Talking Biotech Podcast 403
COVID19 Misinformation "We Want Them Infected" 
Guest: Dr. Jonathan Howard
Host: Dr. Kevin Folta

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Kevin Folta: [00:00:00] Hi everybody, and welcome to this week's Talking Biotech podcast by cbra. Now to those of us that pay attention to the intersection of science and society, the Covid 19 pandemic was a perfect slow motion train wreck. I described this in a piece for the Council on Agricultural Science and Technology as the tale of two infos describing how technology and misinformation collided in a very familiar fashion, which paralleled what happened with genetic engineering.

Only condensing what took 30 years there of divisive rhetoric and social strife into a couple months. Only enabled by the conduit of social media. From the beginning, the pandemic took on these wild political overtones, and the actual science took this unusual backseat to platitudes and pronouncements, pumped through willing social media channels and traditional media channels.

New celebrity experts spawned from irrelevant crank physicians as [00:01:00] well as established medical disinformation networks. So the Mercola's and all those folks were all over it. The most curious spotlight followed a number of trained physicians and scientists that espoused fringy and even risky positions that recorded by media networks and elevated these folks from fringe dissenting views to sturdy affirmations that reinforced the biases of 46% of Americans, even without empirical evidence to back them up.

Now the unfolding of this strange media medical political dance, it, it went on while tens of thousands of people were spreading an infectious disease and being hospitalized and dying from what may have had a very different trajectory as we just followed the science without all the noise. And all of the noise is very well documented in the new book We Want Them Infected by Dr.

Jonathan Howard and Dr. Howard. He's an associate professor of [00:02:00] psychiatry and neurology at NYU Langen Health and the Chief of Neurology at Bellevue Hospital. He also wrote the book that was the inspiration for a class that I started called Cognitive Errors and Diagnostic Mistakes, A Case-Based Guide to Critical Thinking in Medicine, as well as a number of.

Books on neurology and also as a contributor to science-based medicine. So welcome to the podcast, Dr. Howard. 

Jonathan Howard: Hey, thanks so much for having me. I'm also a gator. I grew up in Gainesville, so UF has got a big special 

Kevin Folta: place in my heart. Yeah, that's right. I remember we talked about that last time. I really appreciate that you, that you're able to join me.

And I should mention, he's also contributed to my class, which is on critical thinking in biotechnology and medicine. So I really, really I really appreciate that he's joining us here today. I guess the place to start out is, you know, where did you get the idea to really. That, that this was a necessary book to write.

Let's start there. 

Jonathan Howard: Yeah, so I have been interested in vaccines and the anti-vaccine movement for [00:03:00] about a decade or so after a doctor that I trained with became one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors. A woman by the name of Kelly Brogan, I haven't spoken to her in, in, in 10 years, but she kind of became.

Famous, she, she at least amongst anti-vaccine doctors and anti-vaccine circles. But she was platformed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop. And, and sort of got a, became got a little bit of a name for herself. And I became very interested in the anti-vaccine movement after seeing her kind of take a turn to the dark side after we were done training together here at N Y U and for the past decade, I, I.

I've dedicated myself to learning everything I could about it and refuting all of their arguments. And the second thing that I bring to this topic, I think, is that I, I had lived throughout New York City's Covid wave. Everyone knows what the situation was like three years ago here in New York City in the spring of 2020.

And it was like a bomb went off in, in our hospital and it was nothing but Covid for, for about two months. [00:04:00] And I, I saw more people die in, in those two months time than I had in the previous 20 years, basically my entire career. And as the pandemic progressed and vaccines became available I became aware of a movement led shockingly by doctors to minimize the harms of covid, especially for young people and, and children.

And to maximize. Fears about the vaccine. So the title of the book We Want Them Infected is to be Taken very literally. That quote comes from a man by the name of Dr. Paul Alexander, who was an epidemiologist in the Trump administration at the time. And it speaks to the purposeful movement to infect, unvaccinated young children and young adults with covid in the hopes that this would bring about herd immunity in three to six months, and the pandemic would be over.

Kevin Folta: And let's talk a little bit about the structure of the book, because this is what I really found attractive. It's the kind of book that you can [00:05:00] pick up, turn to any page, and start reading and, and get what's going on. It doesn't have to be a cohesive beginning to end read, and it's really nice in that way.

It's strong. It's essentially. And I don't want to, don't mean this in a bad way. It kind of writes itself that you were able to compile quotations, tweets news stories different little bits from people, images, all kinds of different media, and essentially strung them together with your words and kind of put, put it all together in one cohesive format, grouping them under different, Areas of, of what was happening during the pandemic.

And so when you do this, and this is kind of the important question to ask, is, you know, we, we see a lot of times where Dr. Fauci or Dr. Peter Hotez were little bits that they've said here and there are taken out of context to misrepresent what they said. And so how did you avoid doing that here so that this is a legitimate representation of what these folks are saying.

Jonathan Howard: Yeah, so much of the book [00:06:00] is just quotations by who Doctors who I call contrarian doctors. And these doctors were different than Dr. Kelly Brogan in that they. I think in a few important ways. Number one, before the pandemic, none of them had reputations for spreading quackery. That's number one.

Number two is they mixed good advice with bad advice, which I think that made them a little bit more dangerous. So Kelly Brogan doesn't even believe that germs caused disease, for example. And a lot of people know not to listen to. Quacks like her. In, in contrast, the doctors who I write about mixed good advice with bad advice, so they would tell people protect grandma.

We have to make sure we have to vaccinate grandma. But young kids and young adults, they should go out and get covid. They don't need the vaccine. The third major difference is that they were everywhere. This pandemic a lot of these sort of pre pandemic quack doctors saw their media footprint shrink over the course of the pandemic.

