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We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace the Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID
One of the untold stories of the COVID pandemic in the US is the role of medical and public health professionals in spreading disinformation, pushing for policies that exacerbate the virus’s spread, and driving people away from important interventions, particularly vaccines, which blunt the deadly effects of SARSCOV2. Because of professional courtesy, solidarity or just sheer cowardice, many inside the professions have refused to take on these frauds, egomaniacs, purveyors of sickness and suffering in white coats.
Jonathan Howard’s book We Want Them Infected, though, names names. In painstaking detail, he builds an indictment of these men and women who have blood on their hands, abusing the trust of millions to peddle lies and falsehoods. This book is one for the ages, making it hard to sweep the complicity of these individuals with the virus under the carpet, leaving a record for the future, a cautionary tale for all of us.
Jonathan Howard’s book We Want Them Infected, though, names names. In painstaking detail, he builds an indictment of these men and women who have blood on their hands, abusing the trust of millions to peddle lies and falsehoods. This book is one for the ages, making it hard to sweep the complicity of these individuals with the virus under the carpet, leaving a record for the future, a cautionary tale for all of us.
606 pages, Paperback
Published April 20, 2023
24 people are currently reading
392 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Howard
8 books6 followersJonathan E. Howard, MD, Psychiatry & Neurology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine
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June 6, 2023
No electronic version. Thick book that I thought would take weeks to read. Started reading and couldn’t stop. Then I couldn’t sleep thinking about the story told here-knowing it is true and that people who should be helping, we’re not doing their jobs.
Well documented and broken down into bite size pieces. Well written. And more and more unbelievable but documented and cited so you have to believe it.
Well documented and broken down into bite size pieces. Well written. And more and more unbelievable but documented and cited so you have to believe it.
August 5, 2023
Prefatory disclosure: I have been following anti-vaxers and their propaganda since 2007, and have read Science-Based Medicine (the blog site where this book's author, Dr. Jonathan Howard, has written) since 2008. I had read some of his work during the pandemic, but there was so much going on (and I was trying to educate my children at the time!) that I was unable to keep up with it all.
Dr. Howard focuses on a particular angle of the COVID debate: the contrarian doctors such as Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, Tracy Høeg, Vinay Prasad, and Monica Gandhi, with some detours into your general antivax propagndists such as Sayer Ji and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There is a lot of material, and he dives into it in pretty fine detail--explaining how their arguments were often contradictory or betrayed their real aims, which was simply to let COVID rip loose. Dr. Howard is definitely opinionated, and the tone occasionally veers into the polemic, but he provides receipts. He shows how they started out minimizing COVID, doubled down on a herd immunity approach, and continued to wave off public health measures including vaccines.
This book was published by a small press, and while I believe (in my non scientific, but experienced opinion) that it's largely reliable, it really would have benefited from larger press treatment. A better editor would have smoothed out the prose and made it a little more readable, and the layout and design could have been improved--a problem in spots because of reproduced images and charts.
This book won't be for everyone, which is in some ways unfortunate--this topic could totally have used a more journalistic, popular science writer to make it accessible to a larger readership. That isn't a slam on Dr. Howard or his book, however! It's an extremely valuable contribution to the subject and will reward people who want to delve into this. As he says himself, this is only a fraction of the material these contrarians have provided.
Dr. Howard focuses on a particular angle of the COVID debate: the contrarian doctors such as Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, Tracy Høeg, Vinay Prasad, and Monica Gandhi, with some detours into your general antivax propagndists such as Sayer Ji and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There is a lot of material, and he dives into it in pretty fine detail--explaining how their arguments were often contradictory or betrayed their real aims, which was simply to let COVID rip loose. Dr. Howard is definitely opinionated, and the tone occasionally veers into the polemic, but he provides receipts. He shows how they started out minimizing COVID, doubled down on a herd immunity approach, and continued to wave off public health measures including vaccines.
This book was published by a small press, and while I believe (in my non scientific, but experienced opinion) that it's largely reliable, it really would have benefited from larger press treatment. A better editor would have smoothed out the prose and made it a little more readable, and the layout and design could have been improved--a problem in spots because of reproduced images and charts.
This book won't be for everyone, which is in some ways unfortunate--this topic could totally have used a more journalistic, popular science writer to make it accessible to a larger readership. That isn't a slam on Dr. Howard or his book, however! It's an extremely valuable contribution to the subject and will reward people who want to delve into this. As he says himself, this is only a fraction of the material these contrarians have provided.
