B (3:20)

Yeah. So a lot of what you had to say totally in line with what I had to say. You know, we'll never know because we can't kind of rerun history. But what would have happened in the 2024 election had RFK Jr and the whole MAHA movement not merged with MAGA in the summer of 2024? We'll never know. But it's entirely possible that had that not happened, we wouldn't be here where we are today. And one of the key ways that Maha obtained power is, is they obtained the legitimacy of my profession, the medical profession. So evidence based medicine doctors from Harvard, Stanford, UCSF and Johns Hopkins teamed up with Kennedy to lend him legitimacy. And these guys obtained power by histrionically claiming that public health officials were totalitarian tyrants who, who wanted to seize power and send troops into the street in order to control Covid. Or they might wanna do that if there was a future pandemic. And I'm not being histrionic. So, for example, one of the chief officials at the fda, Vinay Prasad, who we've all talked about many times, tweeted that public health wasn't always a dystopian hellscape intent on using police and military power to maximize compliance. But it is now. J. Bhattacharya cut a propaganda video in which he warned of a biomedical security state should another pandemic arise. And this is set to this ominous music and footage of police in riot gear. And back to Vinay Prasad again. He wrote this article, how democracy might end. COVID19 gives a roadmap for political control in which he warned that should there be a future, future pandemic, a future tyrant might behave exactly like Hitler. And he made that very clear. You know, linked to might be Nazi Germany 2.0. And here we are today with troops in the streets, you know, harassing innocent citizens. I don't think I need to tell anyone here about that. And these guys are silent. Matter of fact, they're more than silent, worse than silent. They stand behind Trump as all of this is happening.

D (5:48)

Yeah.

E (5:49)

So this is the massive irony that's so hard to take. Right. Is that there are these histrionic claims, all of this Covid revisionism that's going on now. And then back then they were warning, oh, this is all sort of the roadmap to authoritarianism. Now we have actual authoritarianism and nothing from them. Right. And they're just going along with all of it because it gets them where they wanted to go.

B (6:14)

Yeah, Again, silence would actually be preferable, I suppose. You know, J. Bhattacharya is claiming that Trump is making America healthy again. So he cut a video where he said it was, quote, ridiculous slander to say that Trump was anything other than anti science. And he said that Trump is making us very, very healthy again. And you know, he became famous by claiming to be silence and censored because YouTube removed one of his videos in 2021 or Twitter deprioritized a couple of his tweets. And here these guys are lending the legitimacy of the medical profession to this authoritarian mad king, Donald Trump.

E (7:04)

Yeah, and one other thing about that, you know, you referenced Rene Persad's comparison of COVID measures to Nazi Germany. And in that paragraph which you include in your essay, he explicitly says that this is a roadmap for a left wing dictatorship, that this is, it is the people on the left who are enacting this authoritarian oppression upon us. And that's what he's really scared of. Right?

B (7:27)

Yeah. No, his exact words were, during the COVID 19 pandemic, some of the most ardent calls for strong restrictions came from members of the political left. So these guys claimed to be apolitical, neutral scientists who were just here to state the facts, when in reality they were political propagandists who openly endorsed Trump, who openly endorsed Kennedy. And they made it clear that the choice was between the sort of fascist leftist takeover or freedom and democracy under Trump.

D (8:08)

So I want to go to three different buckets here of and potentially potential enablers. And Jonathan, you've touched upon all these. We have as well at the podcast. The first is media organizations. And this to me is one of the trickier ones because as someone who's been in journalism for 30 plus years, has a lot of thoughts about how the media functions and operates, but also recognizes that there's always this idea of an unbiased media, which is actually impossible. But there, there, there is a place for, for example, op eds. And I think in the sort of media environment we're in, the social media environment, it's difficult for understand to, for people to understand that there, there has always at least tried to be a difference between investigative journalism and reporting and opinion pages. And so I'm stuck in this place where people shit on the New York Times all the time, sometimes for good reason. And yet there is this. They do invite people to write opinion pieces. Now my personal grudge is that sometimes those opinion pieces are written and they're not actually fact checking medical misinformation. They're letting people just kind of say a lot of crazy shit under the guise of opinion. So they are enabling misinformation in this sense. At the same time, just because they invite someone, I don't like to write an opinion piece, I'm not going to get mad at them for that because that is actually the function of what media is supposed to represent. How are those lines, lines drawn for you and how you cover it? Jonathan?

