Accountability in Action: A Tale of Two Quacks
Prasad, Cartland, and the Failure of American Institutions
There is an excellent podcast by the name of Some Dare Call It Conspiracy, hosted by Brent Lee and Neil Sanders, who did an extensive four-part deep dive into the saga of Twitter troll David Cartland, a former British GP (general practitioner, aka standard medical doctor) who completely immolated his professional career out of dedication to his social media fan club of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. The whole series is worth a listen, but I wanted to compare and contrast Cartland’s well-documented downfall in the United Kingdom with another medical professional who was also publicly humiliated in the news recently: Vinay Prasad, an oncologist who calls the University of California San Francisco home.
David Cartland was once a well-respected and upstanding member of his community of Cornwall, a village in the South of England, where he proudly served as a medical professional. Prior to 2020, UCSF’s Vinay Prasad was considered a rising star in medicine, and his book Ending Medical Reversals was held in high regard. While unscientific misinformation & disinformation has been a feature of numerous pandemics of the past, COVID-19 was the first pandemic in which social media was readily available to amplify destructive garbage like never before.
A Mutual Abandonment of Science
David Cartland and Vinay Prasad were staunch critics of masking and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, with both making wholly inappropriate comparisons to Nazi Germany. Cartland would be marched out of the hospital where he worked and kicked to the curb, while UCSF turned a blind eye to Prasad calling his employers stupid for implementing a hospital mask mandate and rallying his social media followers to agitate (literally using the word “resist” in the title of one Youtube video) against measures to prevent patients from dying of a hospital-acquired virus.
David Cartland and Vinay Prasad both grew a following from fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccine, especially in children and pregnant women, while downplaying the threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, calling it a “cold” on multiple occasions; a basic myth that Some Dare Call It A Conspiracy’s Neil Sanders, who to my knowledge is not a medical professional, explains quite simply: that the symptoms of COVID-19 similar to a flu or cold have less to do with the disease and are in fact resulting from the immune system fighting the virus. Becoming hooked by what SDCIAC calls “lovebombing” by anti-vax conspiracy theorists on social media, Cartland and Prasad both abandoned science to impress jerks on the Internet.
Cartland would then allow himself to be bamboozled into the ridiculous belief that the COVID-19 vaccines somehow make you magnetic, which is utterly hilarious on its face. Stateside, Vinay Prasad would endorse the utter nonsense pseudoscience of “immunity debt,” suggesting that children were now constantly ill in 2022 not because of the new SARS virus they were being repeatedly infected with, but because of remote schooling and masks from 2020. Both abandoned a professional commitment to medical science in order to lend the legitimacy of their credentials to absurdity.
Harassment of Medical Colleagues
David Cartland & Vinay Prasad also lost all respect amongst many of their professional colleagues in medicine, with neither refusing to acknowledge their basic, basic errors when corrected. What would eventually see Cartland stripped of his medical license, however - rendering the years of his life dedicated to med school a complete waste - was the same sort of vile vulgarity that Vinay Prasad regularly engaged in, egging on their respective fanclubs of abusive trolls. To quote the description from the Some Dare Call it Conspiracy podcast:
“A Medical Practitioners Tribunal found proved that Cartland engaged in years-long harassment of fellow doctors, encouraged his followers to target individuals, posted abusive and discriminatory content, and demonstrated dishonesty in relation to COVID exemption documentation.
The result: erasure from the medical register.”
It’s hard to argue that Vinay Prasad has not engaged in similar behavior across social media platforms such as Twitter, Substack, & Youtube. Prasad has frequently attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, blaming him for the pandemic - as an example, he tweeted: “To me it’s obvious that the reason Fauci supported lockdown & school closure was a misguided attempt to atone for the fact that he funded the work that led to the pandemic. No one acts more irrationally than the guilty. The house subcommittee has damning evidence.” In reality, no such “damning evidence” was presented, and does not exist. Fauci has faced numerous threats upon his life as a result of such conspiracy theories that Prasad, a UCSF faculty member, endorses.
In another tweet, Vinay Prasad attempted to pin the blame for the murder of a healthcare CEO on popular comedian and medical professional “Dr. Glaucomflecken,” stating “Glaucomflecken is not actually a student of health policy. He doesn’t understand insurance. Denying coverage does not increase their profits. That idea may have gotten someone murdered. Sad”
As another devastating example of unprofessional misconduct, Vinay Prasad peddled the conspiracy theory that remote schooling in 2020 caused an uptick in suicides & the sexual abuse of children and attempted to pin the blame on Dr. Peter Hotez, who has also been targeted with harassment and threats upon his life. In his tribunal, David Cartland was found to repeatedly insinuate that a professional colleague was a pedophile and was forced to pay significant financial penalties as well as issue multiple public apologies after repeating the behavior. Not a single member of his social media fanclub could save him from what happened next.
