Looking back on my output last fall, I was pretty much a one-tricky pony. Along with countless others, I desperately tried to warn people about Robert Kennedy Jr. and his crew of disinformation doctors. My SBM articles were titled:
Wendy Orent and I similarly sounded the alarm on our podcast last year, with episodes titled:
- RFK Jr.’s Controversial Moves and the Future of Anti-Vaccine Politics
- The Perils of Pandemic Revisionism: RFK Jr. and the Threat to Public Health
- RFK Jr., Big Pharma, and Disinformation
- Election-Eve Anxiety: What RFK Jr.’s Public Health Control Could Mean for America
- RFK Jr.’s Anti-Vaccine Appointments: A Dangerous Future for Public Health
- RFK Jr., Medical Misinformation, and the Fight for America’s Future
None of this was brilliant or particularly insightful. I wasn’t breaking any news or uncovering any secrets. The risks of Kennedy and MAHA doctors were blindingly obvious and out in the open. They broadcast their intentions for all to see. I merely paid attention and cared about their threat. I pleaded with others to do the same. This was a major theme of We Want Them Infected.
I was also quoted in a New York Times article at that time titled Trump Picks Stanford Doctor Who Opposed Lockdowns to Head N.I.H. In it, I pointed out that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya “bungled basic facts” and provided one of countless examples. In March 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya predicted COVID would kill fewer than 40,000 Americans. Things didn’t work out that way. I thought that this was important, and that most people, especially doctors, would share my concern about our future NIH director.
I was wrong about that.
However, the problem was worse than just “shruggies”, a term coined here by Dr. Val Jones to describe doctors who are indifferent to pseudoscience. I am sure many doctors saw my repetitious articles about MAHA last year, rolled their eyes, and quietly moved on. That’s fine. However, several doctors, let’s call them mockies, went out of their way to humiliate and belittle those who corrected disinformation. Their core function was to bolster MAHA by undermining and discrediting those who warned about it.
None of this was mockery unique to me, and many others had it much worse. However, one particularly illustrative example comes courtesy of a doctor I will call Dr. Mocky, who thought my warnings were funny, an opportunity to make jokes and boost their social media profile. They posted a screenshot of my quote in the New York Times with the following comment.
What grave sin had I committed to deserve this spiteful tirade? I must have quoted Dr. Mocky’s friends and explained why I disagreed with them. I don’t recall interacting with Dr. Mocky before, and there was no semblance of a good faith argument from them. Predictably, they didn’t bother to point out anything I had gotten wrong, and they never will. Data, science, and evidence didn’t matter to them.
According to Dr. Mocky, I lacked the qualifications to critique someone of Dr. Bhattacharya’s immense stature. In their vision, a lowly “psychiatrist” who worked on COVID units in NYC and had written volumes exposing medical misinformation had no right to critique a health economist who made podcasts from his office listing all the amazing things he “would have” done. While I was just some blowhard on a plane, Dr. Bhattacharya was a titan, capable of running the entire industry.
Elsewhere, Dr. Mocky insulted me- they called me “fringe”- and then incredibly accused me of doing nothing but insulting people. Apparently my books and 200 articles here are just thousands of pages of me slinging slurs. Predictably, they didn’t bother to provide any examples of that either, and they never will.
While Dr. Mocky faked a concern about my decorum, they were utterly indifferent to the fact that Dr. Bhattacharya insulted people and bungled basic facts. Although I handed Dr. Mocky evidence of Dr. Bhattacharya’s duplicity on a silver platter and it was staring them right in the face in their own screenshot, none of that mattered to them. They simply brushed away the difference between 40,000 and 1.2 million deaths as my “strong feelings”. There were countless more such examples of Dr. Bhattacharya absurdly minimizing COVID and spreading obviously fake statistics. Dr. Mocky didn’t care at all. The countless real people who suffered and died as a result of COVID disinformation didn’t bother them in the slightest.
The only thing that bothered Dr. Mocky about Dr. Bhattacharya’s plan for herd immunity via natural immunity and his blatant anti-vaccine disinformation was that I sought to counter it. There was literally nothing I could have said to get them to take any of this seriously. It was all just a Twitter game to them, and they couldn’t seem fathom that some of us actually took medicine seriously and cared about the victims of disinformation.
Fortunately, I’ll never meet any mockies, and I’ll survive their juvenile japes. Of course it was decidedly unpleasant to be greeted with a deluge of childish behavior from my peers for the sin of trying to alert them, which was their goal. Mockies wanted to make me feel rotten, wear me down, and ultimately get me to stop publicly criticizing MAHA doctors.
