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.