B (9:41)

Yeah, so I don't know if I have the exact answer to that because the second I sort of say, ah, you know, they shouldn't give space to this person or that person, I'll be kind of accused of censorship, for example. But I think that opinion writers have an obligation to be honest and to state the facts. So, for example, in my article, I included, I did call out the New York Times, in particular one of their former opinion columnists. I think she left a woman by the name of Pamela Paul who wrote this glowing profile of the current head of the FDA, Dr. Marty McCary. This was called the medical establishment closes ranks and patients feel the effects. And she quoted him as saying, you know, we're seeing science used as political propaganda. And it was just this sort of glowing profile of him. And she warned about the dangers of Robert Kennedy Jr. In that same article. And so what did she leave out? She left out that Marty Makary was this massive spreader of COVID disinformation who claimed in May 2021 that we had reached herd immunity. When the delta variant arrived, he said, ah, it's just a flu. Now when the omicron variant arrived, he called it nature's vaccine and oma cold. He was against vaccinating children. He claimed that the one COVID infection led to decades of immunity, that it was probably lifelong. And he said that Robert Kennedy Jr Jr shared quote true stories of children who died immediately after getting the COVID vaccine, when in fact what he did, Kennedy, that is, is he lifted, you know, children who died tragically of other causes who weren't even vaccinated and put their pictures in his book. And claimed that the COVID vaccine killed them. So this how the media sort of laundered and whitewashed disinformation doctors simply because they had fancy titles. A professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins and they claim to speak the language of evidence based medicine. And they're very polished speakers who look very good in suits. And in instead of saying the emperor has no clothes, which is the case with Marty McCary, the New York Times and all of these organizations said, you know, the emperor is dressed beautifully. Look at those fine garments.

D (12:11)

I would personally not call J. Bhattacharya a polished speaker, but Julian, go on.

E (12:18)

I was, I was gonna say, just listening to you there, Jonathan. There's this, there's this overlap between a kind of journalistic, A failure of journalism and a failure of medical science or thinking in medically scientific ways where there's this rush to say, okay, now we know, now we know Covid's not so bad. Now we know if you get it once, you're immune forever. Now we know that the vaccines are not effective or are effective or whatever the various rush to judgment type scenarios are. And I just am curious about your thoughts regarding that. When these, like for example, the New York Times op ed that you refer to when a writer like that is saying patients are feeling the negative effects of the medical establishment closing ranks, like, what's the motivation there? What are they referring to? What do you think hooked them in terms of becoming collaborators in this very bad journalistic and scientific narrative?

B (13:27)

I mean, I think that there's always an attraction to sort of a maverick outsider who is taking on the establishment. And let's be clear that people like Marty Makary, Jay Bhattacharya, Vinay Prasad and Martin Kulldorf were professors at Stanford, Harvard, UCSF and Johns Hopkins. They were the establishment, even though they claimed to be on the outside.

E (13:47)

Well, but they, but they had fringe opinions that, that were not in step with the scientific consensus, right?

