I listen to everything by the Conspirituality trio. Recently, two of their episodes featured doctors I’ve discussed previously, Drs. Kelly Brogan and Vinay Prasad. This karmic pairing allowed me to reflect on the first anti-vaccine doctor I knew, Dr, Brogan, as well as copycats like Dr. Prasad, who before the pandemic rejected her sort of quackery.
Interestingly, Dr. Brogan is the “origin story” for both Conspirituality and myself. I’ve discussed how I trained with her, we were cordial, and she was a fine doctor. However after graduation she started posting anti-vaccine content to Facebook. I was both fascinated and horrified. I started to learn all about the anti-vaccine movement, much of it from SBM. By the time the pandemic arrived, I was well acquainted with anti-vaccine techniques and had written a textbook chapter with Dorit Reiss, The Anti-Vaccine Movement: A Litany of Fallacy and Errors, Everything that’s happened over the past 5 years was very familiar to me. None of the anti-vaccine arguments were new.
I was also familiar with Dr. Prasad’s work before the pandemic. I didn’t agree with everything he said, particularly about the value of debunking anti-vaccine myths and medical misinformation. However, I liked his book Ending Medical Reversal and thought our disagreements were in good faith.
Drs. Brogan and Prasad have traveled a great distance from who they were in 2015. Currently, Dr. Brogan is in a dark and strange place. The Conspirituality podcast on her was titled Kelly Brogan’s Divine Dungeon, and you have to hear it to believe it. Dr. Prasad meanwhile is where Dr. Brogan was in 2015. The Conspirituality podcast on him was titled Vinay Prasad’s Pick-me Campaign, and it said:
Derek and Julian look at two recent videos that signal that Vinay Prasad might be angling for a position in a potential RFK Jr-run HHS—and all the misinformation he continues to spread.
Indeed, these days Dr. Prasad sounds very much like Dr. Brogan did 10 years ago, when she too was just “questioning vaccines.” For example in his article Should We Let Children Catch Omicron? Dr. Prasad wrote:
What kids really need, however, is a return to normal. And when it comes to infectious disease, normality means a world where they are routinely exposed to, and overcome, viral illness. For children, getting sick and recovering is part of a natural and healthy life…
Dropping masks, quarantines, distancing, and all other mitigations will allow children to develop the kind of broad immunity gained by living a normal life.
Shielding kids from exposure only increases their future risk. This is partly why the UK does not vaccinate against chickenpox. Serious complications from the disease are rare among children, and the circulating virus allows adults to be naturally boosted against reactivation-driven shingles. By rebuilding population immunity among the least at-risk, moreover, we help buffer risk for those most vulnerable.
Normal” has been an option for adults — it’s time to allow children to resume normal life, not simply because their exclusion is unfair or hurts them socially and psychologically, but because it is immunologically in their best interest. Parents must consider that exposures are how we best protect our children against the variants of the future. In fact, it is reckless to let children age into a more serious encounter with a disease best dealt with while younger.
That was all very familiar to me. It was almost verbatim what Dr. Brogan wrote in articles such as HPV Vaccine Maker’s Study Proves Natural HPV Infection Beneficial, Not Deadly and Vaccination: Your Body. Your Baby. Their Flu. In that article, Dr. Brogan said:
This better way embraces periodic sickness as part of comprehensive wellness. The only way to truly protect ourselves and our infants is through natural immunity bolstered by wild-type exposure in the community. Once you have a particular flu strain, when it comes around again, you will be uniquely protected, and you will pass on this protection to your newborn. There is no replacement for this. We cannot outsource our health to pharmaceutical companies. They just don’t know what health is.
Beyond glorifying viruses and treating vaccine side effects as a fate worse than death, other similarities abound. Both Dr. Prasad in 2025 and Dr. Brogan in 2015:
- Used their stellar credentials. They claimed to be evidence-based to call out medicine from within.
- Wrote themselves into the script. They developed a persona and created a parasocial relationship with their audience.
- Mastered social media. Both of them were early adopters and saw the power of videos, podcasts, and Tweets.
- Monetized their content. They have customers who expect them to provide the content they are paying for. They would lose money if they said positive things about vaccines.
- Were vulnerable to audience capture. Each of them has been radicalized by their audience.
- Portrayed themselves as enemies of Big Pharma.
- Use emotionally charged language to manipulate, provoke, and inflame their audience. Both of them compared COVID mitigations to Nazis (Brogan, Prasad).
- Told their audience to distrust anyone who disagrees with them. Drs. Brogan and Prasad are masters at spreading doubt. Both of them claim only a select few people can be trusted, while everyone else is lying to them.
However, there is one key difference between Drs. Brogan and Prasad. Dr. Brogan is a true believer. I am sure her children are unvaccinated, and she supports people like RFK Jr. because she believes in his movie Vaxxed 3: Authorized to Kill.
Dr. Prasad knows this is quackery however, and would never leave his child vulnerable to measles and polio. Dr. Prasad supports RFK Jr. for political reasons, and so he has to pretend that RFK Jr.’s disinformation doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. When confronted with something he can’t wish away, like Samoa, Dr. Prasad absurdly fakes ignorance – “What did RFK say in Samoa? I don’t know“. Though Dr. Prasad markets himself as a neutral arbiter of scientific data, he is now a political actor and online marketer. It’s silly to pretend otherwise.
However, the biggest difference between 2015 and 2025 has nothing to do with Drs. Brogan and Prasad themselves. It has to do with us. Previously, anti-vaccine doctors were pariahs in the medical community. In 2017, Dr. Prasad had this to say about an anti-vaccine doctor:
Wow, this quack is the head of an institute of an actual medical center?
A lot has changed since then. Today, such “quacks” are esteemed faculty at top medical schools, and their misinformation gets reframed as “heterodox thinking”. Some of them are on the cusp of seizing great power, and things are going to get much worse from here. This is what I meant when I said that Dr. Brogan “won the pandemic” during my appearance on Conspirituality.
You see, I agreed with Dr. Prasad in 2017, and unlike him I haven’t changed a bit.