COVID killed 1.2 million Americans, injured millions more, and it’s not over yet. Although a vaccine was developed in record time and saved millions of lives, hundreds of thousands of people perished due to anti-vaccine disinformation.
Despite all this, the public entrusted the pandemic’s biggest disinformation superspreaders, Robert Kennedy Jr. and his coterie of duplicitous doctors, with the keys to America’s health and scientific infrastructure. Today, they are taking a wrecking ball to things, and there are years yet to go. The U.S. may never recover from their ineptitude and wanton vandalism.
How did this happen?
That’s the question I try to answer in my new book, Everyone Else is Lying to You (available from Redhawk Publishers). Its central premise is that an indifference to disinformation that began in March 2020 led directly to Kennedy and his crew today. There’s a direct line between doctors who claimed that COVID would kill under 40,000 Americans back then and the scientific sabotage under their leadership today. Doctors who spread obvious falsities- Herd Immunity is Still Key in the Fight Against COVID-19, We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April, Should We Let Children Catch Omicron?, Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? – weren’t shunned as pariahs by the medical community. Rather, they were often glorified as brave mavericks and ultimately rewarded for their dangerous absurdities. Although their disinformation and destructive intentions were out in the open for years, most medical “leaders” ignored their threat until it was too late.
March 2020 and May 2025
With crucial contributions from journalist Walker Bragman, Everyone Else is Lying to You explains how the doctors I warned about in We Want Them Infected, aided by MAGA politicians, billionaires, a complicit media, and cowardly institutions, weaponized doubt to rewrite the history of the pandemic, normalize quackery, and elevate themselves to power. Had the election turned out differently, many people would have dismissed Everyone Else is Lying to You as “COVID hysteria nonsense”, as often happened with We Want Them Infected unfortunately. Instead, we are witnessing the intended consequences of a deliberate, coordinated, well-funded, years-long propaganda campaign. And in reality, even though every article I wrote here last year warned about MAHA, I greatly underestimated the threat. The doctors I write about are enabling everything that is happening now- the purges and the censorship. All of it.
While I view Everyone Else is Lying to You as the sequel to We Want Them Infected, I intend for it to stand on its own and tell a different story. We Want Them Infected was the factual refutation of WWTI doctors’ falsehoods and anti-vaccine disinformation. Unlike that book, Everyone Else is Lying to You does not contain detailed data explaining why rare, temporary vaccine side effects aren’t as bad as death from COVID.
Rather, Everyone Else is Lying to You is about the manipulative techniques WWTI doctors and their benefactors used to manufacture rage and how they then used the anger they deliberately stoked to catapult themselves to power. Although Everyone Else is Lying to You contains many pages of WWTI doctors’ disinformation, its primary aim is to zoom out and reveal the methods they used to undermine trust, the threat they pose to the entire concept of public health, and the failure of institutions to respond.
In many ways, I am a collector and curator as much I am an author. 25 pages of We Want Them Infected were simply quotes of doctors declaring the pandemic over, starting in April 2020, and Everyone Else is Lying to You can similarly be thought of as a reference book. Everyone Else is Lying to You once again presents lists of articles and collections of quotes to show how seemingly credible doctors, sheltered from the consequences of their words, repeatedly drilled rageful messages of doubt into the public consciousness to minimize COVID, promote their political agenda, elevate their personal brand, and empower cranks and quacks.
Though they deeply resent me for doing so, I’ve preserved the words of WWTI doctors to show how they deluged the public- on podcasts, social media, TV, opinion pieces, YouTube videos, and congressional testimony- with messages of mistrust and fury. WWTI doctors were everywhere, except hospitals. Thanks to their efforts, many people are convinced that the only problem with COVID was that we tried to contain it and that doctors who minimized it are brave truth-tellers.
The key passage of We Want Them Infected was this:
In this book, I will toggle back and forth between an imaginary world, where the pandemic ended many times, and the real world, where COVID remains the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
In the imaginary world, COVID only threatened the old and infirm. In the real world, tens of thousands of children and young adults were seriously harmed or killed by COVID.
In the imaginary world, pediatric vaccines were dangerous and useless. In the real world, the vaccines are imperfect but much safer than the virus for children.
In the imaginary world, all it took to protect nursing homes and open schools was to say “protect nursing homes” and “open schools.”
In the real world, this was impossible when the virus was allowed to spread freely. In the imaginary world, contrarian doctors were silenced and suppressed. In the real world, they were loud and influential.
Everyone Else is Lying to You is another dark descent into the imaginary world, except now the doctors who created it with their fantasies and fabrications are in charge in the real world. I submitted the final draft at the start of June. Already by then, the toxic incompetence and malevolence of Kennedy and his minions was on full display, and I discuss it all in the book. In its conclusion, I predicted that things would only get worse, a trivially easy prediction to make, and indeed things have gotten worse. I could write another volume about the debacles and disasters that have happened this summer alone. We have already reached the point where Andrew Wakefield is taking a victory lap, and we are utterly doomed if COVID-26 arrives.
Many people found it impossible to get through We Want Them Infected without throwing it against the wall in fits of rage. I have no doubt that Everyone Else is Lying to You will trigger a similar reaction.