B (13:54)

Yes. I mean, absolutely. And I want, I would even say they didn't have fringe opinions. They made fringe claims that. Many of which we've already said, you know, that one infection would lead to permanent immunity. All of these guys massively overhyped the COVID vaccines when they first came out five years ago. Now they were claiming that they would end the pandemic, that they blocked transmission, and they would go on to later claim that anyone who said that was lying and spreading disinformation. But all of these guys are very confident. And what they could do is they could cherry pick mistakes that the other establishment and people like Fauci or Deborah Birx or the head of the nih, Francis Collins, you know, invariably made over the course of the pandemic and say, oh, you know, we were just against that. Or they cherry pick mitigation measures that were unpopular, you know, closing schools, masking toddlers. They're going to be talking about masking toddlers for the rest of their lives and say, oh, you know, we were just against that. We just wanted schools to be open and, you know, children to learn and churches to be open. When in reality, as we've discussed in our previous podcast, you know, these guys were actively pro infection. They claimed that the mass infection of people under age 60 or even under age 70 would lead to herd immunity and end the pandemic in three to six months. And they became famous based on accomplishments that were incredible but entirely imagined. So if you listen to them, they say things like, I would have opened schools, I would have protected the vulnerable. And they proposed protecting the vulnerable. They argued for schools to be open. They didn't do any of these things. They just proposed and they argued for it. They called for things. Now that they have been given the opportunity to lead and prove their real world competency, the agencies that they purportedly lead are crumbling. People who work under them loathe them and mock them, and they leak to the press. For example, J. Bhattacharya is mocked as podcast J and he doesn't even really seem to be running the show there. And measles is spreading and pertussis is spreading and flu is spreading and Covid is spreading. So these guys have shown that they are completely unable to do any of the things that they previously called for. And it's very easy to call for things. I am now calling for them to control measles. I imagine you guys would join me in calling for that and proposing that and arguing for that.

D (16:36)

Well, that's a very radical idea. You know, the second bucket I want to think about is influencers, but I want to specifically focus on some of the people surrounding Kennedy. And one that really hit me. I'd originally not planned on talking about him, but Kirk Milhone, who is now head of asap, he replaced Coldorf. Last month he came out in an interview with a podcast I wasn't familiar with called why should I trust you? And then went back and looked at why should I trust you? It turns out it's like a former John Stewart producer and a bunch of other people. They try to be balanced. They have like Paul offit's been a guest, for example, but then I see that they're doing co productions with Children's Health Defense. And you know, they have Brett Weinstein on, they, they have Zen Honeycut on and they had Milhon on who just, I mean, Elizabeth Jacobs, who's an epidemiologist, she's fantastic, came out and said, this is the most frightening interview I've ever listened to. And then I listened to it and I have to agree with her. He actually said that I don't like established science. Science is what I observe. And he also basically said about the measles. Getting back to your point there, Jonathan, what we're going to have is a real world experience of when unvaccinated people get measles. What is new incident of hospitalization, what's the incidence of death? So he's basically advocating for unvaccinated people to get it. And then they're going to take the data from that to say, ah, fuck it, what did the measles actually do in the wild? What are your thoughts on that?

B (18:11)

Yeah, it, it's horrifying. And he also said about polio. He said, yeah, I think also as you look at polio, we need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now than we were then. Our sanitation is different, our risk is different. And so all those play into the evaluation of whether this is worthwhile of taking a risk of a vaccine or not. And so I think that what we have now is the perfect merger and the tragic and horrible merger of kind of academic evidence based medicine with total quackery. What really sort of clued me into this, I mean, it's obviously Kennedy himself, but, but folks like Sayer G are now spending time with Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Marty Makary and Sayer G, who you guys have covered extensively. He was one of the first people who taught me about the anti vaccine movement because he was married to and partners with my old friend Kelly Brogan. But you know, in 2014, you know, he was writing articles told with her about how the HPV infection was beneficial because it protected you against hpv, you know, which is like poking out your eyes to avoid needing glasses. And he also taught me how mendacious anti vaxxers could be. So he published this list called 200 evidence based reasons not to Vaccinate. This is way back in 2012 or 13. And he rearranged the titles of articles that were actually pro vaccine to make it seem like they were anti vaccine. He changed the word order to trick people. And so that is, who is in charge now? I mean, people like you said Kirk Millhoen. I'm not quite sure how to say his name. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, they want to do sort of a natural experiment and see, and it's happening. What is the death rate of measles now? We're going to find out.

