#75. From Neurology to Pandemic Misinformation - Dr. Jonathan Howard

Dr. Jonathan Howard, neurologist and psychiatrist at NYU Langone and chief of the neurology service at Bellevue Hospital, discusses his dual origin stories. The first as a medical professional and his experiences treating multiple sclerosis and other neuro-immune diseases. The second, understanding the dangers of misinformation in medicine, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic which he doccuments across two books "We want them infected" and "Everyone Else is Lying to you". Dr. Howard reflects on the lessons learned from COVID-19 and the need for the medical community to regain public trust and effectively combat misinformation.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Journey into Neurology and Psychiatry
• 9:45 Multiple Sclerosis and other neuroinflammatory diseases
• 21:51 The Impact of COVID-19 on Public Health
• 49:02 Misinformation and the Anti-Vaccine Movement
• 56:48 Pushback for Speaking out
• 1:05:36 Lessons for Future Pandemics
• 1:14:07 Final Questions

Transcript

0:03

Hello, hello, hello. And today on the Smooth Brains Society, we're joined by Dr. Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist at NYU Lagone and Bellevue Hospital. He specializes in multiple sclerosis, COVID-19 and other neurological disorders and has spent years working with patients on the front lines of complex brain diseases. But Dr. Howard isn't just a clinician. He's combined his medical knowledge and sharp public thinking skills to become an important voice in conversations about science communication and misinformation. His recent books, We Want Them Infected and Everyone Else is Lying to You, reflects on the pandemic years, exploring how ideas and herd immunity as well as natural infection spread through both science and society and what they reveal about trust, weaponizing doubt and decision making in medicine. Today we'll talk about the science of the brain, the ethics of public health. and how doctors and scientists can navigate uncertainty in complex times. Welcome, Dr. Howard. Thank you for joining us. So to start, it is lovely to have you. I'm already raring to go here. I'm very excited. So can you tell us a little bit about how maybe you got into neurology and psychiatry, maybe a little bit about your origin story? So I have a very common origin story for neurologists, which is I read the book, The Man Who Must Took His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. I think that's almost a requirement. And I entered medical school knowing I was gonna become a neurologist and it's really, and psychiatrists, I really think that's the only part of medicine I could do, right? I mean, the kidneys, the liver. The spleen, I mean, I'm glad there are doctors who are interested in those things, but it's definitely not me. And I was always interested in behavioral neurology for the most part. The aphasias, the neglect syndrome, some of the visual disturbances that people can have are just endlessly fascinating to me. So that's why I got interested in neurology and psychiatry. And that's what I do Monday through Friday and too many weekends. you know, working at Bellevue Hospital in NYU, seeing anyone who walks in. Amazing. I mean, yeah, that book I think is just so worldwide. I think almost every neuroscientist, psychiatrist, psychologist I know, all, you know, we're all told about it when we were 16, 17, if we're interested in psychology and it's a great book. Oliver Sacks was a real kind of like, he had a personality and fantastic scientist. So when you, so did you go straight into medicine or did you... did you do a degree beforehand or kind of what were the steps to where you kind of are today working at NYU? m you know, the way I think maybe in Europe, some people enter medical school earlier than they do in the United States. You know, here we go through four years of college and then most people take a little bit of time in between college and medical school to do something. So I actually worked in a lab at NYU and then went to medical school in the University of Southern California. So I traveled to Los Angeles for four years and then I returned here to New York City. to do my combined training in neurology and psychiatry, which is not too many people do that, but I think it's proven useful. It took me a couple of years longer than everyone else, but it's something that I'm very glad that I did. And I've written several non-bestselling neurology textbooks. I've written many non-bestselling books. And in many ways, I'm a collector more than I am an author. in both my writing in neurology and my writing on the COVID pandemic, which I'm sure we'll talk about. With neurology, I have written uh several books. have uh one thing, my sort of big project was a neurology video textbook, which is obviously an entirely electronic book where I aimed with patient's permission, of course, to capture a lot of these findings that I'd only read about previously so that people could see them for themselves. I've also obsessively collect images. So I have an imaging library, MRIs and CTs of almost every single neurological disease. And I've written that up in another non-bestselling book. But none of those broke new ground, but they were just collections of classic important findings. And I hope people have found those useful. Neurologists. it's basically an encyclopedia for neurologists. That's the goal. That's the goal. And these findings are never going to change because our nervous systems are never going to change. And again, you can't describe some of these things. Some of these aphasias are all of the thousand eye movement disorders, for example. And so just seeing them on film, I think, has been very helpful to a lot of people. I hope so. Yeah, I mean, as a neuro imager, eh that is actually fantastic having every single, I'm actually curious. I'll wait till the end of this, because I want to dominate by asking everything about your MRI eh master book. But that sounds absolutely fascinating. So Zaheer, you were going to say something. No, well, I was going to ask about the book as well in the sense that you said our nervous system doesn't change, but do the books keep updating? Because I feel with improvement of technologies, not just the images improve, but also you find certain nuances, feel. For example, if you're looking at stroke, maybe there's nuances within the types of strokes as well and things like that. Yeah, I mean, in terms of some of the treatments, the books are a little bit out of date at this point. They were written, you know, not that long ago, but several fields of neurology have fortunately made incredible advances in the past decade. So the main disease that I treat, multiple sclerosis, you know, we don't have a cure, but it's a vastly different disease than it was 10 years ago. I would say the same is true of stroke. I would say the same is true of migraines. I would say some other fields have, progress has been a little bit slower. Some of the neurodegenerative diseases, know, ALS for example, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, progress is being made, but I don't think it's really quite to the point where we can say it's a massive game changer, unfortunately. So some of the treatment sections are out of date. uh Which is good news, right? I hope that they continue to become more out of date as new treatments and discoveries become available. We've just seen Huntington's, haven't we come through with that? But yeah, I'm a Parkinson's researcher and it's just so incredibly sad that there's no disease modifying treatments. Well, some would say they're on the brink, but not there yet. this is like, it's almost, yeah. Somebody once said to me, they think that reviews or meta-analyses should somewhat stay open always because it's constantly changing by the time. you know, in a year's time, it's almost obsolete because they're moving so quickly, which I kind of like, like almost like this book that you have is like the fact that it's constantly open and it's just constantly being updated almost like a, like a, a plausible Wikipedia, a medipedia, which is absolutely accessible. Yeah, mean, unfortunately it's not being updated. I don't go in and edit it. I'd probably have to come out with a third edition, uh unfortunately. yeah, I mean, it's good that the treatment section of multiple sclerosis is obsolete. That's very good. That's a very good. Yeah, I mean, I've got people who, you know, who I went to university, mid-twenties, you know, I know, you know, the fear is there, you 26, 27 being diagnosed and, but they just said the immunotherapy nowadays just absolutely kind of completely and utterly kind of, you know, changes everything, real game changer. Yeah, no, I 15 years ago when I started treating MS, we used to give out steroids every single clinic day multiple times. And you would see a lot of young people with canes and walkers. you know, that still happens. Again, it's not a cure. And MS is broadly divided into what we call relapsing and progressive phases. The relapsing phase is the sort of acute inflammatory stage. And we've been very good at uh stopping that. And when I say we, We need to give credit to some of the scientists who developed this, know, doctor out of UCSF, Steve Hauser. I don't want to say we, I shouldn't take any credit for this. um But coming up with