They were kicked off social media platforms. They [00:07:00] weren't interviewed by the Washington Post, by the Atlantic, by the Wall Street Journal, by Fox News. Whereas all of the doctors that I write about, Were ubiquitous media pre presences, and a lot of them became almost pandemic celebrities. And yeah, much of what I do is just simply quote them and I quote them extensively and accurately.

I, I try not to do what is called quote mining, which just means that you can just take a snippet of, of, of someone's quote and make them. Make it seem as if they, they believe absurd things. So I, I really try to let these doctors' words speak for themselves, and this includes when they say things that I agree with.

So nearly all of the doctors in the book I I think were anti-vaccine, are still are anti-vaccine for, for children, but a few weren't. And I'm gonna credit them for that for, for, for saying points of agreement. But I really just wanted to let their words. Speak for themselves and, and pages of the book are just quotes from doctors saying throughout [00:08:00] every stage of the pandemic, essentially saying that it's over.

So I just let their words speak for themselves. 

Kevin Folta: And really the next question is one that came up and it's important because as I read the book, I kind of felt like I lost track of this and had to relive it through your vision there. And could you give us a sense, and you did this a little bit already, give me a real sense of what was happening to healthcare workers, at least at Ground Zero in New York during the first wave of the pandemic.

Can you paint the picture of the backdrop that many people have forgotten about? 

Jonathan Howard: Yeah, so I worked throughout the pandemic here at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, which is located kind of in the center of it all, the center of Manhattan. Our emergency room was never particularly overwhelmed. Most of our patients were, came from other hospitals in the outer boroughs, Queens and Brooklyn for example.

And that was really ground zero hospitals like [00:09:00] Elmhurst, where just. They were just deloused with patients and, and, and many people who worked in those hospitals at the time described it like a war environment. I would describe my experience here at Bellevue as a little bit tamer than that, thank goodness a little bit more, more contained because most of our patients did, as I said, did not come from the emergency room, but they were transferred from these other hospitals, and it was a very strange time.

The entire hospital was covid and nothing but covid patients. There were two patients in rooms meant for one. There were pediatricians taking care of seniors. There were gynecologists taking care of men. There were doctors and nurses. Who traveled from all over the country to be here, and you had people like myself.

I'm a neurologist, I'm a psychiatrist. The main disease that I treat is multiple sclerosis. So what do I know about treating a brand new respiratory and vascular virus? You know, I didn't know a lot and. I saw, as I said, [00:10:00] I saw more people die, I think in the first two months of the pandemic that I had in, in my entire career.

And, and every doctor, every healthcare worker who works in in the hospital at that time will say the exact same thing. Every day in my hospital, the, the airway pager, summoning, you know, the, the airway team to, to a, to a room. It goes off maybe once a day, I, I suppose. But during covid it went off every five minutes.

Airway team room 1722, airway team room 15, 12, et cetera. And there were just sirens wailing throughout the city to look at Bellevue. From the outside it looked. Like, not a lot was going on, but that's true of a lot of buildings, jails, and schools as well. So it was it was a, it was a trying time.

It was also inspiring time. You know, we tried to protect older doctors. The city clapped for us. People sent us food and, and looking back on the whole thing, I, I, I don't think that I. Did a lot, to be totally honest with you. I'm not really sure that I made a difference in the life of my patients [00:11:00] other than the fact that they were alone without their family.

And I was as nice as I could be behind my masks and goggles. But I saw a lot. I witnessed what happened, and I think it's, that's one. Problematic aspect of the pandemic is that so much suffering and death took place behind closed doors. But on the other hand, a lot of it was obvious. There were giant refrigerated trucks behind my bo, behind my hospital to store all of the dead bodies, and, and none of this was a secret.

Everyone in New York City, even if they didn't see that with their own eyes, Knew, knew that was happening. But you're right, not only have we kind of forgotten those early days but there's a movement to actively say that it didn't happen. That essentially we all hallucinated the whole thing, which is just horrific, especially considering that a number of healthcare workers died.

They lost their lives trying to, trying to stop this virus and trying to trying to you know, 

Kevin Folta: keep people alive. And that's what I really wanted to start with. You know, really what, what was the backdrop for this happening? Because you started to see the cracks in [00:12:00] the discussion happening not far after this.

That even during these times of, of, of radical emergency care and, and, and lo, you know, they don't say lockdown, but where people were being told, you know, stay home. You started to see the folks coming out, like Iion and others saying, well, this is just the flu. And the estimates, well, it'll be gone in no time.

And not just the, you know, not just the platitudes by the president who said, this is a miracle, it'll go away, no time, whatever. But the actual scholars and others who were physicians who were saying, well, this is just nothing more than a flu. And so what were some of the examples of that kind of rhetoric, and when was it really starting to happen to cause the division that would soon manifest inside the whole population?

Jonathan Howard: So it started the. As soon as Covid hit our shores I, I, I think a lot of people underestimated covid at the beginning. It was this kind of unimaginable event. And, and I wanna make it clear that this book is not just a collection of quotations of [00:13:00] people who got it wrong at the beginning and, and quickly kind of realized their air.

Actually, I do have one such quote Dr. Paul Offit a World renowned vaccine expert. He, he did underestimate covid at the pa start of the pandemic saying something along the lines of, I think it will cause one 10th as many deaths as the flu. And he immediately realized his air and, and within a month said, oops, you know, if you're gonna make an ass of yourself, you might as well do it in front of a million people.

And, and I do share that quote because it's exactly how a scientist should react when they make a mistake as, as, as. We all will because we're, we're only human. But there was a, a very small number of very vocal doctors who I think really got us off on, on the wrong foot. And you bring up one Dr.