August 22, 2023
It’s too easy to believe that the opposition to protecting one another from disease during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was driven by a single president, a cable news network, high profile podcasters, or new age health supremacists. But that gives a pass to highly credentialed doctors who were primary players in mass infection, disability, and death. This book, written by a doctor, focuses on opportunistic doctors who helped shape and drive narratives that fueled the pro-infection culture wars that were amazingly successful in convincing much of American society; and in turn local, state, and the Federal government, along with public health agencies; to turn their backs on the vulnerable and embrace a “return to normal” of ableism, classism, and racism. The book is a great resource that provides an excellent accounting of the tactics used to torpedo efforts to stop the spread and impact of the disease by a few dozen doctors, paying particular attention to maybe a dozen of them, primarily those with big social media followings or access to big media. While focused primarily around the issue of vaccines, the book does briefly touch upon attacks on wearing masks and the fight over pushing kids back into schools without mitigations.
As someone who ran an independent school that did not have a single case of COVID, thanks to a multilayered approach to protecting each other and the local communities, from the beginning of the pandemic through the summer of 2023, I appreciated the documentation of the intense push to get kids into schools to get them infected in the hopes by some that they would be able to contribute to herd immunity. Even though I felt I was on top of the constantly shifting politics of school reopenings, I did not realize the degree to which these doctors shaped the talking points of those who tried to use scare tactics of ‘learning loss’ or suicide to get us to accept mass infection. It was actually a bit cathartic to identify the source of some of those talking points which created great distress for me and others in our community from select families who all of a sudden took offense to our longstanding focus on community care, particularly during the 2021-2022 academic year.
I give this book 5 stars because it captures so well the horrid, intellectually dishonest, unethical, ever changing and hypocritical claims by people who ostensibly believe that one should first, do no harm. Unfortunately, the book is rife with words omitted from quotations, misnumbered endnotes, and poor formatting. I imagine the focus was on getting the book out as quickly as possible, but I think the spread of this book would be aided by having an editor go through and clean it up and then putting out an updated and improved edition. I also do not believe that the author needed to situate himself as a pragmatic centrist relative to radical leftists who are intent on ZERO COVID–there is no shame in being radically in support of the most vulnerable and not tolerating half measures that contribute to harm–although I get that there is commercial value to distancing oneself a bit from those who are zealous about protecting the most vulnerable in a society that has given up on stopping spread. But again, this book still gets 5 stars from me because of the very valuable accounting of what a small collective of doctors did to undermine public health efforts.
I thought the conclusion was great. I’m glad he acknowledged both Trump and Biden as being fully complicit in mass infection, and the quote from Bill Parcels to address Biden’s overseeing of 700,000+ (and growing) COVID deaths since taking office was perfect. I thought it was clever to include the Ayn Rand quote about quarantines at the beginning of the book, considering the claims of fear of an expanding police state by so many advocates of mass infection, who seemed to overlap considerably with those who were adamantly opposed to the protests that popped off in response to the George Floyd killing (against racial injustice and white supremacy, police brutality and terror, and for many groups, the long standing police state that already existed) in 2020.
I also wish that an ethical journalist would write a similar book exposing the journalists and those who had platforms at outlets such as the NYT and WaPo who continually minimized the threat of COVID, used eugenic framing to suggest that ‘normal healthy’ people are the ones who should be centered, and took pot shots at those who were actually on the ground trying to protect people (e.g., Leonhardt, Tufecki). I also wish that an ethical politician would do the same to expose the politicians who contributed so much harm, but such a person may not exist.
As someone who ran an independent school that did not have a single case of COVID, thanks to a multilayered approach to protecting each other and the local communities, from the beginning of the pandemic through the summer of 2023, I appreciated the documentation of the intense push to get kids into schools to get them infected in the hopes by some that they would be able to contribute to herd immunity. Even though I felt I was on top of the constantly shifting politics of school reopenings, I did not realize the degree to which these doctors shaped the talking points of those who tried to use scare tactics of ‘learning loss’ or suicide to get us to accept mass infection. It was actually a bit cathartic to identify the source of some of those talking points which created great distress for me and others in our community from select families who all of a sudden took offense to our longstanding focus on community care, particularly during the 2021-2022 academic year.
I give this book 5 stars because it captures so well the horrid, intellectually dishonest, unethical, ever changing and hypocritical claims by people who ostensibly believe that one should first, do no harm. Unfortunately, the book is rife with words omitted from quotations, misnumbered endnotes, and poor formatting. I imagine the focus was on getting the book out as quickly as possible, but I think the spread of this book would be aided by having an editor go through and clean it up and then putting out an updated and improved edition. I also do not believe that the author needed to situate himself as a pragmatic centrist relative to radical leftists who are intent on ZERO COVID–there is no shame in being radically in support of the most vulnerable and not tolerating half measures that contribute to harm–although I get that there is commercial value to distancing oneself a bit from those who are zealous about protecting the most vulnerable in a society that has given up on stopping spread. But again, this book still gets 5 stars from me because of the very valuable accounting of what a small collective of doctors did to undermine public health efforts.