some of these medications, but with this progressive phase, with this neurodegenerative phase, we're not very good, if we can do any good at all in that stage, unfortunately. So there's a lot of progress has been made. There's a lot uh of work left to go, but Our waiting room is no longer filled with young people with canes and walkers, unfortunately. Again, it happens. I saw two people in their thirties with walk in wheelchairs yesterday. So I don't want to spin an overly rosy picture of things, but it's much better to be diagnosed with MS in 2025 than it was in 20, anytime. You know, the same way we hope someone who's diagnosed with MS in the year 2050 is going to be much better off than people today. Just an MS question. So you were saying that there basically has two phases. What sort of defines these two phases? What happens neurologically that one has one phase and the other sort of thing? Yeah, so in the relapsing phase, which is about how 90 % of patients start, this is what your friends in their 20s probably developed, they will develop a new symptom and they can kind of pinpoint it. I was doing fine until two weeks ago when I woke up and couldn't feel anything from my waist down, or I had blurry vision in my left eye. And that's what we call the relapsing phase. And on imaging, we will see actively inflamed. lesions are lesions that enhance with the addition of contrast gadolinium. In the progressive phase, people develop symptoms the way my, my beard's going gray or my hair's falling out. mean, nothing happens. I look the same as I did yesterday, but I look very different than I did 10 years ago as, as do we all. And there's no firm border between these two phases. It's kind of like, when does a baby stop being a baby? There's no, aha, today you are not a baby. this sort of a gradual transition. So those are really the two main phases of MS. I've done a little drawing. Luckily, not many people will see it, but I think you'll recognise it. It's like the intervals, you know, on like a stepper. And then it gets bad, very bad. And then it kind of comes back down, but you never go back to baseline. And then does that make, that, that kind of the relapsing progression? you just recreated a slide that I show in all of my talks on MS. And again, we have largely... oh eliminated relapses. mean, that's a little bit of a strong word, but drastically reduced relapses, you know, which is great. And I have a lot of patients who I have boring visits with. always say that's the goal because they have nothing to tell me because they feel fine. They come in, I say, how are you doing? I say, and they say, fine, nothing new. Uh, and then we just kind of gossip about their life for the next half hour, however long that they want to talk. And that's an ideal visit. And I have many more of those than I did. 10, 15 years ago. really that's a very positive thing in today's world shall we say and we'll leave it at that. So as well as looking at multiple sclerosis are you kind of interested in other kind of like neuroimmune conditions? I COVID is one of them which we can kind of start to trickle into a little bit. Yeah, um so there's a lot of other neuroinflammatory diseases, things that are not as well known, neuromyelitis optica. something called MOGAD, myelin oligodendrocyclicoprotein antibody-associated disease, limbic encephalitis, NMDA encephalitis. These are much rarer. They can be much more serious and devastating, uh fascinating conditions. And a lot of what I do is work in Bellevue Hospital and any person who comes in there with a neurological problem, if you show up to the ER as someone did this morning with double vision, I'm going to be the doctor that they're going to call. They're actually going to call the residents first and then I'll supervise the case with them. But, but that, you know, that, that's both kind of intimidating and exciting because really anything can kind of walk in the door and you're the first one to try to figure out exactly what's going on. So I spend a lot of my time doing that, but that can be seizures, head trauma, toxic overdose. mean, anything, anything. Yeah, and you've got the book of this talk and a build up of all these different cases that come through the door. Yeah, no, like I said, I've obsessively collected every interesting image or patient that I saw. This sounds fascinating. I think this should be best selling. I'm going to big the stuff up. We should post this all over afterwards. ah We had a guest on oh a little bit ago called, his name was Dr. Keith Sawyer, and he does creativity research, so nothing to do with neurology. ah But he writes a book which he updates every year, couple years, which they've dubbed the Creativity Bible because it updates with all the research in the field of creativity over the past. couple years and I think it's like on it's like eighth or ninth version now. So I mean, it's an option. There is one neurological disease that can lead to bursts of creativity, frontotemporal dementia. Patients can then develop new artistic skills. I don't think I've actually really quite seen that myself, but there is a trade-off between creativity and disinhibition, right? This is why, you know, it's rock stars who are throwing TVs out of hotel rooms and doing all sorts of drugs and this sort of thing. Whereas the The chairman of my universities, for example, are not nearly as creative, but they're not doing as interesting things. Or like my children, for example. When my daughter was three, she was extremely creative and happy being, know, playing naked at the playground. She didn't care at all. Now that she's 20, fortunately, those things have kind of reversed, right? ah You know, she's not nearly as creative and imaginative as she used to be. And she's very, very, very, very concerned, you know, with how she looks and how she presents herself. So there are some neurological conditions that can lead to creativity. So it is an interesting thing to think about how our frontal lobes can inhibit us, which again is a good thing, but can also impair creativity. That's very interesting. I didn't actually think of it that way, but... Yeah, as you said, like why are so many rock stars amount of drugs that they take? Not all of them, but some, some, you know, I saw a study actually recently, that Ozzy Osbourne's brain was looked at, and apparently he was like the ideal person to, you know, take drugs, take alcohol. Apparently his genetics, genetics was somewhat just made for it. But that doesn't mean that's a, that's a rarity. Most people's probably genes are not made for it. So this is not a podcast on saying take drugs. So you kind of spoke about that. Have you been like a medic except for about 20 years when you first graduated? medical school in 2003 so that's kind of when I started. And you said, I know you mentioned about treatments being the biggest one that kind of constantly changes, but since starting, is there any other kind of like big changes that have been happening? know, either it's a technology, patient care, public awareness, and those kind of past 22 years that you've particularly noticed. think what's interesting is we've had new diseases discovered, is, I think, relatively unique to neurology. The orthopedists aren't discovering any new bones anytime soon. uh But in neurology, we have had some new diseases discovered, some of which I already mentioned to you. NMO, MOGAD, or NMDA receptor encephalitis. In 2003, those conditions were recognized. They were considered sometimes different versions of MS, for example, no one would say that today. So I think that's a fascinating thing and something that's relatively unique to neurology, specifically uh neuroimmunology, for example. Other diseases have been reclassified and renamed. There's a bunch of diseases that don't exist anymore, not because we've cured them, unfortunately, but just because we've changed the name, for example. So people don't talk about Steele-Richardson-Oshnetsky syndrome or trying to think what some of the other uh names of those were, but we all call them multiple system atrophy now, which is sort of a uh evil version of Parkinson's disease. POS ones are nasty, aren't they? And PSP, yeah, just quite aggressive. As the name says, it affects basically your entire brain, doesn't it really? And yeah, it got quite nasty. And why we need imaging to better understand so we can do differential diagnosis on those, which I'm sure is in your lovely book. eh And to the point you're saying, like, I didn't realize NMDA encephalitis was... back in 2003, wasn't it? Because that's what made its way to eh Hannibal, wasn't it? eh The main character has an MDA encephalitis in the first season, I think. then I'm not sure if there was... Yeah. so it was recognized. It was broadly called limbic encephalitis, but I don't think the NMDA receptor itself was recognized until 2006, I believe, when that was first discovered. uh And the spectrum of perineoplastic diseases has expanded greatly. And all of these diseases go by these antibody names that are kind of impossible to remember. Some of them are named after patients initials, anti-yo, ma, trela. Some of them are named after the receptor, which is all the ones that we've been talking about, MDA, AMPA, GABA, Lig1, encephalitis, anti-ma. So it's this sort of whole alphabet soup. And who knows, maybe these things are much more common than... then