John YIs, who is a epidemiologist in biostatistician at Harvard University. He's not exactly a household name, but he's probably about as famous as a scientist can get. He won you know, has won hundreds of awards, written hundreds of papers as [00:14:00] this, this world famous guy by, seems like a very genuinely nice person.

And I quoted him favorably several times in my previous book on cognitive heirs and diagnostic mistakes. He was kind of a, a hero to, to people who valued evidence-based medicine. But starting as early as March, 2020, he, he wildly underestimated the pandemic saying essentially that 10,000 people would die.

He, he objects to, to being quoted on that, but he said it essentially he said that if we had devoted as many resources to stopping covid as we did to stop. If we, excuse me, we devoted as many resources to stopping the flu as we did to stopping Covid we could save tens of thousands of lives. He spoke about exaggerated case, spread, exaggerated case fatalities, and he worried very much about measures to control the virus.

Fearing that lockdowns would lead to civil war and, and societal strife and. The best example that I have of, of how much [00:15:00] he underestimated the virus is a quote from April 9th that he, he, he gave an interview with a, a Washington Post journalist, and on April 9th, he predicted that 40,000 Americans would die this season.

And by that time, about 20,000 Americans had already died and 2000 Americans were dying per day. And so essentially his. Prediction was gonna age very poorly in a very short amount of time unless Covid vanished. And indeed, that's what happened. Within eight days, his prediction of 40,000 deaths was OB obliterated.

And he responded by continuing to minimize. Covid he, he went on a talk show of far, far right wing Fox News host Mark Levin, and said The, the infection fatality rate was about one in a thousand. That one in a thousand people were gonna die of covid. By that point, 10,000 New Yorkers had already died, and if one in a [00:16:00] thousand died, that would require 10 million infections when in fact there's only 8.3 million people who live in New York City.

So he was calculating that about 120% of New York City had been infected by April, 2020. And in order to make his math work, he started spreading what I can later only describe as as conspiracy theories, which appear all the time today that people were dying with Covid, not of Covid, that it was just old people.

On their deathbed anyway, who were killed one or two days earlier than they otherwise would've died, that you can't trust death certificates or that doctors killed patients through premature intubations, and none of those are true. But rather than doing what Paul Offit did and say, oops, I was wrong.

That's the, that's the tack that he, that he decided to take, and I think it really profoundly influenced our pandemic response as evidenced by the fact that on my Twitter feed, it's just [00:17:00] ous with people saying some version of what he said 

Kevin Folta: in it is really just a very curious case here, because as you recog Is a really curious case here because as you noted, he is an extremely well-recognized scientist and somebody who I always thought did an outstanding job of breaking down things like meta-analyses and talking about other areas of statistics that really taught us a lot and it really made me wonder what is in it for somebody like him.

To dig in your heels once you've been shown to be wrong. I mean, cuz this is what we've seen over and over again, especially with the physicians that have been involved in making predictions about covid. 

Jonathan Howard: Yeah, so, so I don't know of all of the doctors who I've written about, I think the, the only one who I've met and probably will ever meet is Dr.

Kelly Brogan. But I, I think there is a lot of doctors out there who, who just wanna be a little different. This is why I call them contrarian doctors, that when everyone else is saying A, they're gonna say B. And when everyone else [00:18:00] was freaking out about covid and panicking, What got you attention was to say, everyone else is overreacting except for me.

And I, I I, I think that's it. And I, I, I think that they had a hard time just admitting error. I mean, doing what, what Paul Offit did. It can be very hard and rather than admit error. You know, he kind of threw frontline healthcare workers under the bus by saying quote, they were just going crazy, intubating people who did not have to be intubated.

And that led to and he claimed that, that that led to a lot of deaths. And I, I just think he had a hard time in admitting air that that's that's the best explanation that, that I can come up with. And like I said, I think a lot of the doctors who I write about just wanna be a little bit different for the sake of being different in that.

Let's say the vast majority of physicians felt children did not need to be vaccinated against Covid. These doctors would then say, I predict we of course we have to vaccinate [00:19:00] children against covid. It's killed about 2000 of them. How dare we let more children die preventable deaths And they would be right in this situation.

But I think that they just wanted to be a little bit different without kind of appearing. At Kelly Brogan level of Quacker, even saying that the virus is a complete hoax, for example, although some of these worlds are, are overlapping a little bit with the recent normalization of anti-vaccine super cranks, like R FK Jr.

It's really a disgrace. 

Kevin Folta: This misinformation stream and the personalities that were involved around it, they very soon found their way into the White House. And can you talk about some of the inroads of the different people who influenced the politics within the White House and the Trump administration when on one side he's got Anthony Fauci at at one side, but on the other side had a number of people who were really becoming influential.

Jonathan Howard: Yes. So there was a a group of doctors who met with [00:20:00] President Trump in August, 2020 in the Oval Office. These doctors ironically claimed to be silenced even though they had access to President Trump and became pandemic celebrities. This includes two signers of a document called the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for the purposeful mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated young Americans.

In the hopes that this would bring about herd immunity in three to six months. Jay Bot and Martin Korff as well as Joseph led Dapo, who I'm sure you know pretty well. Mm-hmm. The surgeon General, not personally, but the Surgeon General, the state of Florida, who has recently found fing data. To make the vaccine look more dangerous than the virus.

A pediatrician by the name of Cody Meisner, who I don't talk about a lot, and then Scott Atlas, who due to his Fox News appearances eventually became Trump's Coronavirus Czar. He was a neuroradiologist at Stanford University, had no relevant expertise in the subject but gained president Trump's [00:21:00] Confidence through his appearance on Fox News.

