鈥淔uture generations will know that at least some of us tried to resist the intrusion of quackery into medicine, and they鈥檒l gain some semblance of insight into a confounding reality.鈥�
Thus ends the daunting tome that is听Everyone Else Is Lying to You, Dr. Jonathan Howard鈥檚 follow-up to the equally thick听We Want Them Infected. Together, they chronicle how a power-hungry infrastructure in the United States elevated the voices of pandemic contrarians and gave them the keys to run the place as they saw fit. Keyboard warriors and podcast bros like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Vinay Prasad became famous for arguing with the referees from the sidelines, as a new virus tore through the population; now, they own the sports team, and under anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr they are helping to institutionalize pseudoscience in America while slashing research funding left and right.
Howard鈥檚 previous book focused on refuting the misinformation of the COVID minimizers, while this latest effort highlights the techniques they used to undermine trust, and it accuses鈥攔eceipts in hand鈥攎any institutions and media projects of letting it happen.
This is as much a review of the book as it is a reflection on the state of public health administration in the United States right now, where the inmates are running the asylum.
From self-styled martyrs to government officials
In the media鈥檚 sanewashing of these science contrarians, they gain a professionalism they never had; Howard shows them to be both crybabies and bullies.
Last April, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told Bari Weiss that he had been aggrieved by his predecessor at the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, who had referred to him as a 鈥渇ringe epidemiologist鈥� during the pandemic when Bhattacharya鈥檚 opinion ran counter to what experts were seeing. 鈥淭hat he would use his position,鈥� he听听to Weiss, 鈥�补产耻蝉别听his position to destroy people who disagreed with him, that really hurt.鈥� To portray Collins鈥� diplomatic dismissal of a dangerous, unorthodox position in the middle of a world-altering pandemic as a career-destroying force is quite revealing. Bhattacharya was far from annihilated: he now holds the purse strings of the largest biomedical funding body in the world, and Weiss herself has recently been put in charge of CBS News. Persecution complexes really do pay off in America.
Howard writes that these pandemic celebrities saw themselves as the main characters of the COVID-19 era, asking to be treated with kid gloves and great humanity while hurling insults at the people they disagreed with. Dr. Vinay Prasad, an oncologist turned contrarian podcaster who is now in charge of the vaccine and biologics approval body at the FDA, said on a friend鈥檚 podcast a year ago, 鈥淚 don鈥檛 believe in forgiveness because, in听my听opinion, these pieces of shit are still lying.鈥� He was referring to the public health officials who guided Americans during the pandemic and weighed in on masks and vaccines.
Prasad used even more colourful words I can鈥檛 write on a university website to describe credible health authorities with whom he disagreed. He would go on to also mock people suffering from long COVID. On X, he commented on the fact that science writer Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the pandemic in听The Atlantic, gave a talk in 2024 while wearing an N95 mask. 鈥淚 think it is fair to say,鈥� Prasad wrote, 鈥渢hat Ed鈥檚 Pulitzer prize winning coverage suffered from severe deficiencies and he might have catalyzed some bad policy. He did invent long COVID.鈥�
Mockery is just the tip of the iceberg, though. As Howard reminds us, distressing threats and allusions came out of the keyboards of these pro-infection influencers. Dr. Paul Alexander, a former health advisor to Trump during the pandemic, called for the public execution of the people 鈥渋nvolved鈥� in the public health crisis: 鈥淗ANG them HIGH!鈥� he repeatedly wrote on听. Prasad himself ironically wrote that pandemic protection measures were akin to the rise of Nazism in Germany. That he predicted that a sadistic, authoritarian regime was brewing in the United States turned out to be correct, but like so many of his pandemic prognostications, he got it backwards. He is now part of an administration that kidnaps people off the streets and sends them to foreign prisons, that incessantly names enemies within including mayors and governors, and that is stained by corruption and cronyism.听
Howard insists that these celebs never treated COVID patients in 2020 (鈥渢hey were everywhere, except hospitals鈥�), which allowed them to construct a fantasy version of what was really happening. He quotes the writer Gurwinder Bhogal who argues that social media favours opinions over actions, talkers over doers, and he also lists the听听identified by the scientists Rebecca F. Goldberg and Laura N. Vandenberg to spread doubt. The COVID contrarians鈥� message is that 鈥渆veryone else is lying to you,鈥� and some of the very same strategies weaponized by Big Tobacco can be found in the podcasts they hosted and the Substacks they wrote: contributing misleading literature, employing hyperbolic language, invoking censorship, posing as defenders of health and truth, and normalizing negative outcomes.