we think there have been some studies of testing patients who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia for some of these antibodies. And some people are reporting a high prevalence. So who knows, maybe the treatment of schizophrenia in 10 years is gonna be very similar to the treatment for MS in terms of trying to give patients immunosuppressive disease, immunosuppressive medications rather. This is wild speculation on my part, but there might be a subset of patients uh respond to those medications. And I've always wondered what happened to patients who had an NMDA receptor encephalitis before it was recognized. Like someone in 1999, where is that person today? I maybe that poor soul is kind of languishing in a nursing home or a mental institution, something like that. would they, people who had an MDA and catholitis, be assumed to have schizophrenia? There is, sorry, two questions here, would be assumed to have schizophrenia. And second of all, there's a professor called Ed Bulmore, who I think has got quite a big thing where he thinks that some kind of disease, a lot of some like depression and whatnot, is definitely, it like it is possibly an immune response for the brain. So it's fascinating that that's kind of, now that these... as you say, these kind of encephalitis are coming out that kind of might mimic other kind of diseases. Yeah, so yeah. so I think we have to simultaneously be open to the possibility that a lot of these are going to be immune uh related, while also recognizing there's a high bar to prove that. And it kind of opens potentially the door to quackery or to dangerous treatments as well. you know, depression is a different condition than schizophrenia. You know, I personally think Just a lot of, most of the depression that I see in my patients is just caused by very hard lives that they lead. You know, they might be a single mother at age 22 and, you know, living in a shelter or something like that. I mean, I just think people lead very, very hard, challenging lives, a lot of them. So, you know, it's an interesting and open field of research. And hopefully if research is still allowed in the United States, we'll be making some of these discoveries. I mean, that statement is a really good segue into your books, isn't it? So, uh in the introduction, Beth mentioned two books. The first one was We Want Them All Infected. uh We can start there with that because it has to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. sort of, could you give us a little bit of an idea of what it was about? What brought you about to even writing this book? So guess the origin story of your second half. ah Yeah, off your career. Right, because I kind of have these two separate lives. uh To me, they're sort of related in that it's interesting to think, you know, how does the brain think? How do we develop these sorts of ideas and what happens when that goes awry, both in other people and in yourself? But of course, you can never see it in yourself until someone points it out to you. So the origin story of this is that I trained with a woman. Probably most people haven't heard of her. Her name is Dr. Kelly Brogan. And after she left NYU, she morphed into one of the country's leading anti-vaccine doctors. And when I knew her, we were friendly, were no problems at all. But after she left, she started posting things on Facebook about how vaccines didn't save us. and this sort of thing, she became a psychiatry kind of denier, for example. Needless to say, she doesn't treat patients anymore. She's become a full-time online internet marketer and has been for the past decade, but uh she is a very, very good public speaker. So she was platformed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop and uh was a star of the anti-vaccine movement and wrote these kind of absurd things that the best way to protect yourself against HPV infection was to get that infection, which is kind of like saying the best way to uh avoid needing glasses is to poke out your eyes or the best way to avoid being robbed is to give away all of your possessions. And she even became a germ theory denier writing articles that HIV does not cause AIDS, for example. So I became fascinated by how people, smart people, could believe these strange things. And from 2010 or so to 2020, I just learned everything that I could about the anti-vaccine movement and the refutations to anti-vaccine myths and fallacies. In 2018, for example, I uh co-wrote with Dorit Reis, who is a law professor here in the United States and uh the foremost expert on vaccine law and everything vaccine related, to be honest with you. And so we co-wrote a book chapter on the fallacies of the anti-vaccine movement. so suffice it to say, I was very prepared when COVID arrived in 2020, at least for what the anti-vaccine movement was going to do. I got some things very wrong, which I'll tell you about. And then I worked at Bellevue Hospital throughout the pandemic. You here in New York City, we only had it really bad in April and May of 2020. And I always describe my experience correctly by saying, I don't think that I did a lot. Like, I don't think that there's anyone out there who can say, you know, Dr. Howard saved my life in April of 2020. No, but I saw a lot. I saw what this virus could do when it was allowed to spread unchecked. And I've read so many things about the pandemic where I think to myself, no one who saw what I saw would say that. For example, that COVID was harmless for young people or that death was the only bad outcome or that we could have just contained it somehow if only we had done nothing to stop it. anyways, so I didn't really write anything about COVID in 2020. But when vaccines started coming out in 2021, I noticed that all of the same myths that Kelly Brogan and all of the other anti-vaccine doctors had been repeating about HPV or measles, for example, were being repurposed with COVID. The main difference was it wasn't just quacks. So for example, Kelly Brogan was a pariah in the medical community, kind of like Andrew Wakefield, for example. was going to mention it in a second, but carry on. Yeah. Yeah. But mainstream doctors started repeating her ideas with regards to COVID. I don't think that they knew that they were doing this, but speaking about the benefits of natural immunity, this sort of thing. But these doctors were again, not quacks, they were at Harvard, they were at Stanford, they were at Johns Hopkins, they were at University of California, San Francisco, top medical schools. And those are all the doctors who are leading the charge here, who are currently in power in the United States, the head of the NIH, the head, the National Institutes of Health, the head of our Food and Drug Administration and his sort of right-hand guy, or the new head of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes vaccine recommendations. And the title of my first week, We Want Them Infected, is to be taken very literally. That comes from a quote by Dr. Paul Alexander, who's actually kind of a bit player, but uh who was a epidemiologist in Trump administration 1.0, who said that uh on July 4th, 2020, before anyone was vaccinated. And this was this belief, which was also very influential in the UK with names like Sunitra Gupta, for example, if that rings a bell to you. um that the best way to get rid of the virus was to spread the virus. That if we just kind of mass infected everyone under age 70, for example, that that would create herd immunity and it would end the pandemic in three to six months. And this was obviously based on a lot of kind of flawed assumptions that one infection led to permanent immunity that you could completely create this barrier between first of all that people could be dichotomized into vulnerable or not vulnerable. It's like you're pregnant or you're not. Uh, and that those two groups could be just be totally and instantaneously walled off from each other for months at a time. And then after three to six months, you could reopen everything and everything would be just fine. Maybe some young people like you guys and maybe a little bit myself, you know, we wouldn't, we wouldn't, might have the sniffles for a few days, but then then everything would be totally fine. And I noticed that, you know, especially once vaccines came out, there was just this deluge of anti-vaccine disinformation. And I was so prepared to recognize it and to call it out. And then the second book, Everyone Else is Lying to You, is about how these guys just weaponize doubt. They spread mistrust. They spread anger. They spread rage to Elevate Kennedy into power. I mean who is like Kelly Brogan as I think you guys know just this ultra kind of quack and germ theory denier Where he is taking a wrecking ball to everything and it's just the second book is a book of defeat It's it's how it's how? Medicine lost and how we failed to stand up for ourselves and how we failed to police ourselves So it's a very depressing book. Both books are very depressing in ways that I'm not in real life, I hope. Good. thing which you pointed out at the very start is very important. feel a lot of people kind of think of anti-vaccine phenomenon as a very recent one, but you pointed out how you were doing this in 2010. And I can tell you from my own experience as a child that there were... So I grew up in New Zealand. New Zealand is one of the few countries where