And he was in daily conversations with people like Jay Bot and John Ian all of whom wildly underestimated covid at the start of the pandemic. A matter of fact, Scott Atlas quoted Dr. Ian's in some of his White House meetings, same as just the flu, and it's gonna kill about 10,000 Americans and Scott Atlas openly celebrated rising cases.

He said that he wanted people out there mingling, and it was a good thing when cases were going up. So when folks like myself were begging people to stay home to, to try to not swamp our hospitals further he was out there doing the exact opposite. And, you know, I wanna be very clear that, that in my book, that I, I don't.

Discuss people who I think just had different opinions about about certain things, but just got these very, very, very basic facts wrong, predicting that covid would kill fewer people than the flu, for example. [00:22:00] Or that young people had zero risk of the virus. 

Kevin Folta: So how did, how did folks like Atlas and Marty McCarry, how did their influence in the White House really shape?

Pushback against CDC d c guidelines. 

Jonathan Howard: Well, they interfered with some CDC d reports, so so yeah, so, so Trump started echoing their language of protecting the vulnerable and of De of decreasing testing, for example. So we all remember some of Trump's quotes that essentially the more you test, the more you find.

So we need to stop testing a as if you could eliminate the disease by not testing for it, as if, for example, brain cancer didn't exist before we had cts and MRIs. And I, I think a lot of that came from from from Scott Atlas and who got it again in turn from his buddies. All these guys are at Stanford, by the way, or most of them.

And it, and, and I think that their credentials that I forgot to mention, that's one thing that makes them different from Kelly Brogan as well, and that they [00:23:00] all have credentials from top-notch University, Stanford, Harvard. U C S F Johns Hopkins. So they seem very, very, very credible when they're mixing good advice such as vaccinate grandma with what I think is bad advice, which is let the virus run wild amongst children and young adults.

And there was 

Kevin Folta: another real event that happened. A milestone in the pandemic is when folks like Monica Gandhi and Marty, Marty Macary and others started declaring pandemic over, and that they would have these big celebrations and meetings about these things, but how much did that contribute to the ongoing problem with additional variants that eventually would pop up?

Jonathan Howard: Well, I don't wanna blame them necessarily for variants. I don't think that they can be held responsible for Delta and Omicron, but I do think that they can be held responsible for people letting down their guard against those variants. So you're talking about Marty McCarry, who's a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins and Monica Gandhi, who is a pro H I v and infectious disease specialist at the [00:24:00] University of California San Francisco, who's starting very shortly after vaccines came around began declaring that herd immunity.

Was about to arrive or had arrived and. You know, we, we need to put ourselves back what it was like two years ago. Two years ago was potentially the best part of the pandemic. Up until maybe recently in, in that cases where following, there were about 10,000 cases per day. The vaccines appeared extremely effective, not only in preventing severe disease, but in blocking transmission.

It really seemed two years ago, like, like the end was over and I made a few overly optimistic statements at that time. I certainly wanted it to be over, but these doctors went around saying We're gonna have, Marty McCarry wrote a famous article in the Wall Street Journal called We'll Have Herd Immunity by April, 2021.

And then he wrote some lesser known articles in the New York Post in May of 2021, [00:25:00] essentially saying that we had reached herd immunity and, and Monica Gandhi did the same thing. Meanwhile, just mocking just. Humiliating. Anyone who disagreed with them saying that they were living in fear or addicted to doom and gloom.

Several doctors an internist, I think in Washington dc Lucy McBride even made up terms to kind of pathologize people. Two years ago she called it Corona Phobia. Or fear of normal that if you doubted the pandemic had ended two years ago, you had fear of normal. And then she repeated that in 2022, the exact same idea post pandemic anxiety, like there was something wrong with you.

If you, if you. Wanted to avoid Covid at, at any point after 2021. And, you know, listen, how many people listen to them. I, I don't know how, how many people decided, Hey, I'm not gonna live in fear of Covid, and they're no longer here to, to share their experience of what it [00:26:00] was like, not to live in fear of covid.

In contrast, a lot of people who lived in fear of covid. Are still here to talk about their experience. You know, fear is not a bad thing, but they just use mockery and shame. I think to try to convince people that the pandemic was over and if you still tried to avoid Covid, there was something fundamentally wrong with you.

And 

Kevin Folta: so we're speaking with Dr. Jonathan Howard about his book. We Want Them Infected, which is available from Redhawk Publications. And we'll be back with collaborates talking biotech podcast in just a moment. And now we're back on Collaborative Talking Biotech podcast. We're speaking with Dr. Jonathan Howard about we want them infected his new book on Redhawk publications.

And where do they find your book online if they're looking to purchase this? 

Jonathan Howard: Yeah. So you can go directly to the publisher Redhawk Publications. That's probably the everyone's favorite way to support a small, independent publisher. It's also available on Amazon and starting in [00:27:00] August it will be available on Kindle and an audiobook as well.

Kevin Folta: Ah, very good. And if I can help facilitate the bandwagon fallacy a little bit. When I ordered mine, they were completely sold out and I had to wait a while to get it right. So, so, so you better hurry up and get one. The other part of it is, is it's not a trivial. Sized book. When I received this in the mail, I thought somebody sent me a cinder block.

I mean, this is a big brick of a book and and really, really nice. Well researched. We'll talk about that and maybe, oh, let's talk about that now. So other parts of the book that you discussed, things like the effects of myocarditis the other adverse effects. All of these are presented in their real context, really for the first time that I've seen.

And you really go take a, do a lot of work to. Push or publish. You do a lot of nice work to cite them appropriately, but then also give a little synopsis of each paper that you cite. So can you talk a little bit more about that strategy and how that really helps [00:28:00] to validate the legitimacy of the claims that you make in the book?

Yeah. 

