Everbody Hates Howie?!

Examining the Backlash to "We Want Them Infected"

Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious 7 (2015)

We previously reviewed Dr. Jonathan Howard’s We Want Them Infected, (WWTI) a chronicle of the pandemic and some of its worst bullshit artists from 2020-2022. Thankfully, the book seems to be a smashing success, with copies showing up around the world and well-earned praise taking social media by storm. For those not in the know, a large chunk of WWTI is direct quotes from pro-viral influencers like Jay Bhattacharya of the Great Barrington Declaration, or libertarian Billionaire Jeffrey Tucker - being overconfident, underestimating the virus, and ultimately proven to be objectively wrong in their bold statements.

Now, “certain” individuals, upon bearing witness to what is essentially a mirror… have become completely unhinged at positive press coverage in the LA Times and Psychology Today. Dr. Howard has written a response to this backlash on Science Based Medicine, which you should read for yourself. Most importantly, he says this about his critics:

I invite people to disagree with my words, so long as they are my words. Thus far however, my critics have lacked the courage to quote me at all. Sadly, Mr. Tucker and Dr. Bhattacharya have been so warped by the rewards of social media engagement from unquestioning strangers, they can only robotically repeat the exact same insults and canned responses to all of their critics. They no longer even pretend to engage on the substance of what I actually said- much of which is simply quoting what they actually said.

A pretty fair summary, all things considered. However, it’s worth documenting in detail just what WWTI’s critics have actually said - and what should be an outrage to the general public at large - as some of this is so outrageous it shouldn’t go ignored.

Let’s start with this tweet, from Stinson Norwood - an absolutely unhinged, deranged, and sadistic bully that has wasted years of his pitiful life dumping abuse on people with actual knowledge and responsibility - and is followed by Stanfood University Professor and Great Barrington Declaration author Jay Bhattacharaya, who is featured prominently in We Want Them Infected & retweeted the following:

Unsurprising dreck from Norwood.

This is a Stanford University Professor of Medicine, endorsing personal attacks not only on Dr. Jonathan Howard, but also bringing his wife into it, and making outlandish accusations that Dr. Howard was neglecting his family in a following tweet. This is the content of character that Jay Bhattacharya publicly endorses - and so does Stanford University by continuing to employ Bhattacharya. This isn’t an uncommon scene - any quick glance through the accounts that Jay follows on Twitter include numerous anonymous abusive pro-viral trolls that make ridiculous personal attacks and outlandish accusations to delegitimize and harm real-world doctors and experts with actual expertise and real-world responsibilities.

Bhattacharya is so addicted to the social media engagement and negativity from these indefensible wreckers and is now utterly unable to write or speak in a professional manner when it comes to the topic of public health. This isn’t all that surprising - as we wrote about in A Gamified Theory of Pandemic Punditry:

The designers of these platforms took this experience of discourse and began to apply game mechanics to them. Twitter turned debate into an MMORPG. Discussing ideals became no longer about developing better understandings of the world and making better choices in our lives, but instead about “winning” likes, retweets, and subscribers.

That’s it - it’s little more than a game now to pro-viral influencers, growing all the more outlandish and rabid in the hopes of driving further engagement. The elaborate fantasies about the mythical land of Sweden, “which never locked down,” (false - Yes, Schools Were Closed in Sweden | Science-Based Medicine (sciencebasedmedicine.org) fail to mention that one in three young Swedish adults now suffer from cognitive & neurological impairment commonly referred to as “brain fog.” It’s never about facts or science to these goblins - it’s all about bashing you over the skull with their fantasies.

Outlandish harassment, personal attacks, and violent threats have become part of the job for doctors, nurses, and public health workers (and their families) during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. An all-out anti-intellectual siege, funded by rightoid billionaires like Charles Koch and Jeffrey Tucker, has been permitted to continue uninterrupted by government authorities and the general public. Unfortunately, it has had more success than any layperson could possibly accept. Team “Free Speech” is actually doing everything they can to silence those with the responsibility and expertise to save lives, because their outlandish ideas of abolishing public health and worshipping pestilence simply do not hold any actual water. From Natalia Solenkova on Science Based Medicine:

Having no financial help, media connections, legal protection, or guidance on how to fight disinformation effectively, we did what we thought could work. We were vocal on social media; we ran Spaces on Twitter or rooms on Clubhouse; we published op-eds, substacks, or other articles; we organized non-profit grassroots organizations; and we constantly reached out to leaders of various medical organizations, politicians, and journalists hoping to build a force aiming to combat disinformation. We received hate messages, online and real-life harassment, and death threats. In doing these activities, we risked our jobs and careers due to various social media and media policies, personal and professional relationships, and personal and family safety.