you do not need any vaccine requirements as a child to go to school or anything like that. I feel in the United States you have them, in India you do, and so on, so forth. So there was this whole thing around that back then when I was a child growing up in New Zealand as well. So anti-vaccine movements are not a new phenomenon. And I think it was very good that you sort of pointed that out. And I guess, sorry. even say that they go back to the dawn of vaccines. So if you read some anti-vaccine literature from 1700s or the 1800s, it exists and it's the exact same thing. It's this idea that you're injecting impurities into your body, that you're depriving your immune system of something natural. The idea that Doctors and policemen are just grabbing people off the street and forcing them to be vaccinated, for example. None of it's new. It all dates back, I would say even precedes Edward Jenner, who came up with the first vaccine in 1790. He got this myth, or this idea, myth, that's a, strike that word. He got this idea, as you probably know, from English farmers. And so the very first person I am, of aware of who vaccinated someone was this English farmer by the name of Benjamin Jesty who vaccinated his children in like 1760 or 70 something like that. And then a small and he was reviled. The townspeople thought he was doing something horrible, but then a smallpox epidemic ripped through and his children survived and a lot didn't. So everything we're talking about is 200 years old, at least. It's yeah, it's absolutely what do you think that there was a little bit of a lull and you think Andrew Wakefield and you mentioned it briefly kind of like that was a real resurgence. I mean, we all learn about you know, we all learn about that. I'm sure you in America as well. It was absolutely wild. Now, Andrew Wakefield is definitely the father of the anti-vaccine movement, that's for sure. I mean, there was an anti-vaccine movement here in the United States before him, for sure. uh In the 1980s, there was a movie called Vaccine Roulette, which claimed that the pertussis vaccine uh caused regression and this sort of thing. But certainly Andrew Wakefield is... Not exactly patient zero then, but I guess, you know, the, the founding father of the modern anti-vaccine movement. And he's taking victory laps today. He is celebrating everything that Kennedy is doing and saying, finally, I'm being vindicated. My ideas are right. And again, that all happened thanks to these famous doctors from Stanford, Harvard, UCSF, and Johns Hopkins, who I should add, maybe with one exception, didn't treat COVID patients, they spent the entire pandemic doing what I am doing now, staring into a camera, podcasting. the one core difference is while I talked about what I did, right? I talked a little bit about my experience seeing patients at Bellevue hospital. They talked about what they would do. So they said things like, I would open schools. I would protect the vulnerable. And they treated these hypothetical accomplishments as genuine accomplishments. And they were treated that way, um as if merely saying, I would open schools, I would do this or that, was equivalent to actually doing that. But we're seeing now that they're in power, they can't even run a meeting without embarrassing themselves. The first meeting of the American Committee, our Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, led by Dr. Martin Kuhldorf of Stanford and one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which formalized this idea of uh herd immunity via natural immunity. He couldn't even run this meeting. They didn't know what they were voting on. They took contradictory votes and ultimately decided to just table a lot of votes. So we're seeing what happens when doctors who got famous based on hypothetical imaginary accomplishments, which were extremely impressive by the way, are keeping power in the real world. And it's not pretty. Just absolutely. So I'm gonna have, I'm not sure I think it's a controversial question, but these are like smart people. Of course they're smart people. Why? Why are they spouting this misinformation? It's not one or two of them, there's lots of them. And it seems to be a real kind of, you know, like, large-ish group. What is kind of, what is making them have these, you know, controversial opinions? Well, not so controversial, maybe just the opposing opinions. So that's a tough question. I'm not a mind reader and I've never spoken to any of these doctors myself except for Kelly Brogan. So everything I'm gonna say is gonna be a little bit speculation. I think a lot of these people, first of all, just to repeat, it matters that they never saw what COVID could do. So they experienced the pandemic, the way I experienced, deep sea documentaries, know, what lies a mile beneath the ocean, you know, I've seen it on TV, but that's it. So I think that they all vastly underestimated COVID in the spring of 2020. So for example, the head of the NIH, your National Institutes of Health, Dr. J. Bhattacharya predicted that COVID would kill 20 to 40,000 Americans, that it had one-tenth of the mortality rate of the flu, for example. He was saying that Sweden and New York City had herd immunity in July of 2020. uh Dr. Martin Kuhldorf of Harvard also said that Sweden had almost achieved herd immunity in April and May of 2020. uh So I think they genuinely just underestimated COVID at the start of the pandemic, which a lot of people did. For example, vaccine hero in the United States, Dr. Paul Offit, also underestimated COVID in March 2020, and by April 2020 was admitting that saying, I got this wrong. So I think that they had trouble admitting error. And a matter of fact, they will still say that they were right that their pandemic vision has been vindicated largely just by ignoring their 2020 predictions. So I think that's one thing. I think that they had a lot of sort of libertarian leanings. in that they just didn't want the government placing these restrictions on people. And they felt that this was just an improper role of the government to close down schools and to close down churches, this sort of thing. Of course, it's not like they would have operated normally, but if not for the government, and we don't have to wonder that question, when they helped run the show in Florida during the Delta wave in August, 2021, the virus. closed schools because there were so many sick teachers and so many sick students. But I think that there was a lot of political leanings as well. And then some of them monetized their social media content or their sub stacks, for example. So there was a financial incentive for them to produce the content that got a lot of likes and clicks and shares. They were rewarded with Fox News interviews. They were rewarded with Wall Street Journal editorials. So they became media celebrities. And I think that that had an impact on them via something called audience capture, which is just this idea. And everyone is vulnerable to this, but that if I post something on social media and it gets a thousand likes and retweets, and, you're so wonderful, Dr. Howard. uh that I might be prone to post more of that content. And if you looked at the social media feeds of these guys in 2023 and 2024, you know, actually anytime, and they had eliminated anyone who might contradict them, but it was just full of this sort of, you know, vile revenge fantasies. know, these people need to be in jail. We need to lock them up. You know, we never need to lock down ever again. was the greatest catastrophe in the history of the world. So I think for some of them, if you had told them in 2020 that you, know, five years from now, you are going to be standing next to RFK juniors. He lies about the measles vaccine. They would have probably reacted with horror, but you can sort of see how step by step, little by little, they went down this path until it was too late and they just couldn't admit air at this point. It'd be like George Bush saying, you know what? The Iraq war was wrong. Oops, my bad. know, people just can't do that. if you make a mistake, you have to own up to it immediately because if you double and triple and quadruple down, you know, then it's kind of too late. People are afraid of uh losing face. at that point, are you then just believing it, if you know what I mean? if you start off with the skepticism and then you've gone down this path again and again, at that point, do they believe this dance or do they know that they're wrong and are just sort of grifting? I mean, it's again, it's like mind reading, right? You do not know what's in each individual person's mind. I I think they actually believe that, you lockdowns were these horrible catastrophes and that the virus could have been handled better. I mean, everyone thinks the virus could, no one thinks we did a good job. Everyone thinks the virus could have been handled better. um I do think they kind of largely believed that they came to believe that they were more powerful than the virus and that had they been in charge, schools could have opened, businesses could have opened, vulnerable people would have been protected. I think they actually came to believe that about themselves, which is why they were willing to take these very high positions despite having no experience. Like if someone offered me the job of the head of the NIH or the head of the FDA, I would say I have zero qualifications to run these massive industries, but they were willing to do that. Where again, They are proving themselves to be totally incompetent managers. If you read what employees of those institutions are saying, they are loathed and they are treated as jokes. So I think they did come to believe that they kind of had figured out COVID and they had solved the problem. And if only they were in charge, everything would have been just fine. But that's not the case. These guys were also backed up by very powerful right-wing financial interests in various ways that a journalist by the name of Walker Bragman has done a wonderful job of uncovering. For example, the Great Barrington Declaration. I assume you guys have heard of this because it was relatively influential in the UK as well, but just I'll give a very quick introduction. This was a one-page online petition basically, which was written in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on October 4th, 2020 by uh names I've already mentioned, Dr. J. Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kuhldorf, and from the UK at Oxford, Sunitra Gupta, an epidemiologist. Essentially, it formalized this plan of herd immunity via mass immunity. They claimed, if you actually read it, that it would end the pandemic in three to six months. When they talk about the Great Barrington Declaration today, there's a lot of revisionist history. They will say, ah, we just wanted poor kids in schools. We just didn't think that toddlers should wear masks. We were just so concerned about education and small business owners, for example. But if you actually read it, it's all about herd immunity via natural immunity. But anyways, This was organized by a man by the name of Jeffrey Tucker who at the time was running Head of something called AIR, which I think I think stands for American Enterprise Economic Research Forum something like that But one of these kind of right-wing think tanks and he is a pro tobacco advocate He is an overt child labor advocate. He wrote articles in 2016 called let the kids work which is exactly what it sounds like. It sounds like I'm making something up. And he remains proud of that. So there were a lot of of business interests involved in this as well, who didn't want anything closed down for lockdowns. And of course, a lot of right-wing MAGA politicians. So it was this complete and unfortunate blending of medicine and politics and medicine and business. And that's what I write about in the second. Now, I wanted to ask this, we're talking about it from the doctor's side at the moment or from doctors, politicians, and from the side of the speaker, the side of the idea sort of provider, but then there's an audience, right? There's a receptive audience to these ideas. There's a receptive audience to any of these for it to have worked. What was, what do you think were sort of the factors of that? So I can sort of give an example of like, for example, a reason for people not trusting the government or not trusting sort of the lion coming out of politicians for various reasons for mistrust. Famously, I guess in Pakistan, um in the pursuit of catching Osama bin Laden, people were given false vaccinations, I'm pretty sure, or false blood tests or something like that, which heavily affected their vaccine uptake rate in Pakistan. Or is, sort of these factors also at play here in the US? Sure, I mean, they had to have a ripe audience uh in order to make their message stick. So my job here is not to defend everything that modern medicine does and say that we are perfect and blameless. There have been horror shows here in the United States. You know, the most famous of course, being the Tuskegee experiments, which just ended, I think in the 1970s, where penicillin was held uh from black. men sharecroppers who had syphilis and it led to hundreds of deaths and the spread of the disease. I truly, you know, murder done under the name of medicine. uh There have been scandals involving pharmaceutical companies and, you know, doctors who take money from pharmaceutical companies, for example. So it's medicine is not perfect and we're not blameless. And of course, as the pandemic progressed, people made good faith errors I shouldn't want to say them errors, but as the virus changed and we learned about it, things that people said early on aged poorly and mistakes were made, right? We never had to close beaches, for examples, or hiking trails, or outdoor skating parks, for example. And then people like Kelly Brogan, who I mentioned before, and Kennedy had really laid the groundwork for these guys to just... take advantage of the mistrust that was already there. And that's what they did. They repeatedly said, you know, all public health officials are lying to you. They just want to close down society. They're doing, they're only doing these mitigations because they want to punish Trump. And they were not uh shy about this. uh Dr. Vinay Prasad, for example, who is now uh the number two guy probably at the FDA, you know, made podcasts called Stop Trusting Public Health. So it was not, this was not some message that was kind of simmering beneath the surface. They actively encouraged mistrust and doubt and it worked. And a lot of the rage about COVID mitigations, which they manufactured is now being used as a pretense to destroy the CDC, to destroy the FDA. that is the idea that the people who unleashed COVID on us deserve to be punished. They also blame Fauci and Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH, for creating the virus. So they kind of took these very two paradoxical purposes of, you guys unleashed this horrible, terrible virus on us, and you also tried to contain it. So, but it was all just about spreading doubt. regretting mistrust and they were extremely effective in that unfortunate. it's just a full weaponizing doubt, isn't it, when people are scared. But it seems like to me, it's kind of three main kind of reasons here. I mean, the first thing to say is like, as a good scientist, maybe it's the same as a good doctor to a certain extent is when you realize you're wrong, you say you're wrong and then you move on. And that's how, you know, we have experiments and research and, you know, how we kind of like our knowledge can't always be right, but we have to admit it, which you've kind of saying like. that a lot of people are very happy to do, other people less happy to do, they double, triple down. The second thing seems to be that science has been politicised, which seems to be another really big issue. And then third, even when scientists go head to head, they've had scenarios in their head, well, I would have done this, but you can't prove that that would have actually worked. So this is kind of like all these problems are things that maybe aren't provable. And maybe the three of them all combined is kind of what seems to have been caused. absolute kind of like chaos within like miscommunication, especially on the vaccines and stuff. Do think that's fair to say? I think that's a lot of these people. to repeat specifically in Florida during the Delta wave where they advised the governor of Ron DeSantis and August 2021 The Delta wave just destroyed the state. It closed schools, it decimated nursing homes. Young people weren't spared. I think around 30 children died in Florida during the Delta wave and 70 children or so were going to the hospital every single day. So they do have a real world track record, one of failure. They promised that they would be able to achieve herd immunity in three to six months. And obviously we don't have herd immunity to COVID today. And they also just botched basic facts all the time. All the time. Perhaps the simplest example is that they would say things like that the flu is deadlier for children than COVID. Okay. And they made these statements at a time when COVID had killed around thousand American children and during that same time period, fewer than 20. had died of the flu. So mitigation measures that dented COVID obliterated the flu. Apparently there's a flu strain which was wiped off the face of the planet. But if you listen to their statements from 2020 and 2021, they would say the flu was uh a more dangerous virus. So just blatant, absurd disinformation. That's what I discussed actually in both books, but primarily we want them infected. Just botching basic facts or treating vaccine side effects as a fate worse than death. For example, as I imagine most people know, the mRNA vaccines, especially when they were initially given and given two doses six weeks apart or so, can cause myocarditis, heart inflammation, primarily in males age 12 to 25 or so. It's rare, probably about one in 10,000 people. It doesn't even seem to be happening today. 