E (20:12)

Well, and the wild thing about that is when you hear people who claim to be experts on these podcasts saying these kinds of things, my first reaction is this is just. You're just illiterate about the history of science on these topics. Like, we already know we've run that experiment before and then we've done the other experiment, which is, let's see how much these epidemics can be improved through vaccines. But then the next thought is, oh, actually, it's not so much the scientific. The literacy about scientific history, the history of medical science, as it's more that they've been exposed to these wacky, quacky pieces of conspiracy theory and disinformation and weird ideas that, no, actually, you know, polio improved not because we had a vaccine, but because we had better sanitation. Right.

B (21:07)

Yeah. And I think actually polio was actually partially caused by improved sanitation. That's one of the reasons that it affects that it. We saw these outbreaks of it in the. In the 40s and 50s.

D (21:20)

So.

B (21:21)

But yeah, and Kirk Mulhoan is sort of saying, you know, back when measles ran rampant in the 1950s and 60s, it used to kill, you know, one out of 2,000, one out of a thousand children. And with better medical care, we're probably gonna, you know, not quite see that death rate today. And I hope he's right about that. That seems to be the case so far that we've had three measles deaths in 2025. But what an unethical, you know, crazy, horrible thing to say. I mean, probably trauma surgery is better than it was in 1960 as well. So that doesn't mean that we're going to be, you know, stopping children from wearing seatbelts, for example. And of course, death is not the only bad outcome from these viruses. Measles can cause encephalitis. Measles can cause blindness. Many years down the road. Measles can cause a secondary brain condition, something called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is universally fatal. I did see one case of that in a woman who got measles in Mexico when she was a child. And even though the vast majority of Children who get measles, thank goodness, recover without any problems. They're sick and they are miserable. This is what pediatricians tell me who treated measles during the outbreak in New York City in 2019. And it's one of these things that if I did this to my children, if I fed them, you know, spoiled milk on purpose, and you know, they had a horrible stomach bug and had to stay home for three or four days, but they healed and were totally fine, I would rightfully be accused of child abuse.

E (22:52)

Well, and this is something that you've pointed out many times, Jonathan, that I think is really good to highlight here is the hypocrisy and the weird inversion of logic, right, where the risk assessment gets so turned upside down, where, you know, vaccines are incredibly dangerous because a tiny percentage of people may have an adverse reaction and an even smaller percentage of those, it turns out to be something they don't recover from. But just letting measles run rampant is okay because we only have a small number of deaths, right?

B (23:22)

Yes. Although the anti vaccine movement would probably argue with you about the safety of vaccines that way they would say they're much more dangerous than they're portrayed to be. And probably this time next year, the CDC is going to be publishing so called evidence that vaccines cause autism and all sorts of other ailments. You know, that is definitely, I shouldn't say definitely, but it's almost certainly coming this year. So we're going to be hearing a lot more fear mongering about vaccines. And they're just getting started. And it's horrific for me to see doctors lend, to repeat myself, lend the legitimacy of the medical profession to all of this. The CDC just slashed the number of recommended vaccines. Taking off rsv, taking off Covid, taking off flu, hepatitis A and B in the meningococcal vaccine. And Marty Makary and Jay Bhattachary were there promoting that, saying this is a way to save vaccines. Because we are creating a hierarchy of vaccines. We really want parents to get the measles and polio vaccines. And so we're gonna be cut other vaccines. This idea that vaccines are in competition with each other, which I first encountered I think in 2022 by Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Hogue, another high official at the FDA today who said we shouldn't vaccinate children against Covid because if we do that, then parents won't get their children vaccinated against measles and polio. So they faked a concern about the routine vaccine schedule in order to further their mission of infecting unvaccinated children with COVID And again, these are the people to circle back to where we started, who are now sitting there twiddling their thumbs while Trump sends troops into the streets of Minnesota.