Jonathan Howard: So the book isn't quite as intimidating as you're making it out to be. I think about two. About 150 or 200 pages are references, and it's been very, very, very gratifying to hear people. You know, recognize, recognize that and, and how much work went into that because I want people to be able to fact check me that when I said you, you know, Dr.

Gandhi said the pandemic was gonna end in California in June, 2020. That you, or 2021 rather that, that, you can look that up and you can see that I'm, I'm in fact accurately quoting her and quoting her, her fully. Your question was about back. So, so, Let me just explain maybe the last 25% of the book it's all about pediatric covid and how.

Anti-vaccine ideas that I'd heard about measles and the H P V vaccine. And really every vaccine starting from 2010 to 2020, the beginning of the pandemic [00:29:00] were almost plagiarized by the doctors who I write about. You can read an anti-vaccine article about measles from 2019 and. See how anti-vaxxers minimize the harm of measles by saying things like, it will only kill one out of 10,000 children who get it and more children die of car crashes et cetera, et cetera.

And anyone who fears measles is, you know, living in fear and fear-mongering. It was a benign childhood disease for 99.999% of people, et cetera, et cetera. And then you can read an article by some of the doctors who I discuss and. It's the exact same thing. That's exactly how they talk about pediatric covid and their arguments against vaccinating children were the exact same ones that I'd heard again about the M M R vaccine, for example.

I mean, there are some differences. The M M R vaccine is better. It is 99% effective at, at. [00:30:00] Stopping measles. The covid vaccine is not that good unfortunately, as we know. But it's still almost that effective, especially for young hil, for children and, and young adults. Not at preventing the disease, but it preventing the rare but grave outcomes.

And the toll that Covid has taken on children is comparable to many vaccine preventable diseases for, for days, for, for in, in avac vaccine era. So, 99% of children with covid or more are, are gonna have a, a mild course with the disease. Thank God. That's the only good thing that you can say about it.

But when you consider that 73 million American children have been infected, rare, but grave outcomes add up. And a lot of doctors, and I do devote one of the longer chapters of, of, of the book to this treated these rare vaccine side effects as a fate worse than death. And, and I mean that very literally.

Doctors who wrote articles saying young adults [00:31:00] should not live in fear of covid, fear of death is not a reason to avoid. Covid spoke about vaccine myocarditis as this very, very grave and, and, and dangerous thing. And maybe it is. I don't wanna minimize it. You know, if a vaccine takes a child and gives them myocarditis, I don't sends them to the hospital.

I don't wanna trivialize that. But it's not as bad as death. I'm willing to die on that hill and. Every study, every study of vaccine myocarditis, especially for children under the age of 18, and it doesn't occur in children under 11, for example. So it does not occur in babies, toddlers, and elementary school children, but they describe the clinical course as.

Favorable as mild as having a very good prognosis. Grave outcomes are literally about one in a million in children. So a again, I don't want to trivialize trivialize that, but it's not as bad as [00:32:00] death and doctors who spoke about these rare, generally mild vaccine side effects is a fate worse than death.

We're doing exactly what anti-vaccine doctors did about the M M R H P V and polio vaccines before the pandemic. Yeah, and that 

Kevin Folta: was really what I was getting at there, was you had these studies cited one after another on page 4 31 where it showed you, you did a synthesis of what it actually said.

And the answers were that it really was, cases were, were reported, were generally mild, that you, there was no clinical presenta, a very minor clinical presentation, never have to spend time in the hospital. It was really Much more mild than even I thought it was. And so this was a really informative part of the book and I'm glad you did the synthesis like that and that same chapter.

Back to Kelly Brogan. I didn't know that she thought the H P V vaccine was complete bs and I ha and here's. How could you be more wrong? I mean, that one's been just a, that's a no-brainer. Yeah. Well, 

Jonathan Howard: she wrote this article, I think [00:33:00] in 2013 or 14 which essentially argued that the best way to pres pr protect yourself against H P V B infection was to get infected by H P V.

And that, that idea was very common in anti-vaccine circles before the pandemic, they would glorify natural immunity. You know, we, we both know that the word natural has a magical hold over, over people's mind. Of course, the immune response induced by vaccines is completely natural. But. Her idea that the best way to gain immunity and protect yourself against a virus was to get that virus became very mainstream.

This pandemic. And, and I, I sort of liken that to it, it's like getting pregnant as a form of contraception. I mean, it works. It kinda defeat the, the purpose and doctors turned into cheerleaders. For the virus. Martin Kor from Harvard wrote an article called The Triumph of Natural [00:34:00] Immunity. Marty McCarry tweeted about one study showing.

Know that natural immunity led to, to decent immunity, at least before all these variants came around. And he, he, he tweeted natural immunity wins again. And, and it is just such a bizarre, inappropriate way for doctors to, to talk about a virus that has. Killed, you know, a million Americans and injured countless, millions more.

You know, natural immunity isn't useless. I don't want to per pretend that there isn't some immunity to, to covid. Of course there is, but one reason that fewer people die with the second infection is that people can only die once and. We have to be humble about, I think the consequences of repeat infections, right?

I mean you know, you've got a newborn daughter, so this is gonna sound kind of horrible, but, you know, how many times is she gonna encounter covid by the time that she's 20? And what are the effects of that gonna be? You know, I, I hope not a lot, but I think we just have to be, be humble about the possibility that [00:35:00] repeat covid infections might not be good for developing children.

Kevin Folta: No, very. It's very true. And the same folks who will tell you that it's perfectly fine for kids to get infected are the same people saying, we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccine. We don't know the long-term effects of the virus. And there's been a podcast in this series that talks a lot about the co the coronavirus sars COV two virus, actually awakening the human endogenous retroviruses in ways that are consistent with what we see in cases of als or, or multiple sclerosis, like, like you study.