99 % of the cases are mild. I don't want to minimize it, but most of the... The young man affected spent a couple days in the hospital and left feeling fine. But they treated this side effect as a fate worse than death. So when talking about death from COVID, they would say, for young people at least, you know, it's rare, this sort of thing. But when talking about this vaccine, myocarditis, it was just this catastrophe of epic proportions. And we are seeing the real world consequences of this now with our FDA's attempts to limit the COVID vaccine for even pregnant women uh based on the side effect of vaccine myocarditis. Or they weaponized uh medical research, for example. When they didn't want something to be true, they would say, You know, you need to study this in a randomized double blind placebo controlled trial. So they would say that about all mitigation measures, uh, you know, which is a ridiculous sort of thing to say that everything can be studied in a randomized controlled trial and you shouldn't do it until it is actually proven itself in a randomized controlled trial. and now that they're in power, they're not doing any randomized controlled trials. That's for sure. They're cutting off funding for them. So they had so many techniques to sort of spread out. But the ground had been laid by all the people who I had been studying and writing about from 2010 to 2020. So just to be clear, they did not do a randomized double-blind control trial about Tylenol and autism. Okay. I was just wondering where they got that one from. Sorry. And so now that they're in power, they are beginning to approve unproven treatments for autism, for example. So the FDA is going to approve leukovorin, which is basically folate, for autism. They're changing the label. And the head of our FDA, Dr. Marty McCary, says he is doing this based on, quote, incredible stories from doctors. So when he wants something to be true, he will say, incredible stories suffice. when he doesn't want something to be true, like he does not want the COVID vaccine to be beneficial for young people, he will say, we have to start from scratch. We have to start totally over and do new randomized controlled trials. And let me be clear, I'm not against randomized controlled trials. A matter of fact, uh aside from working at Bellevue throughout the pandemic, the thing that I'm most proud about is that I was in a randomized controlled trial. So I was a... guinea pig, I volunteered to be part of the AstraZeneca randomized controlled trial. So I think I have done more to advance actual randomized controlled trials than any of the doctors I write about it. It was a very small contribution, but a real one. And you're of touching now into like medical ethics almost that you can't I mean so from what you're saying and I've not read into a lot about what's that's been said there for what you're saying they're not using actual kind of research and saying like yes there was a p-value of you know below 0.5 or you know confidence intervals they're just saying I've heard some really good stories so we're gonna do it but the same doesn't work. Does that mean it needs to be brought more into medical education? or how can we better help generations to come with that? That's a good question. think, um I don't know how you can teach people to behave well. I don't know if you can kind of teach good behavior. I do think one thing that needs to be done is medicine needs to do a better job of kind of policing our own. I've already alluded to that, but a lot of doctors reacted to these guys absurd and obviously false statements, that we had heard immunity in May of 2021, or that one COVID infection led to decades of immunity, something that was obviously unknowable when the virus was brand new. I think we need to do a better job of pushing back against that. I think there's this sense that it's inappropriate to really contradict You know, our peers in public, for example, you the number of times other doctors told me, oh, your tone isn't nice. You're not being friendly. You know, that was a lot of the sort of feedback that I got without ever trying to engage in any of the content, for example. And I think a lot of people have woken up, even though it's now too late. For example, here in the United States, we're basically kind of seeing a public health secession. where the blue states, the democratic states, California, New York, Massachusetts are gonna be forming their own vaccine policy independent of the national government, independent of the CDC. And then states like Florida are gonna do their own kind of crazy things. So I think in a lot of medical societies like the American Academy of Pediatrics or American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists are forming their own independent vaccine recommendations. And I approve of all of this. think this is great. I just think it's two or three years too late. So I know because you've kind of got some very strong opinions and also I know you're obviously a doctor and you obviously very publicly speak out about this. Have you experienced much kind of pushback or how do you and also how do you kind of balance the two together? Yeah, so I have experienced a decent amount of pushback from the doctors who I write about. um A lot of them ignored me, which is their total right. Like no one owes me a response. um Of the responses that I got from them, it was literally just calling me names. Anane, unhinged, a schmuck, a grifter. The fact that I wrote a book. was used as evidence that the book was no good because I was, you know, it's for sale, which of course invalidates every single book ever in existence. um But I think that I'm not, they stopped pushing back because much of my work, and this kind of links to the neurology video book, much of my writing on the pandemic is just collections of quotes. It's collections of... know, NIH Director J. Bhattacharya saying we had herd immunity in April 2021, or the only problem with COVID is that people are afraid of it. So, and they can't argue against their own words. And so I think that they have come to realize that the more they push back on me, the more attention it gets. So, and they don't want that. They do not want people to be reminded of what they said in 2020 and 2021 because they want to maintain this fiction that again they just cared about poor children in schools. So I haven't received any meaningful pushback except maybe sort of stylistically that I kind of go a little bit overboard you know that I could have the book could have been books could have been half the length okay I hear that criticism but but in terms of the content I've gotten zero pushback and I will go further and say I never will. Because if I present this quote, unless I'm making it up or just totally botch it, no one can argue with me. And no one has and no one will. But I want to follow up with a couple of questions on those points. the first one is, so you said again, it's kind of like collections. So you're presenting people their quotes back to them. Are you presenting it in the books, for example, with data or something to back it up being like you said this at a time when this was happening kind Is that the whole thesis of each these books? Correct. Correct. mean, so it's interesting because I'm very explicit that that is the format of both books. So what I say is that there's this mirror world, there's this pandemic mirror world, which had nothing to do with what was actually happening in hospitals, what was actually happening in schools. This is the pandemic world as portrayed on Fox News, as portrayed in the Wall Street Journal, as portrayed in the Twitter feeds of these doctors. So here's a good example. So on August 1st, 2021, Dr. J. Bhattacharya told the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, quote, we have protected the vulnerable by vaccinating the older population. Immediately after that, like on August 2nd and 3rd, 2021, the newspaper headlines were just blaring out about overwhelmed hospitals in Florida, uh full of quotes of pediatricians describing how sick the Delta variant was making some children. News reports of children who were dying were trickling in as well. So yes, so that's exactly what I do. I present these quotes, which if you read them, you would think, great, the pandemic is over. We have nothing to worry about. And this started, by the way, in March and April. of 2020. So it started the moment the virus hit our shores and it never stopped, just combined with headlines from the real world. So there was these really these kind of two pandemics, but that's exactly what I try to do. You know, just these quotes, these fantasy quotes, and then then the real world. And if you listen to these doctors, like if I had been in a coma and just sort of woke up and watched some of their videos. I mean, they're very persuasive and they have these stellar credentials, know, professor of medicine at Stanford and this sort of Johns Hopkins. And then you just listen to them and they say, you COVID doesn't hurt anyone under age 60. It's crazy to lock down all of society just, you know, uh to protect people who have zero risk from the virus, you know, as if. There was no risk of passing it on as well. I they claim that kids didn't spread COVID. So it's just this fantasy world and then the real world. And the two never met. And now the fantasy world is in charge. The second question which I have was sort of, I guess a bit more of a hypothetical, but it comes to the sort of aspect of countering such narratives. So you said that nobody's actually, oh that people would just call you names, but don't actually rebuttal what you said. But if you were to rebuttal what you've said, are there any arguments which people should think about, should know about? I know sometimes it's not purely anti-vaxxers, purely pro-vaxxers. Like for example, some people might allergic to certain vaccines and therefore they shouldn't take certain ones for those reasons or might have bad reactions or know someone in the family who did for