Jonathan E. Howard, MD

Jonathan E. Howard, MD is a neurologist and psychiatrist who worked throughout the pandemic at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID (2023) and Everyone Else Is Lying to You: How our medical establishment weaponized doubt to spread COVID, normalize quackery, and undermine public health (2025). Both books rigorously document how social media influencers and prominent physicians and scientists, some of whom are now high-ranking officials at various agencies in the US Department of Health and Human Services, started working immediately after the pandemic arrived to downplay the severity of COVID-19, argued for a “natural herd immunity” approach to the pandemic, and then cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines beginning soon after they arrived. It is his mission to prevent these officials from memory holing their scientifically inaccurate and irresponsible past statements on the pandemic through rigorous documentation used to remind our readers of how vociferously they opposed science-based public health interventions and regularly spread scientific misinformation and disinformation.

An archive of Dr. Howard’s posts for SBM can be found here.