A “Hero” on the Internet, a Scourge in Reality
Having an extended meltdown in the public eye, Cartland seemed to face significant pushback in his local community, resulting in him calling his fellow Cornwallers “a bunch of inbreds.” This did him no favors and ended with him being thrown out of his local church and publicly scolded in the local Facebook group. But wait, it gets worse for “The Honest Doctor!” - a moniker Cartland assigned himself as part of his current “Health Coach” grift.
Sacrificing his medical career upon the altar of a delusional martyrdom complex fueled by social media, Cartland returned to his passion of soccer, becoming a referee. This would not last in the wake of losing his medical license. After admitting to producing fraudulent vaccine exemption letters for travel, David Cartland found himself on the UK’s Disclosure and Barring Service’s Children’s Barred List, forbidding him from employment that involves working with children & vulnerable adults. The local football association then suspended him from refereeing immediately after being notified of Cartland’s prestigious new membership. Taking to social media, Cartland cried that he had “committed no crime” and was the true victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thanks to award-winning journalism from the same village full of “inbreds,” in Cartland’s words, David had effectively rendered himself unemployable. A self-proclaimed “family man” who can no longer provide for his wife and children, reduced to begging his anti-vaccine fanclub for help after giving them everything he had - with nothing to show for it but an Amazon.com bestselling author ranking in the... 9000s. For someone who regularly engaged in homophobia on social media, Cartland had proven himself to be quite un-masculine & weak in the end.
For once, accountability had finally caught up with an anti-vaccine grifter.
The Cowardice of American Medicine
Across the Atlantic Ocean, such antics would be rewarded by one of America’s leading medical schools: the University of California San Francisco, in a saga that the PAI has covered for years. In 2025, it would see Vinay Prasad elevated to the Food & Drug Administration, where he was ousted twice in less than a year of proving that his enthusiasm lied with impressing his anti-vaccine fans on Twitter, instead of a dedication to upholding any sort of professional or scientific standards.
Most notably, Vinay Prasad produced an intentionally leaked memo in which he claimed that the Food & Drug Administration had and would soon present “evidence” in which the COVID-19 vaccines killed at least 10 children. There was no evidence - this was merely a federal handout to anti-vaccine grifters on social media, like Prasad’s Twitter BFF & deranged misogynist Alex Berenson. Even Benjamin Mazer of The Atlantic, who has never resisted the opportunity to lend credibility to anti-vaccine myths such as “immunity debt,” treated Prasad’s e-mail rant as credible. The actual report found no evidence of such claims, with Mazer and The Atlantic failing to issue a public apology and redaction of the article. Prasad engaged in an incredibly serious act of misconduct that is on the level of Andrew Wakefield, who violated young children in the production of fraudulent “evidence” suggesting the MMR vaccine causes autism.
Wakefield lost his medical license before running away to the United States to play the victim. Prasad on the other hand, after engaging in numerous instances of serious misconduct which required bringing in an outside firm, was allowed to return to the University of California San Francisco and Sensible Medicine as if nothing had ever happened. What UCSF is teaching the future doctors and scientists of America is that the best way to advance your career is to be a reactionary and abusive social media troll, no matter who gets hurt in the process.
Vinay Prasad’s co-author on numerous opinion editorials masquerading as scientific literature, Tracy Beth Hoeg, was also kicked out of the Food & Drug Administration and immediately ran to anti-vaccine slopagandist Maryanne Demasci to insist that they were victims of a conspiracy by Big Pharma. This is precisely the same claim made by Andrew Wakefield. Whereas British medical authorities correctly understood cranks like David Cartland to be a threat to patient health and safety, UCSF and California’s Medical Board has instead established a standard in which such behavior is encouraged, and clearly a role model for students to follow in the footsteps of.
This cannot stand. While California Democrats are presently humiliating themselves by rallying behind the former Health & Human Services Secretary who couldn’t be bothered as tens of millions of Americans were disabled by COVID-19, the state’s medical institutions are helping to drag the nation further into an anti-intellectual reactionary spiral into utter irrelevancy. There is no justifiable reason for why the United Kingdom can have the decency to drop the hammer on obnoxious quacks, while the United States allows such pestilence sycophants to prosper unimpeded.
In closing, it’s worth restating that the podcast Some Dare Call it a Conspiracy and their four-part deep dive into the saga of David Cartland, hosted by Brent Lee and Neil Sanders, is a must-listen for anyone with concerns about the intersection of social media and medical quackery. It’s clear that America’s universities & other institutions have much to learn from our friends across the ocean, if we are to ever reverse course.