And that these patterns are still there and the same types of hers that they see there are. Are activated by the coronavirus. People are still studying that. The idea of natural immunity though always intrigues me and it really is immunity by infection rather. It's not really a natural immunity.

You get it by infection or you get it from vaccination. That chapter of the book was really good. And especially the visuals that you presented. And can you share some of the maybe more visual [00:36:00] examples like the Holocaust stars, other ways in which people talked about. Natural immunity being superior to to vaccine based 

Jonathan Howard: immunity?

Yeah, well, I think the, the Holocaust stars was a picture and it's horrible, horrible stuff. Was a picture of a a man wearing a Jewish star at some town hall meeting and about vaccines and, and likening the persecution of people who refuse vaccination to the fate of Jews in the Holocaust, which is.

Historically, obviously, Worse than inaccurate and just a offensive beyond belief. But none of this is new. An anti-vaxxers wore yellow stars be before the Holocaust, but yeah, no, I try to make use of visuals. It, it's gonna be an interesting point when it comes to the, the, the audio book about how to, how, how we'll do that, we'll figure it out.

And, and I think one of the most compelling ones is about natural immunity. Is the, the, the fact that newborns are, are, do not arrive with natural immunity. And 4 [00:37:00] million babies are born every year in the United States. And so if you look what happened with measles before the vaccine came out in the 1960s, measles cases would spike every year there'd be about 4 million.

It would infect kind of every newborn baby or. Anyone without immunity. Then cases would plummet the next year as it kind of ran out of children to infect and then it would spike the next year. So it would seesaw up and down every year. And if we don't vaccinate babies against covid, that's gonna be covid spate as well, with the exception of the fact that.

COVID, as we both know, you can be reinfected multiple times, which fortunately is not the case with measles. So we're probably not gonna see quite that jigsaw pattern, but it just reemphasizes the point that, yeah, all right, fine. Even if your child has contracted covid and has natural immunity, great, that's wonderful.

But the babies that were born today don't come with that. And about 10,000 babies are born in America. [00:38:00] Every day. And babies have by far the highest risk of covid deaths of any children. So if we are not vaccinating them, what's the, you know, we might as well not vaccinate against any of the diseases, or if you're gonna argue, it doesn't make sense to me to argue against vaccinating children for covid, but then taking great offense, great umbrage at being called anti-vaccine, which a lot of the doctors.

Who I discussed would, they would say they're very pro-vaccine. Even though the, the, the deadliest disease for American children today, they're happy with children getting it. That was part of their plan. 

Kevin Folta: And all the physicians who ma who made these pronouncements and folks who led us the wrong direction.

At this point, they kind of get a free pass. I don't know a lot of people who are still really coming down on Aria and I, iion or others. The, the frontline doctors, you know, kind of seem to have disappeared from the public discussion. Yet the people who were correct and who continue to promote the ideas that are more in line [00:39:00] with the scientific evidence, your fauci, your pure hotez, others they still get a lot of heat.

And what is it about? The current state of things, whether it's in the world or social media, that really continues to put the pressure on the truth tellers rather than those who misled. 

Jonathan Howard: Yeah. Well, they would, they would say that they, they, they told the truth even though they were wrong the whole time.

I mean, Jay bot predicted at the pandemic start that 20 to 40,000 Americans would die. I, I don't know. I, I, I wish I kind of had a better answer for this. I think one thing is that, People who didn't live in fear of covid and, and refused the vaccine and, and, and died from that, they're not here to, to share their experience.

That's number one. Number two is people like Jay Charia speaks quite a bit about the harms of measures to control C O I D, such as the lockdowns. And I don't disagree with him about that. I, I, I certainly don't wanna come across I've never come across. Is saying [00:40:00] lockdowns and school closures were harmless.

He sometimes pretends that I say that to argue against his own imagination and to kind of make me look like an idiot. But a lot of people suffered from this and I think the fact that a lot of these measures were successful leads people to conclude that they weren't necessary in the first place. So, The fact that not that we did a decent job of protecting children at the start of the pandemic, and we were able to vaccinate tens of millions of American children before they encountered the virus.

Leads people to think that they never needed protection to begin with. And if Jay Barrio wants to claim that he's correct, then we really have to think what would have happened. What, and, and I mean this very seriously, what really would've happened had we let. 73 million American children contract covid within a few months of each other at the start of the [00:41:00] pandemic, and obviously we'll never know, but I don't think it would be as benign as he and his ilk portray it to be.

Here in New York City in the first six weeks, the pandemic, we had 74 Department of Education employees die, 70 of whom worked in schools. Obviously, I don't know that they all got infected at schools, and this included 30 teacher deaths. Here in New York City, one out of every 200 children lost a parent or caregiver.

So all of those numbers would have been worse. Had we done nothing to control the virus, though, of course, once people saw some teachers dying and, and some children brought the virus home and killed grandpa, it's doubtful that they would've sent their children to school, or teachers would've showed up even if they were offic, even if schools were officially open.

And of course, Even. Throughout the pandemic schools were closed, not just because of overly cautious democratic politicians, but because of overwhelming numbers of sick [00:42:00] children and sick teachers. This happened in Texas and Georgia and Arkansas. The National Guard had to be called in during the peak of the omicron wave here in New York City schools were officially open.

But my kids spent one or two days sitting in the, in the auditorium doing nothing because there weren't enough teachers there. And this happened in Sweden too. You may read that Sweden never closed schools, which is not true. High schools there were closed and elementary school. Elementary schools were never officially closed nationwide.

But. Scores of schools had to close down at various points due to overwhelming covid outbreaks. So I think what Jay Bot Charya can do is say we overreacted. And, you know, the harms of these mitigation measures will be affecting us for, for years to come. So really anything bad that happens now in the world is blamed on lockdowns inflation.