example so they come with that so are there any sort of yeah sort of rebuttals which you feel could be made and how do you tackle those? think actually the strongest criticisms of my work have actually come from the other side, maybe the more COVID conscious side, uh in that, for example, I never advocated for mask mandates. I never advocated for ventilation in schools. mean, and there's a lot of reasons why I do that. uh I'm a doctor. I'm not a sort of public, I'm not an advocate. That's not my role. That's not how I perceive my role in things. I don't want to get out over my skis. I don't really know if ventilating every classroom in America is possible and how well that would work. But I think that criticisms kind of from the other side have had a little bit more merit. And I think what happened is this, a lot of positions got attributed to me that I never took. And it's taken me a while to sort of figure out why. For example, these guys said that they would have opened schools. And since I'm being in opposition to them, It puts me in the position of being, yay, pro, you know, it was great that schools were closed. We should have closed them more. You know, but that's not my position. My position is that school closures weren't a choice. And this is evidenced by the fact, again, we don't have to speak about things in the conditional tense. We can just read news headlines of schools closing throughout the country when the virus overwhelmed cities. or even when schools were officially open, that children attendance was 50 % and they were being taught by random parents, for example. So um if there was an educator who came on and said, schools in New York City could have opened four or five months earlier than they did, they were closed for too long, we could have made things safer. You know, I'm open to that argument, but it actually doesn't really contradict anything that I've said. I think what I'm talking about is on a much more basic level. And no, I'm not wrong about that. We didn't have herd immunity in May of 2021. The flu did not kill more children than COVID. Vaccine side effects are not as bad as death. I've offered any of the doctors I talk about to... to debate me on these issues. Not that I'm a big fan of public debates because those often reward the best speaker and who's more charismatic, but none have tried. In addition to my books, I've written about 250 articles on science-based medicine. So anyone can read those for free. Not a single person has attempted a good faith rebuttal of those. And again, I've come to realize they never will. They just won't. Sounds like a proper head-to-head using facts would work out, as you've just said, if you've seen it time and time again, it's always the good speakers and there's a way that you can dodge questions to make it your own. So it's very, very difficult. So I tend to ask a question now, which is like, usually I ask if you could do any research in the world, but I'm going to change it up a little bit if that's okay. So I want to pretend this isn't going to happen. So it's all very pretend. We faced another pandemic tomorrow. What do you think is the biggest lesson you'd want policymakers, doctors, even politicians to remember from COVID-19 and that we could do or that we could have done? Yeah, no, if we face another pandemic here in the US, we're doomed. mean, we would have bodies in the streets, uh which actually did happen outside of a couple of New York City hospitals more or less. We would not repeat Warp Speed, which was the greatest success of Trump's first presidency, developing an imperfect but amazing vaccine in 10 months. So we're doomed. I think the biggest lesson for future public health leaders and future uh leaders in medicine is we need to not tolerate misinformation and disinformation. And again, it can be hard to figure out what that is. And I'm not saying we should shut down people who think differently. For example, the Nobel Prize winning scientists who developed the mRNA vaccines, I was Watch her name, Karina Kariko, for example. But apparently she was kind of laughed at and mocked and dismissed with her research into mRNA vaccines, or mRNA, until she won the Nobel Prize and saved billions of lives around the world. So it's not an easy thing oh to do. But again, when doctors say these sorts of absurd and obviously wrong things, I think we need to stand up against them in a unified way. The way that we are doing now, Again, two or three years too late. And this was something that our public health leaders um did not do a good job of. kind of treated uh refuting misinformation as something kind of beneath them. they were clueless to its power. They were totally caught off guard by this. And I'll just give you one quick example. I keep referencing Florida's Delta wave. I talked to a public health leader there ah who said that as COVID was killing children and hospitalized children, a myth took hold that it wasn't COVID that was hospitalizing children. It was actually RSV. And he said that this myth kind of spread like wildfire throughout Florida's politicians at the time. And he said, I have no idea where that came from. And I said, I know exactly where that came from. And I wrote an article about it at the time in August, 2021, there was a single doctor on Twitter who has now joined the FDA as well, who just kind of looked at random spikes and waves and RSV and COVID waves and said, I wonder, I'm just asking questions. I wonder if doctors are actually misdiagnosing their patients. And this sort of blew up on Twitter and it was seen by tens of thousands or million people who knows. And it became, as I later learned, a myth that affected the things on the ground in Florida because they were claiming it wasn't COVID that was killing children. It was RSV instead. So I think people need to be more attuned to what is happening. Whereas, you know, previously, you know, a doctor saying, you know, boy, I need to pay attention to social media would almost kind of be, I don't know, shameful. You know, like this is beneath the dignity of our profession. But but it's not. and it impacts things in the real world. You've just made actually a really fantastic point there. It's like you've just given two examples, somebody who was a Nobel Prize winner, but within her research, she was controversial within the science community. Then there's people who are bringing opinions out into the public, into the wider audience that maybe aren't correct. And that's maybe when it becomes more misinformation, when it doesn't have the science to back it up. And that's when it becomes a problem. um Because the public do put trust in scientists and doctors. But if you get a few kind of bad apples that spread this misinformation, it can become really scary. And do they trust us anymore with what we're doing? And how do we share our knowledge in a way that's accessible and right almost? So yeah, really very good. Very good point. circle back. I I mentioned this gentleman from UCSF, Steve Hauser, who's helped come up with treatments for MS. He really... convinced people and did the research showing that MS was an immune mediated disease that B cells matter and later that B cell depleting therapies have revolutionized the field of MS. So we absolutely need people to be able to challenge dogma and think outside the box, but they have to bring data and There's something called the Galileo Gambit, which maybe you have heard of, but where it's sort of pseudoscientists will say, they laughed at Galileo, they laughed at me, therefore I'm like Galileo, but it doesn't quite work that way. And again, I think a lot of times the doctors who I write about weren't saying things that were just kind of controversial or outside the box. They were saying things that were wrong and they were absurdly wrong and they were obviously wrong and it was dangerously wrong. uh You know, just look at our current FDA head, Dr. Marty McCary, writing articles, The Power of Natural Immunity or We'll Have Heard Immunity by April. He wrote that article in February 2021, the whole time saying, Everyone else is lying to you. That is public health leaders who are lying to you that we're not going to have herd immunity. So we need to have a big tolerance for people who think outside the box and actually bring data and much, much, much less tolerance for people who I think are bad faith actors who are out to score political points to elevate their personal profile. and you know, I have done a lot of damage. Has anyone ever questioned him on one of him saying that in 2021? And has he ever like had a kind of come back almost to it? You know, I've never seen him go on a spot where someone might ask him those hard questions, unfortunately. ah These guys have done a very good job of secluding themselves in a bubble where they only speak to each other and congratulate themselves on how right they were and they feel sorry for themselves for having been sort of oppressed and censored and victimized. They consider themselves the pandemic's chief victims a couple of times. He has done, since becoming FDA director, he has done news interviews with journalists who have held his feet to the fire about why he is trying to restrict COVID vaccines in pregnancy, for example, and he's floundered. The news reporter's shaking their head when it's all done. But until then, he has done a very good job of avoiding anyone