However, the problem isn’t that they were insulting and denigrating me, the problem is that they were insulting and denigrating my warnings. I wrote serious articles- read them yourself- warning the world that Kennedy and his crew were dangerous, and mockies told the world I was a “dishonest, nasty and woefully ignorant” psychiatrist who spews “COVID hysteria nonsense” and “ridiculous sensationist hyperbole”. I brought facts, they brought grievance and emotions.
Worst of all, they taunted me- and again, none of this was unique to me- specifically to elevate and protect doctors who fluffed Kennedy. At the same time I was begging people to pay attention to Kennedy’s threat, Dr. Bhattacharya was singing his praises, glorifying him as the savior of American medicine and science. Dr. Bhattacharya had already spoken at one of Kennedy’s presidential rallies, and in his article RFK Jr. Will Disrupt the U.S. Medical Establishment from November 2024 he said:
The American public voted for disruptors like RFK Jr in 2024, and academic medicine now has an opportunity to atone for its Covid-era blunders. If it engages constructively, it can participate in crafting and implementing reforms that would, indeed, make America healthy again.
As with COVID disinformation, Dr. Mocky wasn’t the slightest bit bothered by this. In fact, Dr. Mocky specifically tagged Dr. Bhattacharya to let him know he had his back.
Dr. Mocky also collaborated with Dr. Vinay Prasad last fall, back when he was writing gems such as Sabotaging RFK Jr’s Confirmation Will Increase Vaccine Hesitancy. While Dr. Mocky said my warnings were “fringe,” he never objected to Dr. Prasad’s vulgar MAHA/MAGA propaganda. That silence also sent a message.
Author note: My YouTube channel is back!
Today, in addition to the purges, censorship, attacks on universities, and banned words, MAHA doctors are integral to Kennedy’s efforts to dismantle vaccines in the U.S. Thanks to their efforts, Dr. Andrew Wakefield is taking a victory lap. I’m glad that I at least tried to stop these malevolent actors. Mockies can’t say that. When medicine and science were under attack, they rolled out the red carpet.
My recent writing has been a record of how we got to this sad moment, and mockies are part of that story. Their collective mockery played a role in numbing people to a dangerous threat, and I don’t need their permission to merely remember that. It wasn’t that long ago, and no one forced them to behave this way. They chose to shield MAHA doctors. Obviously, in the scheme of things Dr. Mocky’s single Tweet was a speck of dust, forgotten by everyone except me. However, there was a whole class of such influencers, who may not have spread disinformation themselves, but nonetheless berated those who warned about it with content-free taunts all just to preen on social media.
I also can’t help but wonder if things might have turned out differently had more doctors had behaved with a modicum of professionalism and simply cared about obvious disinformation when we had a chance to contain it. What if more doctors reacted to Dr. Bhattacharya’s prediction of 40,000 COVID deaths with shock and concern, instead of calling me a dumb dumb stupid head? What if these doctors had joined me, and many others, in sticking our necks out and taking risks to warn about MAHA? What if we had presented a unified front to oppose disinformation?
Sadly, we’ll never know.
I also wrote several articles last fall discussing the many doctors who had enabled MAHA doctors to that point. They were titled:
That last article said:
Hopefully Mr. Kennedy will never gain power. It’s bad enough that it’s a real possibility. However, if it happens, I don’t want to hear a peep out of some doctors.
I’ve done some thinking and changed my mind about that. Although doctors weren’t unified before, maybe we can be today. We should all work together to oppose MAHA in any way we can. I won’t complain today, when they regurgitate our warnings from before. Indeed, Dr. Mocky is saying things like this in 2025. Better late than never, I guess.
Mockies might even be useful today in a way I cannot. Unfortunately, another article from me exposing MAHA won’t move the needle an inch. After all, a lot of people think I am just a random fool on a plane. Doctors who previously volunteered as defense attorneys for MAHA and have just now realized its risks, have no unique insights and nothing to teach those of us who recognized the danger long ago. However, after years of willful blindness, mockies’ newfound opposition to the forces they previously championed might send an important signal: If even the doctors who laughed at COVID disinformation and its victims are concerned, something must be seriously wrong.
So while I encourage mockies to speak out today, I also feel they should do something they’ve obviously never done before and actually read my writing, or that of anyone who warned about MAHA previously. We’ve done the hard work for them, and if they honestly care about standing up for science and medicine, they need to learn everything they’ve deliberately ignored the whole time. I bet they won’t find any of it funny. No one who has actually read my books has said laughed at them.
