? And what, what are they saying? And what's their response?
HOWARD: Yeah, so before I talk about that, let me just talk a little bit about pediatric covid and covid for young people in general, because Myocarditis predominantly affects young men.
So, if you look at how many children have died of covid, the exact number isn't entirely clear. There are reasons that some cases may be missed, and maybe some cases have been over counted as well. But around 2, 000 children have died of covid so far, maybe a little bit more. And hundreds of thousands of children have been hospitalized and millions of children have been made [00:38:00] sick by the virus.
And some of these children get very sick. About one third, depends on which variant is circulating, but about one third to 20 to 30 percent of hospitalized children need to be in the ICU and about five percent of those need to be intubated. And some children have had seizures and strokes or amputations or lung transplants.
plans. And these outcomes are very rare, but rare outcomes multiplied by 73 million American Children. Has it added up to a lot of sick and injured and dead Children? The toll covid's toll easily equals or exceeds that of many other vaccine preventable diseases. And I want to be very clear that all of these numbers would have been much higher had we listened to these doctors and allowed 70 million American Children.
None of whom were vaccinated to contract covid all at the same time in the spring of 2020 as they want, as they wanted. So the vaccine [00:39:00] came around. The first children were vaccinated in, I believe, May of 2021. And soon after that, reports started coming out of myocarditis. Initially, the initial response or signal for this, I believe was from Israel.
So myocarditis. is inflammation of the heart, and it can be serious. It can be a fatal condition. And when we're talking about vaccine myocarditis, we need to talk about two things, how often it happens and how severe it is. So if you're talking about children under the age of 18, and it mostly occurs in males between the ages of 12 to 25 or so, it does not occur in younger children, fortunately.
So how often does it occur? Well, the numbers are a little bit all over the place, but the most recent meta analysis, which is the sort of study of studies, pegged the rate at about 1 in 15, 000 males after their second vaccine dose. So if you run the numbers of how many males were vaccinated here in the United [00:40:00] States, again I'm speaking just 18 and under at this point, there are probably about 700 to 1, 000 cases of vaccine myocarditis here in the U.
S. And then we need to discuss how severe it is. Well, fortunately, it seems to have a very favorable and benign, mild course in the vast majority of children who get it. That's not 100%. There have been some cases of fulminant myocarditis in children. It has sent some of them to the ICU. I'm aware of one child in the entire world who plausibly died of vaccine myocarditis, someone in Japan.
There may be others out there, but catastrophic outcomes seem extremely rare, fortunately. In the latest series from Canada, as doctors have learned about the condition, most they, they sent most children home from the emergency room and those who spent the night in the hospital only stayed one day.
So I don't want to minimize it. It's a big deal whenever a [00:41:00] child gets sick and whenever a child is sent to the hospital and these Children will have to be followed over the long term to make sure that there's no cardiac scarring. So it's a real side effect. And other vaccines have caused myocarditis at around this rate as well.
But compared to what covid has done to children, it's just not even close. As I got done saying, thousands, two to two thousand children have died of covid, and hundreds of thousands have been hospitalized. And my, the virus causes much more severe myocarditis at a much higher rate. Especially in this post infectious autoimmune condition called MIS, multi system inflammatory syndrome in children, which has affected about 10,000 American children and killed about 80.
And about 80% of children with this condition have myocarditis, which has caused hemodynamic collapse in some children. Most children with this condition go to the ICU. Fortunately, seems to have vanished with most recent variants, so we're not seeing a [00:42:00] lot of myths these days. But a lot of the doctors who were very, very, very, very worried about vaccine myocarditis would speak about literal death from covid as vanishingly rare, not something to fear. So doctors spoke about this rare, usually mild vaccine side effect as a fate worse than death. And I mean that very literally and that's the definition of what it means to be anti-vaccine.
And the vaccine for children, it's not perfect, especially with some of the newer variants, just like for adults, but there have been 25 or so studies from around the world showing that it's very effective at limiting rare but grave harms in children. And the world would be in much worse place off had no children have been vaccinated.
