Was John Snow an Advocate of "Focused Protection?" Or did Podcast Jay Lie Again?
A Review of The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
In our next installment of book reviews, looking at the history & politics of public health through the lens of COVID-19, we return again to cholera & the 19th Century. Taking a step back from Richard J. Evans’ Death in Hamburg, set in the 1892 German port city, we now cross the English Channel and several decades to mid-century London, the heart of the British Empire. As we step off our vessel, with Johnson’s The Ghost Map in hand as our guide, your nose will quickly be overwhelmed with quite the most unpleasant horror.
“No one died of stench in Victorian London. But tens of thousands died because the fear of stench blinded them to the true perils of the city, and drove them to implement a series of wrongheaded reforms that only made the crisis worse.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
What might the brutally subjugated subjects of the British Empire think, had they known that the imperial core was drowning & dying in a sea of their own shit?
A Chronic Case of Main Character Syndrome
Your mind suddenly might flash forward to a familiar scene. In the fall of 2020, when three unqualified academics, on behalf of a Koch-funded conservative think-tank, promised the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in a mere 3-6 months via the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans, including children, with a new SARS virus. They clinked champagne glasses while publishing a useless online petition known as the Great Barrington Declaration. Many prestigious thinkers, such as “Dr. Fart” and “Prof. Fullof Schitt” bravely signed the GBD.
While Bhattacharya and Kulldorff continue to whine that the GBD was censored and debate was silenced, this is a blatant rewriting of history that many liberals have fallen for. In response to the GBD, several thousand actual doctors, scientists, and public health experts published a response, known as “The John Snow Memorandum,” named after the hero of The Ghost Map and founding father of epidemiology. Pointing out the GBD’s many errors and recklessly unethical propositions, including how many infections would lead to disability. People who have been studying pandemics and public health long before 2020 soundly rejected the absurd demands of blatantly corrupt amateurs to gamble with the lives and health of millions.
In response to these criticisms, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff responded with childish insults and namecalling, calling their professional colleagues “discredited,” “Covidians,” and “Faucists.” Instead of acknowledging her many errors, erotic fiction author Sunetra Gupta would demand “herd immunity through constant reinfection.” All the while insisting that they were the real John Snow of the modern era.
Bhattacharya insists that John Snow “favored focused protection,” “was a proponent of focused production,” and insists that were he alive in the fall of 2020, Snow would have been a GBD signatory.
”How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time?” -Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Reviewing Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map and the real history of John Snow in mid-19th century London, let’s see if such a claim holds feces-contaminated water.
Manure & Misinformation
In a less revolting scene, the population explosion that came with industrialization provided London with all sorts of new challenges. Packing two million souls on top of one another like sardines requires all sorts of infrastructure the city lacked in the 1850s, most notably an adequate waste disposal system. Late at night, you might hear the occasional explosion, as an underground scavenger & his gas-burning lantern stumble into a dense cloud of methane, emerging from the massive colonies of feces lingering just beneath our feet.
“But without infrastructure, two million people suddenly forced to share ninety square miles of space wasn’t just a disaster waiting to happen - it was a kind of permanent, rolling disaster, a vast organism destroying itself by laying waste to its habitat.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Much as how SARS-CoV-2 transmitted from person to person via shared air, the bacteria which causes cholera (Vibrio cholerae bacterium) was able to bounce about like a pinball through the population, using human bodies as bumpers. (Much like how SARS-CoV-2 spreads through shared air!) As one infected person’s explosive diarrhea would find its way into the same source of water that others drank from, and the bacteria easily found new hosts to infect. Thousands upon thousands would die agonizing, humiliating deaths.
The overwhelming stench of the city, drowning in feces dumped in cellars & waterways, triggered a sort of primitive response that made miasma theory - the idea that foul-smelling air is the cause of all disease - the dominating theory of the day. Desperate for a cure, the public turned to their own version of the anti-intellectual cesspool we all enjoy called Twitter: the local newspaper. As exploitative cranks such as Mary Talley Bowden are shilling ivermectin as a miracle cure for hantavirus, Victorian London had an entire industry of quackery and little actual medicine:
“You didn’t need an academic degree to share your cure for rheumatism or thyroid cancer with the world. For the most part, this meant that the newspapers of the day were filled with sometimes comic, and almost always useless, promises of easy cures for diseases that proved to be far more intractable than the quacks suggested.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Keep in mind, however, that there are those among us working to return our society to those harrowing times. As Dr. David Gorskon writes for Science Based Medicine, there are forces plotting (neo-Confederate Jeffrey Tucker, Reason Magazine, etc.) to abolish the Food & Drug Administration in its entirety, so that exploitative quacks can kill kids by selling poison as “miracle tonics” once again.