The war in Ukraine. I'm not kidding about this. You know, Are, are blamed on lockdowns and, and he's a very compelling speaker. He's very good[00:43:00] at, at, at portraying himself as the victim that anyone who ever contradicts him is trying to silence him or slander him or slur him. And, and, and he has suffered so much this pandemic when of course he, like 99% of the doctors who I write about in the book was never at the bedside of a sick covid patient.

These, these guys were completely sheltered from the consequences of their, their words. They were on Fox News when, when I was in the hospital. Yeah, and I think this is 

Kevin Folta: a really important point, and it really ties in with the last chapter of the book, which is about meeting disinformation where we see it.

And one of you, this is something you've been at for a long time on science-based medicine and on Twitter, has been, you've been outstanding, you've been a great resource that I really go to for, for information around a number of topics. But how much does misinformation play into this in that, It reshapes the public opinion, not only about whether or not to trust the evidence, but [00:44:00] also the 

Jonathan Howard: scientists.

Yeah. Well, listen, you know, you've been at this for, for longer than I have, so, and, and you've taken infinitely, you know, more, more abused than I have and hopefully ever, ever will. But yeah, I mean, I, the. People who were fighting misinformation before the pandemic. People like myself, although I was doing it kind of anonymously I was, I was a little fish in a, in a big sea, which is fine.

But, but people who were, well, more well known yourself David Gorsky were, were subject to, to a lot of threats. And the, the universities, and again you can speak to this better than me, they, they, they don't really have Your backs. I, I, I think they, they view fighting misinformation, academia as kind of a, a quirky thing that maybe people do on the side, whatever.

It's not that big a deal. It's kind of like stamp collecting, like, great, if you wanna collect stamps, that, that's wonderful. But it's not really that impressive and I, I think we need to, to change the culture regarding that, that. [00:45:00] You know, that, that we, we should not tolerate misinformation. And, and I think a lot of people are fearful of doing of correcting misinformation, not just because they're gonna face a backlash, but they don't wanna be seen a, as a censor and they don't wanna be seen as calling unorthodox views, misinformation.

And I, I, I certainly don't either One of the, the heroes of this pandemic, and I mentioned her in this book, Is a Hungarian scientist, I'm probably gonna butcher her name, but Caitlyn Carrico who was at the University of Pennsylvania and was kind of thought of as a, as a. Research, you know, a quirky researcher who no one paid much attention to, but her, her work on MI mRNA led to the mRNA vaccines.

So she was heterodox, she was thinking outside the box. And we need to, to, to reward that. We don't need to to, to penalize that. And that's certainly not what I, I am trying to do. But when people make blatantly, mathematically false [00:46:00] claims, as, as I've discussed, or. Falsely declare the pandemic over. You know, we, we need to say this is wrong and this is unacceptable.

We don't need to threaten anyone or fire anyone, or censor, censor anyone. But we shouldn't applaud it either and say, this is just heterodox thinking. These people are just thinking outside the box. And unfortunately that's been that's been the reaction of a lot of doctors to misinformation within their own field.

Well, I 

Kevin Folta: think that doctors and o other professors, scientists, folks who are involved in reading the bad information don't always know the most strategic way to address it. And I think the thing light bulb that went off in my head is, is that when someone's making a claim that's completely false. They are not my audience.

The audience is really the people who are out there who don't know what to believe and are trying to figure out who to trust. So at that point, it's a battle of me against the person making the false claim to win the trust of the outside. So, Viewer, the outside reader. And so my [00:47:00] responses are never, Hey, you're stupid.

My responses are always you know, I understand where you would get that idea, but here's how we understand, here's how we know that that's not the case. Here's some resources that we might consider thinking about. Public health is extremely important and vaccination is a critical part of that. You know, that kind of response does get some traction.

And so it's about maybe what we need to be doing in the next chunk of time before the next pandemic is figuring out how do we train our physicians and other healthcare professionals scientists to be able to engage in social media where the false information lives. 

Jonathan Howard: Yeah. And it was particularly hard this pandemic because what was true one day was, was, was false the next.

And I think in medicine, I'm, I'm kind of used to that. I'm used to new discoveries being made. I'm used to fields changing. I mean, as we said, the main disease that I treat is ms. And the very definition of that disease has changed twice in my lifetime. Not by leaps and bounds, but by you know, interesting and, and important ways how [00:48:00] that disease was defined.

And as a neurologist, I'm used to making decisions all the time about rare diseases. With, with incomplete information to guide me. There's not pristine evidence to guide every decision that I make. And that was hap that, that happened to all of us. This pandemic. We, we, we saw. The science change, what was true for variants two years ago is completely untrue for variants today.

And so a lot of people, you know, good faith people, I don't wanna say they made mistakes, but, but things that were said about the vaccines two years ago just aren't true. And they were made to seem as if they were spreading misinformation when I, when I don't think that they were. Yeah. And, and 

Kevin Folta: that kind of goes back to your statement with Paul Offit in the beginning, correct.

Is that the science changes with time and with data, and it's easy to go back and get a, grab a soundbite of Anthony Fauci saying, well, it'll be a safe and effective vaccine, a hundred percent safe and effective, or, or anybody. There's, there's a lot of statements that were made, [00:49:00] which when you speak about it in the public parlance, it's safe and effective.

When you're speaking about it in the scientific parlance, you're saying it's extremely low risk. But the public doesn't buy low risk. They want no risk. They want zero, and it's never gonna be zero. 

Jonathan Howard: Correct? And I got, I got in some trouble for calling Vaccine Myocarditis favorable. You know, of course vaccine myocarditis is not favorable.