The impossibility of "shielding" seniors from covid while allowing everyone else to take no precautions
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no question. And the other issue with that sort of, we want them in technical approach is that. Not only is there no way to [00:43:00] sort of get food to elderly people or protect them in nursing homes or whatever, but like a lot of children live with their grandparents in one way or the other. And so if you're forcing those children to go to school, you're literally taking them and delivering a virus to their parents or grandparents that you supposedly want to protect from.
And they never, that was something that I did see people. Try to ask the advocates of this idea. Well, what are you going to do about those kids? Oh, well, we'll figure it out. Like, they never, ever had any sort of response to specific scenarios and that is highly likely. And recently--
HOWARD: They did have a response, but it was the wrong response.
They said, children don't spread covid. They said children pose no risk to teachers and children pose no risk to older, their older relatives at home. So they had her as wrong. Yeah. It's hard to the extent that it was [00:44:00] true early in the pandemic. It obviously isn't true of newer variants. And that's one of the things these doctors did is they treated this brand-new virus as this old predictable friend that we know everything about and they can totally minimize variance.
I will say one thing since school closures are probably the most controversial aspect of the pandemic and one of the most hated and I didn't like it for my children. They had remote schooling for a year, and it really set one of them back quite a bit, I think. And. No one likes school closures. We were all.
Didn't want that to be true, but it's important to realize that the virus closed schools too. So once schools reopened, especially during the delta and during the omicron waves, a lot of them had to close again because there were not enough teachers there to teach the students or a couple of times schools were officially open, but students were just sent to [00:45:00] classrooms taught by National Guardsmen are.
I know one of my One of my kids just spent the entire day sitting in the auditorium during the Delta wave because there weren't enough teachers there. So I do just want to push back on the idea, not that you said it, but that schools were closed just by overly cautious Democratic politicians when in fact it was the virus that closed schools.
And here in New York City, during our first wave, we lost 74 educators, including 30 teachers. And 70 out of those 74 educators were in schools. I don't know. I can't prove that's where they contracted the virus. But had we done nothing, how do we just let all students and all teachers get infected? There would have been more dead teachers, and that's not good for Children have to recognize.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and that's assuming a lot of teachers wouldn't have just quit.
HOWARD: Oh, yeah, of course, of course.
SHEFFIELD: Because that's what would happen is that a lot of people would have said why would I risk my life for this job? I'll go get another one or be [00:46:00] unemployed or go live with someone.
HOWARD: Right. I don't want to come off as in favor or opposed to school closures.
I really voiced no opinion on the topic. Other than to say we should be honest about what would have happened had we never closed schools and just let the virus run rampant there. And you're absolutely right. Teachers would not have shown up to work and a lot of parents wouldn't have sent their children once.
One child died in the school that would have an effect on every parent at the school, or they wouldn't want them to bring the virus home to their grandparents. So I think the idea that everything could have been just fine if it only wasn't for teachers, unions and democratic politicians.
It's evidenced by the fact that the virus did close schools in every single red state as well, even after politicians tried to open them. So we don't have to ask what would have happened. We know, we know what did happen in schools couldn't stay open when there were zero [00:47:00] mitigation measures in place.
Herd immunity is real, but it requires vaccines
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good point. And I guess another thing that is important, I think, to note here is that the idea of herd immunity, it is a real medical term, but it's not improper to speak about herd immunity and usually, I mean, often it's used in the context of a vaccinated population being resistant to disease, but it is the case that natural herd immunity can In existence, some scenarios, right?
And so these guys weren't just completely making stuff up like a completely imaginary concept, but they were misapplying it to the circumstances.
HOWARD: Well, humanity has never before eliminated a virus by spreading that virus. Humanity has never achieved herd immunity to a virus without a vaccine. The biggest problem being newborns.
So if you look at measles in the 1950s and sixties, before there was a vaccine. What would happen is cases [00:48:00] would, like a giant jigsaw upper, kind of jigsaw shape. Anyways, peak and trough, peak and trough, up and down. So one year there would be 4 million people infected. And then the next year there would be 300,000 people infected.
Then a new crop of babies would be born, and they would be infected. So we do have herd immunity to measles. We have herd immunity to chickenpox. We have herd immunity to polio as well, because those vaccines and those diseases induce. very long-lasting immunity. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case with our current vaccines in this current shape shifting virus.
