We Want Them Infected, by Dr. Jonathan Howard, is a significant stand against efforts to rewrite the history of the COVID-19 pandemic and promote the deadly pseudoscience of the anti-vaccine movement. The book opens with the titular quotation from Dr. Paul Alexander, who was an official in the US Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration:
Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk… so we use them to develop herd… we want them infected…
This call for the mass infection of the population was in July 2020, just a few months into the ongoing pandemic that has now killed over 1.2 million people in the US and caused an estimated 27 million excess deaths worldwide.
We Want Them Infected [Photo by jonathanhowardmd.com]
As an individual, Dr. Alexander is a fascist zealot who later went on Alex Jones’ Infowars to rant about how vaccines have tainted the blood supply and call for the public execution of any health officials and politicians who promoted vaccines or infection control measures, all while hawking his own miracle cures. But his call for mass infection was part of a broader attack on public health embraced by a layer of doctors and scientists at leading research institutions, as well as government officials and media personalities across the globe.
The intentional infection of children as government policy was articulated by Sweden’s State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell as early as March 13, 2020. It was then picked up by New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, who praised Sweden’s approach, writing, “Is this cure [of lockdowns]—even for a short while—worse than the disease?” This phrase—“the cure can’t be worse than the disease”—was immediately seized upon by Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India and other fascistic figures.
The pseudoscientific justification for herd immunity through mass infection was later given its clearest formulation in the Great Barrington Declaration from October 2020, and it is here that Dr. Howard focuses his book.
The central thrust of the Declaration was that people under 65 were unlikely to die from COVID-19, and if they would just live their lives normally and get infected, then the pandemic would end in three to six months as people gained immunity through infection. The organizers of the Declaration went on to found the Brownstone Institute as a think tank to pursue the attack on public health. Howard refers to the collection of doctors and researchers in the broader orbit of the Brownstone Institute as “contrarian doctors.”
Dr. Jonathan Howard [Photo: jonathanhowardmd.com]
The main authors of this manifesto of death, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and their colleagues emerged as a center of disinformation, quite willing to lie and falsify research to support their goal of undermining basic public health measures.
Howard writes:
Doctors and scientists from our most prestigious universities convinced millions of Americans that COVID was only dangerous for the elderly and infirm. They influenced powerful politicians, who also wanted the virus to spread widely. While overwhelmed frontline doctors begged the public to avoid the virus, other doctors, completely sheltered from the consequences of their words, worked to undermine these efforts.
In reality, the effects that COVID-19 continues to have on children is grim. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) figures, over 200,000 children in the US have been hospitalized by COVID-19, with a tragic 2,320 dying to date, making it by far the deadliest infectious disease affecting children.
Beyond the acute phase of the disease, children can be affected with a variety of long-term impacts. Up to a quarter of children experience lingering Long COVID symptoms four weeks or more after initial infection. One recent study showed that infants infected with COVID-19 are several times more likely to develop type 1 diabetes. Ultimately, the biggest refutation of the Declaration’s “focused protection” pseudoscience is that more than 200,000 children in the US and over 10 million globally have lost a parent or primary caregiver to COVID.
This book traces how from the very beginning of the pandemic the figures around the Declaration were not simply mistaken, but wrong in ways that cannot be arrived at through honest science. To give just one of Dr. Howard’s many examples, the Great Barrington Declaration claimed:
If the virus is like other coronaviruses in its immune response, recovery from infection will provide lasting protection against reinfection, either complete immunity or protection that makes a severe reinfection less likely.
One year later, after the beginning of the Omicron wave had blown away efforts to obscure reinfections, Dr. Gupta claimed the exact opposite:
One thing we have always known, because there are other coronaviruses circulating, is that we lose our immunity against the infection very rapidly, whether the virus changes or not.
This would be the recurring pattern for contrarian doctors, either avoiding or lying about their prior statements that proved wrong. On point after point, the estimated number of deaths, the danger to children, the threshold for “herd immunity,” the risks from new variants, and more, this network of doctors was repeatedly and loudly wrong.
Dr. Howard approaches the matter with meticulous citations and attention to detail that come from his experience struggling against the anti-vaccine movement and writing for the website Science Based Medicine years before the onset of the pandemic.
