Episode Details

Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who practices at NYU-Bellevue and posts frequently on Science Based Medicine.

Transcript, unedited, with links to audio

Eric Topol (00:05):

Well, hello, Eric Topol with Ground Truths and I'm really pleased to have the chance to talk with Jonathan Howard today, who is a neurologist and psychiatrist at NYU at Bellevue and has written quite an amazing book published a few months months ago called We Want Them Infected, so welcome Jonathan.

Jonathan Howard (00:27):

Hey, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Eric Topol (00:30):

Yeah, I mean, there's so much to talk about because we're still in the throes of the pandemic with this current wave at least by wastewater levels and no reason to think it isn't by infections at least the second largest in the pandemic course. I guess I want to start off first with you being into the neuropsychiatric world. How did you become, obviously caring for patients with Covid, but how did you decide to become a Covidologist?

Jonathan Howard (00:59):

Well, I developed a strong interest in the anti-vaccine movement of all things about a decade ago when a doctor who I trained with here at NYU in Bellevue morphed into one of the country's biggest anti-vaccine doctors a woman by the name of Dr. Kelly Brogan. I knew her well and we were friends; She was smart and after she left NYU in Bellevue, she became one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors and really started leaving off the wall things that germ theory didn't exist, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. When Covid struck, she felt that SARS-CoV-2 was not killing people because she doesn't believe any virus kills people and so I became very fascinated about how smart people can believe strange, incorrect things and I dedicated myself to learning everything that I could about the anti-vaccine movement. In 2018, I wrote a book chapter on the anti-vaccine movement with law professor Dorit Reiss.

(02:01):

And so when the pandemic came around, I was really prepared for all of their arguments, but I got two very important things wrong. I thought the anti-vaccine movement would shrink. I was wrong about that and I was also really caught off guard by the fact that a lot of mainstream physicians started to parrot pandemic anti-vaccine talking points. So all of the stuff that I'd heard about measles and the HPV vaccine, these are benign viruses, the vaccines weren't tested, blah, blah, blah. I started hearing from professors at Stanford, Harvard, UCSF, Johns Hopkins, all about Covid and the Covid vaccine.

Eric Topol (

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