There are some lines in Steven Johnson’s writing from 2006 that are darkly hilarious two decades later:
“Imagine the terror and panic if a biological attack killed four thousand otherwise healthy New Yorkers over a twenty-day period...a world where urban tragedies on that scale happened week after week, year after year.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Oh Steven of 2006, you sweet summer child. Such an innocent babe, little did ye know what horrors await. Johnson’s predictions would be dead wrong, as the real world is not like the melodramas 24 or Spooks: the looming threat wasn’t some Hollywood racial stereotype clutching a vial with a skull & crossbones on it, but instead, credentialed saboteurs who found a profit motive in selling a SARS virus to the public.
Send for the Snow, Man!
When Jay Bhattacharya likes to pretend that he is the modern-day John Snow, it’s worth comparing how the two conducted themselves when it came to the major challenges of their time. Jay Bhattacharya was an unknown conservative academic who never attained a medical license before producing a wildly unethical & fraudulent seroprevalence study on COVID-19. On the other hand, John Snow was a standout in his field & a local celebrity before deciding to take on not just cholera, but the dominating theory of miasma:
“Here we have a man who had reached the very pinnacle of Victorian medical practice - attending on the queen of England with a procedure that he himself had pioneered - who was nonetheless willing to spend every spare moment away from his practice knocking on hundreds of doors in some of London’s most dangerous neighborhoods, seeking out specifically those houses that had been attacked by the most dread disease of the age.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Now, this is quite confusing. Shouldn’t Snow be bent over a typewriter, smashing out short-form insults? Why isn’t he spending all his time appearing on the local radio, babbling nonsense into a microphone? As we all know now in 2026, the smartest scientists are those who talk the most, casually tossing around cheap insults. Doing actual work is for chumps!
How could Bhattacharya possibly confuse himself with someone clearly his opposite in every way? Whereas Jay had the patronage of racist billionaires to support his efforts, John Snow lacked such bountiful resources. The establishment miasmatists, as wrong as they were, struggled to overcome their primal instincts:
“All of John Snow’s detailed, rigorous analysis of the water companies and the transmission routes of the Horsleydown outbreak couldn’t compete with a single whiff of the air in Bermondsey. The miasmatists were unable to override the alarm system that had evolved so many aeons before. They mistook the smoke for the fire.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Industry was poisoning the drinking water of London, and miasma theory was what industry supported. Industry supported the mass infection of an unvaccinated population with SARS-CoV-2, and industry bankrolled propaganda such as Jay Bhattacharya’s GBD, Emily Oster’s data fraud, and The COVID Collaborative. The truth is, industry rejects public health in its entirety, because public health requires regulations and government invention:
“...the state should directly engage in protecting the health and well-being of its citizens, particularly the poorest among them; that a centralized bureaucracy of experts can solve societal problems that free markets either exacerbate or ignore; that public-health issues often require massive state investment in infrastructure or prevention.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Again, another darkly hilarious line to read in 2026.
Much easier to insist that the public simply accept widespread pestilence. Instead of simply acknowledging their error and adjusting their views accordingly, the entrenched miasmatists of London had their own “Great Barrington Declaration” moment. Their genius strategy was to collect all of the human waste festering across the city in private cesspools, and... deposit it into the Thames river. The very same Thames that provided much of the city’s…drinking water?
Mirroring when Jay Bhattacharya led Florida’s pandemic response, this boneheaded thinking would kill thousands upon thousands of people, including children. The resistance to John Snow’s “theory as a waterborne agent that had to be ingested to do harm,” just like the resistance to the reality that COVID-19 is preventable & capable of significant harm to all, was killing a massive number of people. Jay Bhattacharya’s insistence that John Snow would have been a GBD signatory is nothing but a narcissistic delusion.