So the idea that we could have achieved herd immunity through the mass infection of unvaccinated young people Absolutely turned out to be a fantasy and people who still claim otherwise. I mean, what restrictions do we have to drop today in order to achieve herd immunity and end of the pandemic, as we were promised, I want the pandemic to end, [00:49:00] too.
Why most doctors won't debate anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, okay. So, but going back to the kind of their general anti-vaccine advocacy. Now, I have one of the, it's been a topic in recent weeks where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has kind of launched his presidential campaign on an anti vax line and is his great ally, Joe Rogan, the podcaster and former Fear Factor host boosting him and saying, you guys need to debate Kennedy.
And of course, a lot of people look at that and they say, well. Bobby Kennedy is just some mentally ill lawyer. I'm not going to debate him as a medical professional. I'm not going to debate it in that job. And I think as somebody who has, if that's your viewpoint, you're certainly entitled to that. I mean, what's your response to that?
You've written about it.
HOWARD: Yeah, so this invitation to debate Robert Kennedy was extended to Peter Hotez, who is a, expert in tropical diseases in [00:50:00] pediatrics in Texas and developed a patent free vaccine, which is, I think I read 100 million doses of it have been given in India. So he's a real hero of this pandemic.
He hasn't been right about everything either like everyone else. And I can understand how a lot of people felt he should have debated Kennedy, right? If the science is on your side and the facts are on your side, why not just humiliate Kennedy during a live debate? But there's several reasons why Dr.
Hotez refused and why he made the right decision. The first of these is that by agreeing to even show up, he kind of elevates Kennedy, right? When you think about something to be debated, you tend to think about each side really brings something to the table here. But this would be the equivalent of NASA scientists debating a flat earther, right?
You really don't need to do that. The second of these is that live debates tend to reward the best speaker, not necessarily the person with the best information. For example, I am so well versed in anti-vaccine [00:51:00] arguments. I am sure I could win a debate. against 99% of doctors if I was to take the anti-vaccine side.
I could probably humiliate them and win the debate, but I would be wrong. The third reason is that it's impossible to fact check claims in real time. It's very hard on anti vaxxers and Robert Kennedy in particular, are known to just spew a fire hose of lies and misinformation that are very difficult to fact checked in real time.
I'll give you an example of this. When I first encountered the anti-vaccine movement, one of the first documents I encountered was something called 200 evidence-based reasons not to vaccinate something like this. And this was written by Sayer G, the head of a pseudoscience website called Green Med Info, who was recently on a conference call just last night with Robert Kennedy.
And he was named as one of the disinformation dozen during the pandemic as people who spread some of the worst and most information, misinformation online. Anyways, [00:52:00] so he collected 200 articles that he felt proved vaccines were dangerous and unnecessary. And one of them was titled a measles outbreak and occurred in a highly vaccinated population.
Okay. That doesn't sound good, but when you actually read the article, what it said is that in this city, I think it was San Diego, a measles outbreak occurred, even though 95% of children were vaccinated. Because the 5% who are unvaccinated clustered together and created this sort of pocket of vulnerability, so it was really a very pro vaccine article, but he just rearranged the title and rearrange the words to make it seem like vaccines didn't work.
It would be close to impossible to be able to refute all of the misinformation in real time. And I am for debates, and I extend an invitation to anyone here to go to Science Based Medicine if they wish to [00:53:00] debate me, pick an article of mine and let me know what I got wrong. So I'm not afraid of debates.
I don't think Dr. Hotez is necessarily either. But I prefer to do it in writing, and I'll say this too, Dr. Hotez agreed to go on Rogan's program, he was a guest at the start of the pandemic, and just answer questions without having to share the stage with a crackpot who has left dead children in his wake, and he was right to refuse to do that.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's also worth pointing out that there are a number of people who, I guess, are, what people are now calling science communicators. Who did say, well, okay, he doesn't want to do it, but I will debate Kennedy on your program. Why don't you invite me on, Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan has completely ignored these people.
And because I, because you are right that people in a live debate type format, you can do things like filibusters or delay or just take up all the time and use, yeah, as you were saying, [00:54:00] just this litany of nonsense arguments and then say, Oh, well, you didn't refute, you know, I made 20 arguments and you only refuted one of them.
And of course the logical answer to that as well. Because you made so much nonsense that I didn't have time to refute all of it.