This campaign of anti-science seduced fence-sitting influencers and false-balance-equivocating media outlets, expanding the reach of this push for the 鈥渦rgency of normal.鈥� Howard spotlights the former dean of Harvard Medical School, who promoted people like Dr. Prasad during the pandemic and who is now worried about the consequences of RFK Jr and the COVID minimizers mingling at the White House. It brings to听my听mind Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor, who听听as secretary for the Health and Human Services department after the latter reassured him that, despite being one of the leading voices of the anti-vaccine movement, he would never do anything to make vaccines harder to get. Older readers will be reminded of the Big Bad Wolf dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood鈥檚 grandma; younger readers will say that these people voted for the leopard-facing-eating party and are now shocked that the leopard is eating听their faces.
The book听also unearths and immortalizes the funding infrastructure that benefitted these pro-infection doctors. With more than a little help from independent investigative journalist Walker Bragman, Howard shines a light on the funders of the Brownstone Institute, which served as a media hub for the COVID contrarians. You will not be surprised to learn that it involves dark money groups, some of which are known to have backed RFK Jr鈥檚 anti-vaccine outfit, fundamentalist Christian organizations, and right-wing outlets.
On a similar financial note, Dr. Marty Makary, now FDA commissioner, once charged between听听to speak at events. Once again, victimhood is a lucrative business in the land of the free.
Documenting a tragedy
Everyone Else Is Lying to You听is a brick: at 671 pages, it even omits its lengthy bibliography, available as a free, 71-page download. What this book unfortunately lacks is a sense of synthesis. Pages upon pages are filled with bullet-point lists, reproduced biographies and event descriptions, and occasionally entire听articles听penned by journalist Walker Bragman, who writes an eloquent and pithy foreword to the book.
Howard himself admits in chapter 2 that he is 鈥渁 collector and curator more than an author,鈥� and that his books are reference tomes. I couldn鈥檛 help but think of journalist John Carreyrou鈥檚 page-turning denunciation of the fraud behind Elizabeth Holmes鈥� Theranos: the award-winning听Bad Blood. There is a听story听to be told about Prasad, Makary, Bhattacharya, and their ilk, a book that digests their lies and wrong predictions and educates the reader. I don鈥檛 think this book succeeds in telling a compelling story, however, as much as I respect and admire Howard鈥檚 painstaking work of documentation. I remember him writing at some point that many readers of the prequel,听We Want Them Infected, wanted to throw the book across the room because of how depressing the mountain of falsehoods it reported on was. I think there is a way to write a book about a damnable subject that one still devours cover to cover.
If Howard moves forward with a third book in this series, I hope he considers partnering with a co-author who can absorb his accountability archive, synthesize it, and help tell a punchier story with it.
That鈥檚 because this story is of special importance. Science deniers are now in charge of the health apparatus of the United States, and their falsehoods and distortions are promoted on the Internet where they can infect other countries. Bhattacharya called the social pressure during the pandemic to toe the scientific line 鈥淪talinesque;鈥� Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo called the COVID-19 vaccines 鈥渢he Antichrist of all products;鈥� and Prasad wanted heads to roll, not realizing that years later his own head would roll at the FDA before, metaphorically speaking, being听.
All of this nonsense loosens trust in public health. It feeds infectious diseases like measles and allows them to spread more than they have in recent memory. It starves the United States of important biomedical research, while rewarding the architects of this downfall with prestige and attention.
Howard鈥檚 conclusion is not cheerful. 鈥淭he good guys lost,鈥� he writes. To the people who voted for the leopard-face-eating party, he says, 鈥淲e told you so.鈥� Book editors usually force their writers to end on an optimistic note. This book鈥檚 solution is that what these rich influencers said and wrote needs to be preserved so that judgment can be rendered at a later date. And hopefully鈥攁nd this is truly the only rosy outlook I could find鈥攆uture generations can learn from the mistakes of our very grim era.