D (25:25)

I want to get to the journal articles in the third bucket, which will be next, but to go back to the influencers for just one more moment. You know, it doesn't surprise me that Paul Saladino is talking about pull up bars in the airports and won't talk about ice, for example. But when you get really close to Kennedy, you have Cali Means, who of course is one of his closest advisors and runs an alt Med True Med grifting company using HSA dollars to buy supplements. He was on the MAHA report, which is a Wednesday YouTube live stream that Tony Lines, the founder of Skyhorse Publishing, runs every week. It's part of Maha Pack, which is their organizer, organizing and fundraising committee. And this week Cali comes on and I mean, you guys might not have seen this, but he basically comes on and it's a year into Maha and Kennedy's tenure and what is he open with saying? Change is harder than we thought it was going to be and it's moving slower. And then he goes, so we're going to talk about three things now. He ended up getting cut off because he was at the airport. But the first thing he opens with after saying they've done all of these amazing things this past year is that we really need to focus on affordability of health care. This is the exact opposite message that they've been saying the whole time. They've been basically going with fuck healthcare, except in emergency situations, we have the products that are true health care. And now he's turning to an affordability message. Now again, I know you might not have heard that yet, but just having him having said that, how does that make you feel about what they're doing?

B (27:05)

Sounds nice, but I don't trust a single thing these guys have to say. And you know, as you point out, he is a supplement salesman, he is a pill pusher. You know everything. Every accusation with these guys is a confession, right? Instead of, as you guys know, oatmed people often say that doctors like myself, we want to treat the symptoms and cover up the symptoms rather than getting at the root cause of disease. And which of course is what vaccines do, they prevent the root cause of disease. And these days, people like Kennedy are suggesting covering up the symptoms by treating measles with vitamin A and cod liver oil, things that probably cowie means has to sell. So even when these guys say things that sound good, like reducing animal testing, I mean, my God, I love dogs and cats and animals. Who wouldn't be in favor of that? It's just something that you can't begin to trust anything that they have to say ever on anything.

D (28:07)

Agreed. So the third bucket kind of spills over into that because it's about the organizations that are being built to support this movement. So MAHA Action, the MAHA Report, Maha Pack, all of them are interconnected. You also have Children's Health Defense, of course, because that's Kennedy's or you know, he says he's philosophically or you know, divested from them, he doesn't get a paycheck from them. But I, without sounding conspiratorial, I'm gonna guess they all have WhatsApp ch where because I get emails from all of them. And the MAHA report and CHD are publishing the same shit every day. They're coming across often, often within the hour of Kennedy going on Twitter and announcing it. So these articles are written and ready to go at this point. Then you get the journals which there was, some of them have started and are planning on starting in order to publish their own scientific reports. This to me is one of the most dangerous aspects of what they're doing. How, how do you possibly combat seemingly legitimate scientific journals coming out with these reports? And now they're going to turn to this, these saying this is the gold standard science that shows that vaccines and autism are linked, that fluoride and drinking water. Because the EPA just announced they're going to do a major review of that today. How, how do you possibly stop that tidal wave?

B (29:31)

I'm not very good with solutions at this point. If I knew how to stop this stuff, it never would have happened in the first place. You know, I've been trying, as have you, trying to fight all these guys since 2021 or since 2020. So I'm kind of out of ideas about how to, how to fight them at this point. I'm more in the frame of let's just document this so everything is, nothing is forgotten to history. But you're absolutely right about this. And I wrote about this on February 21, 2025 on science based Medicine. I wrote an article, misinformation Doctors start a Misinformation Journal to spread misinformation information. And it's about this journal. I forget what it's called at this point, but it the the Academy of Public Health or something like this. It's called the journal of the Academy of Public Health, which was who? Who. The people who are on it are people who we've talked about and Martin Kuldorf, Jay Bhattachari, Marty McCarry, Scott Atlas, another signer of the Great Barrington Declaration, Sunitra Gupta and John Ioannidis, a former giant of evidence based medicine who starting six years ago, started spreading. I think he was patient zero for Covid disinformation. So yeah, the co opting of the legitimacy of Medicare journals is a big problem. But none of this is new. This has all happened before with the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry. I think the only thing that's changed is that these people are now in charge. But the technique of using medical journals or scientific papers to launder pseudoscientific ideas is an old, tried and true technique. None of this is new.