But on the other hand, somebody who has a debate background or a rhetorical background could call out such techniques. And in fact, that technique that we're talking about here is sometimes called a "Gish Gallop" in debate parlance after a creationist, there we go again, who would use it as a way of saying, see, this proves that the Bible creation story is true because I made these 50 points, and that's not reality.
But Rogan has a record of doing this, that he doesn't invite people onto his podcast who disagree with, and then at the same time, we'll very rarely try to call out people and try to demand that they appear on his program [00:55:00] when they may have any number of other things going on in their lives or whatever it is, like people have a million correct reasons not going this guy's program at his command, but he doesn't invite people who disagree, right? The record is indisputably true in that regard.
HOWARD: So he had on Dr. Hotez at the start of the pandemic, but before there were any vaccines. And to me, the whole thing bothered me in a different way, just in that live debates are performances, they're spectacles. And that's what people wanted.
People wanted to see Kennedy own and dunk on Hotez, like it was some sort of WWF competition, wrestling competition. And then, given what I saw during the pandemic, and the number of people I saw die, it just seems kind of an inappropriate thing to do.
And it wouldn't have changed anyone's mind. Everyone who was on Hotez's side before the debate would have been on [00:56:00] Hotez's side after the debate, and same with Kennedy. So people just wanted a show, and that's all that Rogan cares about. He just wants entertainment, he just wants eyeballs, he wants to be seen as heterodox or controversial, which is why he won't have someone on like Dr. Hotez, these days at least, just to answer questions.
SHEFFIELD: Because he doesn't want his questions actually answered. What he wants to do is hector and berate someone that he doesn't like for saying mean things, as he defines them.
HOWARD: Correct.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the other thing is, though, even on their own standard, they don't even meet their own standard of that.
They will not engage in the debate. And your point about why a written dialogue is probably the ideal for this type of interchange of beliefs, because that is how the scientific world works right now.
If you have evidence to show that vaccines cause some condition or whatever, and you have real [00:57:00] definable, replicable data that was soundly constructed and interpreted, there are people who will engage with your point, if you have it written out. And it is extremely, I think, notable that these anti vax doctors and whatnot, they confine almost everything they do to just blathering on a podcast and they're not writing research papers, by and large, or if they do, they're on just a little tiny sliver of their argument.
And it's like 99% of the argument is not in the paper, but 1% is, and so therefore you should believe the part that they won't actually try to prove.
HOWARD: Yeah. And so there's an internet adage called Brandolini's Law. Hopefully I'm saying this right, but it says. Essentially, the amount of effort it takes to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than the energy it takes to create it in the first place.
And one of my more recent articles on Science Based Medicine was discussing this principle. And someone did agree to debate me, a [00:58:00] businessman by the name of Steve Kirsch, who has become one of the Twitter's most outspoken anti-vaccine advocates. And he's a complete not job for lack of a better word saying that vaccines have killed hundreds of thousands of people and only saved a handful of lives.
And he's very inappropriate. He was gambling. He put up some sort of wager about whether this child who died of covid was actually had underlying conditions or not. I mean, just speaking in a wildly inappropriate way, treating dead children almost as sport.
But anyways, I said anyone is always welcome to debate me. Like I said, my articles are there, and anyone can write a rebuttal to them. And he did. And it was full of basic factual errors and omissions.
And I wrote a response to it. Just based on three sentences of his where we talked about vaccine myocarditis and I went through all of the studies regarding vaccine myocarditis, all of the studies showing that the virus causes myocarditis at a [00:59:00] much higher rate and a more severe myocarditis.
And again, emphasizing that which causes more myocarditis isn't the point. Even the question because of what the harms of covid are not limited to myocarditis and that article was about five pages long. I suppose if you printed it out just based on three sentences of his and it never could have been done during a live debate unless you gave me half an hour to just sit and read the article. So live debates reward the best speaker, the slickest speaker, the most charismatic speaker, not the person who is right.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's, I think that's definitely true. All right. Well, let's see. Are there any other aspects of the book here that you think are worth getting into? I want to make sure.
HOWARD: Oh, I think they're all worth getting into, but yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Well, that you want to make sure the audience will come away with.