I thought the conclusion was great. I’m glad he acknowledged both Trump and Biden as being fully complicit in mass infection, and the quote from Bill Parcels to address Biden’s overseeing of 700,000+ (and growing) COVID deaths since taking office was perfect. I thought it was clever to include the Ayn Rand quote about quarantines at the beginning of the book, considering the claims of fear of an expanding police state by so many advocates of mass infection, who seemed to overlap considerably with those who were adamantly opposed to the protests that popped off in response to the George Floyd killing (against racial injustice and white supremacy, police brutality and terror, and for many groups, the long standing police state that already existed) in 2020.
I also wish that an ethical journalist would write a similar book exposing the journalists and those who had platforms at outlets such as the NYT and WaPo who continually minimized the threat of COVID, used eugenic framing to suggest that ‘normal healthy’ people are the ones who should be centered, and took pot shots at those who were actually on the ground trying to protect people (e.g., Leonhardt, Tufecki). I also wish that an ethical politician would do the same to expose the politicians who contributed so much harm, but such a person may not exist.
June 13, 2025
As many other reviewers have already noted, Dr. Howard's book provides a badly needed dose of hard facts regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. It seems incredible that after 1.2 million Americans have died of Covid, the majority of books written about the pandemic are either blatantly dishonest or badly misinformed. Many have been written by simple crackpots, others selling alternative treatments and cures, and some for political gain. A few were well-intentioned, but misinformed.
Not "We Want Them Infected." Dr. Howard's book documents in ten well researched chapters the misinformation, conspiracy theories, and blatant lies that flooded cable and social media within weeks of Covid's emergence in America. Rather than amplify misinformation because it was “good for ratings,” the author has backed nearly every assertion made in the book with hard, verifiable data.
For example, Dr. Howard acknowledges that Covid vaccines can cause myocarditis, a rare and generally mild side-effect. Yet during the pandemic and even today, several prominent medical and political pundits falsely claimed that the Covid vaccines were killing more people than Covid itself. Dr. Howard soundly refutes this persistent false claim providing test results from twenty-nine credible studies investigating “the clinical course of vaccine-myocarditis.” A typical study found that, “The clinical course of vaccine-associated myocarditis-like illness appears favorable, with resolution of symptoms in all patients.”
This is a typical pattern in "We Want Them Infected." The author presents a misconception whether innocent or malicious, explains the issue in comprehensible terms, then provides hard data from credible sources that presents the true situation. After all the wild claims and conspiracy theories that sprouted during the pandemic, I find this very refreshing.
Incredibly, many prominent individuals who spread disinformation about vaccines, herd immunity, and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the pandemic have recently been given prominent roles in public health starting with the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
They should all be required to read Dr. Howard’s excellent book, “We Want Them Infected.”
Not "We Want Them Infected." Dr. Howard's book documents in ten well researched chapters the misinformation, conspiracy theories, and blatant lies that flooded cable and social media within weeks of Covid's emergence in America. Rather than amplify misinformation because it was “good for ratings,” the author has backed nearly every assertion made in the book with hard, verifiable data.
For example, Dr. Howard acknowledges that Covid vaccines can cause myocarditis, a rare and generally mild side-effect. Yet during the pandemic and even today, several prominent medical and political pundits falsely claimed that the Covid vaccines were killing more people than Covid itself. Dr. Howard soundly refutes this persistent false claim providing test results from twenty-nine credible studies investigating “the clinical course of vaccine-myocarditis.” A typical study found that, “The clinical course of vaccine-associated myocarditis-like illness appears favorable, with resolution of symptoms in all patients.”
This is a typical pattern in "We Want Them Infected." The author presents a misconception whether innocent or malicious, explains the issue in comprehensible terms, then provides hard data from credible sources that presents the true situation. After all the wild claims and conspiracy theories that sprouted during the pandemic, I find this very refreshing.
Incredibly, many prominent individuals who spread disinformation about vaccines, herd immunity, and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the pandemic have recently been given prominent roles in public health starting with the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
They should all be required to read Dr. Howard’s excellent book, “We Want Them Infected.”
December 15, 2023
This is an entertaining, well-sourced, well-argued book whose primary aim is to show how Covid contrarians contributed to the tsunami of misinformation throughout the Covid pandemic. Howard’s primary method of doing is so is by literally quoting such contrarians at length to leave no room for doubt as to a) what these contrarians claimed; and b) how recent history and clear scientific evidence has clearly refuted such claims.