E (31:18)

Yeah, I mean, I hear you, Jonathan, saying you're not really good at coming up with solutions. I have to say this essay to me feels like one of your most expansive, sort of passionate analyses of this intersection of Maha and Maga. And I hear it as ending with actually a really powerful call to action. Like you're saying, don't normalize any of this, Keep track of all of it. Let's write the history faithfully. Which side are you on? We have to hold these people to account. Do you think that this is part of what helps us to return to some kind of collective sanity?

B (31:55)

Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, I think very few doctors in the year 2026, or scientists or really anyone can deny the reality of what's happening. Whereas this time last year, or certainly in 2021, 22, 23 and 24, a lot of people, I think, had their head in the sand. I don't want to claim that I was some sort of Nostradamus who predicted all of this. Things are actually much worse than they predicted that I would turn out to be. But one of the first things that I said, one of the things that I said the first time we spoke, and this was actually a quote that Matthew kind of pulled out as being the key quote of my first time on conspirituality, was that Kelly Brogan won the pandemic. And little did I know how right I was at the time, now that all of her ideas have gone mainstream. And so I think the medical community is now fighting back in very important ways. So first of all, there's almost a public health secession at this point and a lot of states and certainly a lot of medical Agencies are rightly saying, ignore the cdc, ignore the fda. These are completely untrustworthy and we're just going to pretend that they don't exist, which is the exact right thing to do. So I don't mean to say that the situation is hopeless and certainly individual doctors will have individual conversations with patients. And my patients, some of whom I've known Now for almost 20 years, you know, trust me. And they, because we have developed that relationship and we've worked hard over, over that time to get to know each other. And they view me, hopefully correctly, as a reliable source. So I don't want to say that everything is sort of lost and this sort of thing. What I mean is in my role as kind of a writer and science communicator, I'm not really trying to solve the problem at this point so much as to explain how we got here. And I like your three buckets, Derek, because I think that's all very important. But I would add sort of a fourth one, which is the legitimate medical community. All of the people who are now horrified, rightly a lot of them were treating J. Bhattacharya, Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad as these good faith actors who just had different ideas, they just wanted schools open, all of this sort of thing, when in fact, and at that same time, Vinay Prasad was saying public health officials, leftist public health officials are Nazis and the only way we can restore our democracy is to put Trump back into office. Or Vinay Prasad wrote this article that sabotaging RFK Jr. S confirmation will increase vaccine hesitancy. He portrayed Kennedy as the savior of vaccines because Kennedy was gonna finally do all of the research studies that would forever the debate about whether or not vaccines are safe. So at the same moment Prasad, Makary and Bhattacharya were spreading this wild disinformation, there was a whole group of other doctors who were treating them as legitimate sources, as these good faith actors. And so I really think the medical community needs to do some sort of introspection about that and realize, you know, where we fail and why were. It's going to sound like I'm sort of patting myself on the back a little more than I hope to, but, but why were so few people calling them out? In other words, Peter Hotez should not be famous, or Paul Offit should not be famous because there should be a thousand Peter Hotez's, there should be a thousand Paul Offitz. And to be clear, there were, I mean there was a. I don't want to make it seem like it was just 10 of us. There was a huge group of doctors and scientists trying to push back on this information disinformation. But we're kind of a ragtag group. We don't have a Jeffrey Tucker supporting us. We don't have big money supporting us. And our universities. They kind of view this as kind of an odd, quirky thing, as if I was a stamp collector. Like, okay, that's not good, that's not bad. It's kind of a quirky thing that you do. So I really think the medical community needs to, to look inwards and see how we can stop this from happening again.

F (36:35)

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