Yeah, this doesn’t sound like the “Marketplace of Ideas” at all. If you have to rely on endless abuse and death threats as a crutch, you’re certainly full of it. But let’s not dwell on this, let’s keep poking through this intellectual trainwreck. Here is neo-Confederate billionaire rightoid and helm of the Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker:

Neo-Confederate who wants to own Black people as property.

Here is the Psychology Today review. Absolutely nothing Tucker alleges can be found within this article. It’s simply screeching and howling over positive coverage of a book that features dozens, and dozens of cited quotations of Tucker’s favorite pro-viral sycophants, contrasted against the actual reality of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This outlandish statement was retweeted by numerous “Ultra MAGA” rightoids, an Epoch Times senior editor, a “right wing ancap,” and someone referring to themselves as “Erich Hartmann,” a named shared by a Nazi pilot. We are treated to a lovely promo standoff, as Tucker proceeds to go after Dr. Howard personally, making a bold threat:

This is absolutely a threat, and a pitiful one at that.

Of course, Tucker never actually does this. He is simply trying to intimidate Dr. Howard into silence, because the Great Barrington’s feelings are much more important than the facts. These charlatans, when confronted with a mirror of their own statements, have slipped into a fury of angry howling like a pack of rabies-infested jackals. Think this is as bad as it gets? Just look at what “researcher and entrepreneur” Mark Changizi said about the colleagues Dr. Howard lost in early 2020:

• “Very mild respiratory virus” - FALSE
• ”Anyone without comorbidities” - FALSE
• Claims that pro-viral influencers were “censored” - FALSE
• ”Collective hysteria” - Obscene accusations of mental illness with a tinge of misogynistic venom behind it. From somebody who paid $8/month to a billionaire so they could sit behind a keyboard and sling endless abuse all day. Yikes!

A vintage 2020 classic from Mark Changizi

Mark Changizi is so dedicated to forcing his delusion onto everyone else, that he has become completely detached from scientific reality. For someone who claims to be a “researcher,” any time scientific fact gets in the way of his emotions, Changizi simply throws the facts out the window and goes into a full-blown rage, making outlandish threats such as the following:

Accusations of “crimes against humanity.” Threats that Changizi and his 54,700+ followers are “coming for you.” This is the level of discourse that pro-viral influencers operate upon - misogyny and even outright calls for violence. This is what makes Enlightened COVID Centrism, “vaxxed and relaxed,” and “reinfections are mild” sycophants, who love to draw false equivalencies between imagined “ZeroCOVID” fanatics and these very real InfinityCOVID goblins, doing everything they can to silence anyone who dares challenge the Great Pestilence Charade with scientific fact.

Nate Bronze also crusaded against the Precautionary Principle of Public Health, thus making him much more aligned with pro-viral influencers than any sort of “centrist” position that someone could reasonably take.

The problem with “Enlightened COVID Centrism,” is drawing a false equivalence between those who would fight pestilence, as “ZeroCOVID” lunatics, and the very real horde of rightoid, dark-money funded jackasses who make public calls for violence and personal attacks against a doctor’s family for the sake of online engagement - which in turn, legitimizes this abuse as part of a larger “debate.” Especially when that abuse is all these pestilence sycophants have. Not that this matters - for layabout pundits like Nate Bronze, keeping it kayfabe & protecting the business is more important for maintaining one’s self-image than actually engaging with the reality on the ground.

As a society, we’re throwing one of the essential pillars of civilization - doctors, nurses, and public health workers - under the bus, and pretending that this sort of conduct is somehow tolerable or simply channeling legitimate grievances. As we wrote about in Trolley Problem Fetishism over GBD’s Jay Bhattacharya joining Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2024 Presidential campaign:

Growing evermore detached from reality, the pro-viral influencers would use the monopoly of violence possessed by the state to brutally enforce everyone's participation in their elaborate power fantasies.