HOWARD: Just that it was 99% of doctors comported themselves with honor and [01:00:00] bravery this pandemic, and it was just really sad to see a small number of sheltered, very influential doctors spread gross misinformation, and the last chapter of the book is sort of about what to do about it, and I think we just need to do what you and I are doing today, which is not tolerate gross misinformation.
We need to leave space for people to have different ideas, and not everyone who questions vaccines is anti-vaccine and we need to not label people who disagree with us as misinformation necessarily. But people who just spread wildly fake statistics or repeatedly declared the pandemic over, they need to be called out for the bad actors that they are.
So I'm grateful to you for doing that and having me on to allow me to do that as well. I appreciate it.
Covid contrarian doctors don't seem to have much actual experience with covid patients
SHEFFIELD: Okay, great. And I guess, well, maybe let's have the last topic. I think, and you talk about it in the book somewhat, that there does seem to [01:01:00] be a distinction between people who actually treated with patients and their approach to the virus.
The people who were pushing these non-actions basically had no experience, direct experience with covid. Were any of these people, did any of them have covid treatment experience? And did it affect them if, I mean, do you think that's relevant?
Why do you think that's relevant if they did?
HOWARD: So I think a handful of the doctors who I mentioned did treat covid patients in one way or another. But for the most part, very few of them did, and most of the ones who did treat covid patients worked out of San Francisco, relatively well-off environment. I don't think that they saw some of the nightmare scenes that we saw here in New York City.
And elsewhere throughout the country and I, the doctors who I write about say things that no doctor who treated covid patients who worked in the [01:02:00] hospital would ever say things such as hospitals were being overwhelmed by the worried well, by people who are just showing up to the hospital in a panic, convinced that they were going to die. They were overwhelmed by people who were dying and were very sick.
And when you read the accounts of some of the doctors who worked here where I worked at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, we didn't even have it nearly as bad as some of the hospitals in the outer boroughs. Elmhurst Hospital in Queens was really the epicenter neighborhood called Corona, ironically enough.
But it was like a war zone there. According to the descriptions, just people dying in hallways. People stumbling outside of the hospital. And this was just not unique to New York City. This was in Italy, and Spain, and Iran, and India, all over the world at various points of the pandemic.
And I think that my experience with it didn't allow me to predict the course of the pandemic any better than anyone else. I made erroneous predictions, which I include in the [01:03:00] book. I want to hold myself to the same standards that I hold everyone else, but it really gave us a lot of humility. I think about what the virus can do.
I did see some young, healthy people suffer and some young, healthy people die of the virus. Not many, but it made me realize that young people weren't totally immune from covid's worst effects. And there's something about having skin in the game that's valuable, meaning if I successfully convinced large swaths of my community to reject the covid vaccine, I would be creating more work for myself and more risk for myself.
The doctors who successfully did convince large swaths of the country to reject the covid vaccine, they never had to see someone express vaccine regret. They never had to see someone with their last breath, say goodbye to a family member on zoom saying, I really should have gotten the vaccine and so, there's something to be said for having skin in the game.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. I think [01:04:00] so. All right, well, this has been a great conversation. We've been talking today with Jonathan Howard. He is the author of the new book, We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace The Anti-vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of covid.
And you are also on Twitter. You've got the number 19 in your username. What's what is covid 19? Is that what that is? What is that?
HOWARD: No, no that's always been my lucky number. I wore that. I played baseball and 19 was always my number. So, okay. Well, superstition.
SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so for those listening, it is 19 J O H O. So Joe Ho, presumably your nickname. Yes. Okay. All right. Well, great, Jonathan. It's been a good conversation.
HOWARD: Thanks for the questions and thanks for having me. It was great to be here. I really appreciate it.
SHEFFIELD: All right. So that is the program for today.
I appreciate everybody for joining us. And of course you can go to theory of [01:05:00] change. show to get the full. Audio, video, and transcript of this episode. And if you are a paid member or subscriber, you can get complete access to every episode in the archive. So I appreciate everybody who is doing that. And I strongly encourage you to do it if you are not.
And of course, if you can't, I understand everybody has a different financial situation, but you can support the show just by giving a nice review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or subscribing on YouTube, that's another important way to support the show as well. So I appreciate everybody who is doing that in one way or another.
Thank you very much. I'll see you next time.
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