The Pump Handle That Changed the World
When Jay Bhattacharya claims that John Snow was a “proponent of focused protection,” he is referring to a series of events which led to the famous moment of the Broad Street water pump handle being removed. Snow had worked and struggled for years to prove that the drinking water supply was contaminated & ultimately responsible for cholera deaths, and it wasn’t until he presented his findings to the local Board of Governors that he had real success. In the Amazon.com blurb for Bhattacharya’s upcoming book titled “The Great Barrington Declaration,” he misrepresents his online petition as casting “a ray of hope for billions of people who were living under lockdown & mask mandates.” Let us compare this to Snow’s reality:
“When the Board of Governors removed the handle on Friday morning, the act was met with open jeering and derision by the passerby who chanced to witness it.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
What Johnson leaves out is that wealthy industrialists also opposed the move. While Snow would tragically pass away of a stroke at 45, this would set off a chain of events that would massively shift the landscape of London, and the entirety of urban planning, forever. The term “focused protection” is not used once in Snow’s writing, nor the entire scholarship of credible public health literature. Whereas Bhattacharya championed widespread outbreaks of disease, Snow actively fought against them:
“...Snow’s intervention did not just help bring the outbreak to a close. It also prevented a second attack.” -Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Bhattacharya would have you believe that Snow only sought to protect those vulnerable to cholera. While critical thinking is clearly quite painful for Bhattacharya, it’s pretty easy to say that... everyone is vulnerable to cholera. So naturally, we must focus on protecting the entire population. Bhattacharya’s rewriting of history intentionally excludes what came next, and the ramifications for the entire world.
“Establishing sanitary water supplies and waste-removal systems became the central infrastructure project of every industrialized city on the planet...the building of the invisible grid of sewer lines and freshwater pipes that made the modern city safe”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Just look at how these deranged ZeroCholera radicals have completely corrupted our society! We need to learn to live with cholera, the overwhelming stench of human feces in the air, and thousands dying week after week! This is a violation of my freedom to deposit my filth where I please! Children need cholera to build their immune systems! Think of all the taxpayer money wasted that could have gone to building awesome battleships!
Hopefully, this finally puts to bed this absurd fantasy that Jay Bhattacharya has any sort of credibility or expertise - a delusion endlessly repeated in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other leading journalism outlets. He should be shunned from academia due to his established record of dishonesty and misrepresenting facts to suit a politicized agenda on behalf of wealthy interests, but more importantly, the sheer incompetence on all topics medical and scientific. Bhattacharya is the modern day equivalent of Dr. Johann Caspar Theodor Kraus, Hamburg’s Chief Medical Officer, who in 1893 got thousands killed by insisting nothing could be done to prevent cholera outbreaks.
“The scourge of cholera then seemed intractable, too, and superstition seemed destined to rule the day. But in the end, or at least as close to the end as we’ve gotten so far, the forces of reason won out. The pump handle was removed; the map was drawn; the miasma theory was put to rest; the sewers were built; the water ran clean.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Clean Air activists fighting for the infrastructure upgrades to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 could certainly learn a thing or two from John Snow’s tale. “Infection is inevitable” is still the dominating philosophy of our day in 2026 when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, not because of some mystical properties of the virus, but simply because industry’s capture of our politics has organized society into embracing widespread disease, disability, and death.
The liberalism that sought to mediate conflicts between labor and capital, which understood the necessity of state interventions such as constructing a citywide sewer system or improving air quality in schools and workplaces, is long gone.
Closing Thoughts
Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, originally published in 2006, is darkly hilarious in how prescient it is. Little did Steven know just how right he would be:
“Some experts think a pandemic on the order of 1918 is a near inevitability.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
An airport paperback and clearly a product of the time, Johnson feared terrorism much more than zoonotic evolution. He does dedicate a great deal of real-estate to warning about H5N1, aka bird flu, something which has been in the news recently and remains a looming threat. What Johnson failed to predict, tragically, is how a coalition of wealthy interests, reactionary politicians, and mercenary academics would collude to discipline the public into simply accepting a markedly higher threshold of preventable disease, disability, and death. Twenty years later, one of The Ghost Map’s final lines does not age well:
“The global challenges that we face are not necessarily an apocalyptic crisis of capitalism or mankind’s hubris finally clashing with the balanced spirit of Gaia.”
-Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Ha…ha…ha. Very funny, Steven. Got any more clever jokes?
“The only question is whether we can steer around these crises without killing ten million people, or more.” -Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
According to the infamously radical leftist zine The Economist, the global death toll for COVID-19 is over 35 million. Sorry Steven, but we completely and utterly failed. No small part of it thanks to jackasses who saw a global crisis & sought to exploit it as a brand building opportunity. Just as Jay Bhattacharya sought to rewrite the history of John Snow, we are currently drowning in efforts to rewrite the history of COVID-19.
John Snow & Jay Bhattacharya both dealt with a great deal of shit in their lifetimes - except Jay’s problem is that it comes from whenever he opens his mouth.