This is what the anti-intellectual siege campaign funded by rightoids and waged by worthless howlers is all about: silencing critics and destroying the very idea of “public health,” to get the public on-board with eradicating “disposable” citizens, such as those with “comorbidities,” which of course inevitably leads to “illegals,” LGBT people, and Jewish people as well, given enough time.

In truth, the jackasses pushing these views are in the extreme minority. However, the public’s indifference, lapping up the nectar from the forbidden fruit of “normalcy,” is the same cowardice that allows this ideology of hate and pestilence-worship to flourish. And flourish, it has.

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Self-proclaimed “team reality” hellspawn.

Sarah Beth Burwick is an LA-based lawyer who is an outspoken anti-vaxx influencer, that apparently developed the ability to diagnose PTSD over the Internet. It’s always the accusations of mental illness with these people, as Tweet-addicts like Burwick can’t engage on the facts or with what Dr. Howard actually wrote, so she has to write him off as mentally damaged and delusional for not going along with their pro-viral charade - you have to be sick to not wanna throw your children in whatever deadly & disabling pathogen arrives on our shores!

“false narratives” is what killed millions worldwide, apparently

Brian O’Shea is the husband of Naomi Wolf, an impressive crank-of-cranks paragon of elaborate fictions: that vaccines are slavery, Apple is working on vaccine-enabled Time Travel, and the urine of vaccinated people is contaminating our water supply. Really cool stuff! Brian and Naomi used to have a professional relationship, in which Naomi employed Brian as private security, and said relationship became intimate. Of course, you don’t have to be a qualified security expert to know that this is utterly reprehensible and a massive breach of ethics. A review of O’Shea’s history would quickly prove he took private security as serious as Wolf takes “journalism.”

So now, Brian O’Shea is threatening Dr. Howard with criminal charges before a grand jury for the grave crime of… compiling the statements of anti-vax, pro-viral “censored” voices like GBD’s Jay Bhattacharya & Martin Kulldorff - instead of responding to anything Dr. Howard actually wrote - on top of this, Brian’s also tagging in major ringleader accounts like “VigilantFox” to help drive engagement and further harassment of Doctor Howard. This is how all of these plague-loving cranks operate: all dissent must be punished with overwhelming abuse, overwhelming them and silencing voices critical of the anti-public health agenda.

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Photo of WWTI index from Dr. David Berger (@YouAreLobbyLud)

In the physical edition of We Want Them Infected, there are dozens and dozens of pages dedicated to simply providing citations for every quote featured in the book - Vinay Prasad of UC San Francisco alone has nearly a hundred quotes in WWTI. Disagree with Dr. Howard all you want, but the book is largely a compilation of the words spoken and written by pro-viral influencers that have made a name for themselves since the pandemic kicked off in 2020.

What these pestilence sycophants are really getting mad at…is their own words, and the words of their “thought leaders.” Anyone who dares to write them down and engage with them critically, must be threatened, abused, and harassed relentlessly into silence. Sadly, it’s worked on a lot of needed voices to oppose this ludicrous, outlandish crusade against public health, but that is hardly justification to surrender the public square to this deranged, eugenicist crusade to abolish public health, childhood vaccination, and a life expectancy which is now in freefall.

University of California San Francisco’s Vinay Prasad encouraging unprotected smoke inhalation.

This is not the talk of serious scientific experts. This is the abuse of completely unhinged ideologues who think they can bully their critics into silence, for accurately recording their public statements and responding with… basic scientific fact. To these viral perverts, there is a certain segment of the population whose lives are simply disposable, especially if it’s in service of forwarding the profit motives of private capital. Let’s get one thing very fucking goddamn clear:

These jackasses want protected status to throw out endless abuse and hatred, and any public criticism of their pro-viral, eugenicist pestilence worship must be brutally punished with endless vitirol, threats, and real-world violence.

This is what Stanford University is endorsing by refusing to deal with Professor Bhattacharya, this is what University of California San Francisco is endorsing by refusing to deal with Professor Vinay Prasad, and what every working American must angrily oppose with every fiber of their being.

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As far as personal threats against Dr. Howard and his family are concerned?

“…The Street Always Wins.”

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