who might ask him hard questions, which is why, for example, None of these guys will ever come on my podcast, even though they say they want debate and discussion because they know that I have a massive video library of just crazy things they said. And I would play them that video and say, look, you said we had herd immunity in May, 2021. The Delta variant arrived three months later. Uh, and then the Omicron variant arrived six months after that. Were you right? And if you were wrong, Where did you admit it and what were the consequences? And so uh they'll never answer those questions. And they're even in the process of vastly rewriting the history of the pandemic, denying their own words, just denying things what they said. It's very 1984-ish. uh Just, think out of the interest of time as well, there's just one more question from me and I'm sure Beth has multiple more. I also have multiple more, but just one more from me. And that is, all these things you said about calling people out on things which are probably absurdly wrong or holding their feet to the fire. Someone like you is probably really well equipped to do that, but someone like me, for example, might not have that same level of knowledge, know-how. It might sound wrong, then like Beth said, a doctor saying this is, how, what advice would you have for somebody like that who to sort of challenge, but also then not just come in with that bias that yes, they're definitely wrong because for example, then I could challenge what you say and then not necessarily turn. yeah, based on the data. So yeah. Do you have something for someone like me? Yes. Yes. So my advice would be to do what I did in 2010, which is to pick something that's kind of very narrow and that you're genuinely fascinated in. I just became fascinated by the anti-vaccine movement. was pure luck or misfortune that it became super relevant with a pandemic. I obviously didn't predict that, but there's dozens of other medical misinformation that I don't push back on. know, abortion, drug policy. cancer quack treatments, for example, just because I don't really feel I have the expertise and other doctors do it much better. So I would advise people who are interested in this to pick one thing that they care passionately about and really sort of dedicate themselves to that. So certainly when I say that the medical community has to do a better job of pushing back on disinformation, it's not just with regards to vaccines, it's with regards to everything. So, you know, people can choose whatever field or whatever topic interests them, but I think that they should really dedicate themselves to whatever they feel that they're passionate about. I just happened to pick vaccines and infectious diseases and viruses, and it happened to become super duper relevant. I mean, had no intention of writing any book on the pandemic until 2021, 2022, when I just started to notice again. Everything that I had been studying for the past 10 years was repeating itself, but not out of the mouths of quacks, but out of the mouths of mainstream doctors writing in mainstream publications. And it was just, it was deja vu all over again for me, unfortunately. Yeah, it's I was speaking to a friend recently about he dedicates himself to like a kind of he's from Venezuela and he dedicates himself to the political cause going on there and all the troubles that they're having. And he says like, you know, he says like, can't have lots of fingers in all pies. And I was like, yes, you'd put your whole fist into a pie. And that's how you mess things up. And that's how you kind of get which is basically what you're saying. So I'm just putting into an analogy that You want to focus all your energy on that single pie. then, know, you can basically then you're kind of really disrupting when things kind of go particularly wrong. And I've got a couple more very brief questions, if that's OK, just kind of ones to end off with. I think quite a good one might be is what do you think is the actual the biggest force driving the anti-science kind of miscommunication movement? Because we've already said the two sides are just not going to hash it out and talk about it. That seems like the plausible way to do it, but it's just not happening. So what's the biggest driving force that might need to be targeted, do you think? distrust. So medicine has to do a lot of work to win back trust, again, to try to fix things that we have done genuinely wrong. mean, some of the opioid scandals here in the United States, for example. So we need to look our... And I think we've done some work there, but... but to fix the problems that are real, but also to push back on the problems that have been fabricated, this manufactured rage and doubt. But it's gonna be a decades long project and because human psychology doesn't change. So it's gonna be a constant process. And things are probably gonna get a lot worse before they get better. And this might be one of those things that the United States never recovers from. There are historical precedents for this. The most famous being Leshenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin, where this kind of quack scientist thought he knew how to breed crops, for example. using Marxist principles and had all the geneticists shipped off to Siberia and executed because genes were associated with Nazis, for example. And the Soviet Union, know, millions died of famine and they never really recovered. And, we may be facing a moment like that, unfortunately, hopefully not quite that dramatic here in the United States, but scientists are leaving. uh mRNA research is being canceled. Vaccine research is being canceled. All sorts of research is being canceled. Words are being banned and it's a scary time to be alive. I don't have solutions to the problem. I'm just here to document how we got here. Yeah, and I think identifying the problem is one of the biggest things. there can be solutions, be start to thought about which distrust in the medical community is a big one. So, okay, that's what we need to work on, folks. Yeah. And again, I I think my own profession did a very poor job of holding bad actors to account, you know, which is something that's seen in every field. mean, bad cops protect, you know, you know, or get protected or, know, priests and sexual abuse. don't mean to liken it to those horrors, but I mean, just to sort of say that there's a precedent for professions kind of shielding their own and shielding themselves. And all of the doctors I write about, again, did a very good job of this, kind of weaponizing their victimhood. It was impossible to disagree with them without being accused of writing a hit piece or slurred or slanders. So any criticisms was met with this, ah you're attacking me, you're trying to silence me, you're trying to censor me. So we need to learn about these techniques. Again, none of which are new. This is what the tobacco industry did. This is what the fossil fuel industry did and is still doing. They would find sort of the one maverick expert out there. um So we need to learn about these techniques so that we can better face them and stop them. And I do think medical education should at least touch on this. Yeah, that's it. Awesome. I think on that uh we can end there. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for coming on. Really appreciated it. No, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Great questions. And I love how we talk about the neurology and tie this all into the brain and how people think, which is really actually all I'm interested in. Yeah, it's been absolutely fascinating and it's so interesting to hear kind of the climate in the US, you know, maybe don't hear about it in the UK and to get different perspectives on it. you see some parallels as well throughout, like so far away yet some things you see, I remember seeing a lot of this in New Zealand as well at the time and even today. So yeah. Yeah. No, and I do touch on, don't mean to open up a whole new topic, but I do touch on the UK. mean, you know, the same forces were there, you know, with, with, know, Sumitra Gupta and Boris Johnson and, know, some of the letters that were written advising against mitigation measures in the fall of 2020. And so the same story played out in many different countries with the same forces, the same actors, the same right wing dark money. uh On that dark note uh of time, the links to English anti-vax movement. But we would love to have you back on in the future as well to talk more. um Maybe there's a third book coming out as well, hopefully a more positive one. uh The third book is gonna be about what's gonna happen in the next three and a half years and so it's not gonna be, but listen, I'd love to be back on and hopefully we'll be more positive and hopefully my personality is a little bit sort of more positive and upbeat than some of my writing, which is very, very dark and sad. And people find it hard to read without throwing against the wall, which is the nicest feedback I ever get. Well, the good thing about a podcast is you can't throw it against a wall, can you? uh Unless you're to get my laptop, I think I'd be in trouble for that. That's probably not what you want. But thank you so much for having me. I appreciate all the great questions. so much for coming and take care and take care, everybody. Thank you so much for listening till next time. Bye.