A major section is devoted to formerly-careful scholar Dr John Ioannidis’ reckless downplaying of the pandemic by way of severely underestimating its infection fatality rate and thus severely underestimating the likely total US deaths that would accrue over the pandemic.
A lot of pages are similarly devoted to Jay Bhattacharya and the extremely ill thought-out Grand Barrington Declaration (GBD), which essentially advocated a “let ‘er rip” strategy on anyone not deemed high risk, and a “focused protection” strategy that would have been impossible to implement. Howard provides copious quotes from Bhattarcharya and other GBD proponents, and compares then to expert statements who condemned the approach as ridiculously fanciful.
All in all, this is a comprehensive piece documenting the many Covid contrarians, many formerly esteemed/reputable in academia, who were primarily voices of misinformation throughout the Covid pandemic. Though it’s somewhat bloated—chapter 7 comprises pages upon pages on failed predictions, factually wrong statements, and terrible advice by these contrarians—this was a fun, alarming, thorough read.
A major section is devoted to formerly-careful scholar Dr John Ioannidis’ reckless downplaying of the pandemic by way of severely underestimating its infection fatality rate and thus severely underestimating the likely total US deaths that would accrue over the pandemic.
A lot of pages are similarly devoted to Jay Bhattacharya and the extremely ill thought-out Grand Barrington Declaration (GBD), which essentially advocated a “let ‘er rip” strategy on anyone not deemed high risk, and a “focused protection” strategy that would have been impossible to implement. Howard provides copious quotes from Bhattarcharya and other GBD proponents, and compares then to expert statements who condemned the approach as ridiculously fanciful.
All in all, this is a comprehensive piece documenting the many Covid contrarians, many formerly esteemed/reputable in academia, who were primarily voices of misinformation throughout the Covid pandemic. Though it’s somewhat bloated—chapter 7 comprises pages upon pages on failed predictions, factually wrong statements, and terrible advice by these contrarians—this was a fun, alarming, thorough read.
July 10, 2023
Incredibly well researched and a thrilling, if not terrifying read. You can fact check all the claims and there are plenty of citations. The author is a good writer, fair and knows how to put events, data and quotes with proper context. We were all there. We all saw what unfolded during the pandemic but it’s different experience to see everything laid out in a timeline. As a reader, you start to see how mistakes (some small and maybe even once well-intentioned) quickly build and then impact public health policy. You start to see how institutions and groups are made of humans, who can be ego-driven and unwilling to admit their mistakes even in the face of glaring evidence.
July 29, 2024
Appalling book. It fails totally & utterly to address the causes of the Trump administration's (followed by the Biden administration's) botched response to the first two years of the pandemic. Instead it spends a dreary 400 pages wasting time on the irrelevant Great Barrington Declaration (GBD).
The GBD was written by an extremist fringe group. Their impact on the pandemic was minimal/negligible as they were denounced by the entire mainstream media, the CDC, high profile public health officials, etc.
Hence this book is pointless and provides no insight into why over 1 million Americans died of COVID-19 in the first two years of the pandemic.
The GBD was written by an extremist fringe group. Their impact on the pandemic was minimal/negligible as they were denounced by the entire mainstream media, the CDC, high profile public health officials, etc.
Hence this book is pointless and provides no insight into why over 1 million Americans died of COVID-19 in the first two years of the pandemic.
March 6, 2024
This is the encyclopedia of all the COVID mis- and disinformation.
Favorite quote -- from Dr. Kristen Panthagani (via twitter) talking about a graph made by Dr. Prasad (one of the disinformation dozen), "A case study in graphs that crush my soul, and why appropriate axes (and axis labels) are the lifeblood of visualization. You can't even see the data (which seems to be the intended point.) This graph misleadingly suggests that the risk of hospitalization by COVID..."
Favorite quote -- from Dr. Kristen Panthagani (via twitter) talking about a graph made by Dr. Prasad (one of the disinformation dozen), "A case study in graphs that crush my soul, and why appropriate axes (and axis labels) are the lifeblood of visualization. You can't even see the data (which seems to be the intended point.) This graph misleadingly suggests that the risk of hospitalization by COVID..."
August 22, 2023
This is a well-cited book about how the anti-vaccine doctors managed to gravely hinder the vaccination of children during the pandemic. He lays out their contradictions and logical fallacies that impacted us so badly in the pandemic. I agree with his brief take on the Biden administration part of the pandemic and Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
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September 7, 2023An exhaustive recounting of incorrect things people said about the pandemic, and why they were incorrect.
Potentially educational, definitely stressful.
Potentially educational, definitely stressful.
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