It'd be better if zero children had it. But again, the fact that most children go home after a day in the hospital after they're treated with just ibuprofen, that's what doctors mean by a favorable prognosis. 

Kevin Folta: With everything we've learned from the last pandemic, which I don't even believe is necessarily over yet.

I, I see news of variants still floating around out there in India and other places. What have we learned about the next pandemic that's coming? I mean, we've had already had a couple of close calls with SARS and with mers, and now with SARS COV two What have [00:50:00] we learned both from a medical response side as well as maybe a social psychology side, as how we can next best address the next pandemic?

Jonathan Howard: Yeah, that, that's, those are, those are tough questions. I mean, I think that some of our public healthcare leaders really underestimated how dangerous medical misinformation was gonna be. I mean, I, I did too. I knew that the anti-vaxxers were gonna have a flood of misinformation about it, but I thought that once people saw their neighbors dine, they would prefer a needle to a coffin.

And instead, many per many people ended up preferring a coffin denied covid denying covid D'S impact with their last brat. So I think that we just need radical honesty and humility that about a new virus, about a changing virus, about a new vaccine. But, but I'm not optimistic about it. If, if. You know, 23 comes around tomorrow you know, half of the country would, would go to coughing [00:51:00] parties to, to try to contract it.

I'm afraid. There's just so much distrust and so much suspicion. And, and not all of it is totally unwarranted. I mean, the c d C made a lot of mistakes. This pandemic, Pfizer and Moderna are, are not you know, always holy grails of ethical behavior. And I, I think that, that the United States is gonna be in a lot of trouble if there's a pandemic in the near future.

And I think unfortunately that we can look forward to the return of some vaccine preventable diseases. Hopefully I'm wrong about this. And this time next year we won't be reading about measles and chickenpox and pertussis coming back. But we might, there's just so much distrust out there and it's, it's, it's.

You know, I, I, I don't know what to do about this other than to say, to just try to be as honest as possible and humble as possible. And when you admit error, when you make an error, you need to admit the error. And my book contains several examples of my own errors. I, I do not spare myself[00:52:00] mistakes that I made.

And if you're like Paul Offit and you make an error and you rapidly correct it, you're gonna be trusted as opposed to someone who just doubles down. 

Kevin Folta: So project warp speed takes off and we see tremendous funding going into the development of a vaccine, which I always credit the Trump administration as one of the best parts of the administration was the development and getting out of the way of the science, which I thought was great.

But at the same time, we saw the explosion of an anti-vaccination of attempts just coming at the same time as the vaccine was being developed and not even out yet. So how do you interpret that within the anti-vaccine movement? 

Jonathan Howard: Yeah, so I agree with you completely about warp speed. And this really shows what the anti-vaccine movement is about.

They're not about data, they're not about science. They're not about evidence. They will claim to be, but the movement to oppose covid vaccines came even before warp speed was announced. The, there were Facebook messages released from, I [00:53:00] think February, 2020 from anti-vaccine groups. Gearing up against any eventual p covid vaccine.

So they were there, they were meeting, they were marshaling their forces, and they were prepared for this moment. And the same thing is true with the pediatric vaccine professor and oncologist from the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Vne Persad. Was arguing against the pediatric covid vaccine as early as January, 2021, and the vaccine was not available to children until May, I think.

Yeah, May, 2021. And the results of the studies were not available until April, 2021, so even before any data about the vaccine was released, doctors opposed, vaccinating children. And they used whatever facts on the ground were, were available to bolster their arguments. So in January and February of 2021, when we kind of thought potentially Covid was going away, [00:54:00] his argument was that children don't need to be vaccinated because Covid o's going away and enough adults are getting vaccinated.

That that. Children won't need to be. Fast forward a year and he is still against the Covid vaccine in 2022 and 2023. But then his argument became, not that children won't get it, but that they've are all already had it. That that they have natural immunity. So whether cases were falling or cases were rising that was used to support the.

Fundamental unquestionable belief that kids did not need to be vaccinated. And this just really shows how anti-vaccine arguments are not based in science. They're not based in data. They start with the endpoint. The vaccine is dangerous, the virus is safe, and they work backwards from there. Well, 

Kevin Folta: Dr.

Jonathan Howard, thank you very much for joining me today on The Talking Biotech podcast. It is a really good read and I really hope people check out. We want them infected. It. It's an [00:55:00] excellent book. And you mentioned the audio book and Kindle may be coming in the near future. 

Jonathan Howard: I'm hoping by August 1st.

That's that's the plan. So, Okay, 

Kevin Folta: so it makes a great Elvis death day gift. I don't know what other holiday is in August. Oh, my 

Jonathan Howard: birthday and anniversary are August 1st, so there, 

Kevin Folta: oh, there you go. So, so celebrate his birthday and anniversary by buying a copy of it. We want them infection. We want them infected.

Okay. Well thank you very much, Jonathan for joining us today and hope to talk to you real soon. Oh, 

Jonathan Howard: professor f that's always an honor to, to, to, to speak with you and I'll look you up when I'm in Gainesville next. Yeah, that'd be 

Kevin Folta: awesome. We're always here. So thank you very much for listening to The Talking Biotech podcast.

Write a review on iTunes, or better yet, By the book, we want them infected and write a review on Amazon. Cuz you certainly know that people who never bought the book are going to write reviews about how much they hate it. And this will be all five stars and all one stars. And your legitimate review that's detailed, that discusses the reality of the text of the [00:56:00] book and, and really puts it into context is what's going to change someone's malicious post.

Into something that nobody pays attention to. Really important that we're all out correcting that false information and misrepresentation when we can. That's our responsibility is folks who care about science. All of the information for Dr. Howard's books are in the show notes, so please check it out.

Thank you very much for listening to The Talking Biotech podcast, and we'll talk to you again next week.