The COVID pro-infection lobby and its relentless campaign against public health in Jonathan Howard’s “Everyone Else is Lying to You”

More than 420 state bills “attacking longstanding public health protections such as vaccines, milk safety and fluoride” have been introduced in the U.S. so far in 2025, an Associated Press investigation determined in October. Around 30 bills in 12 states have already been enacted or adopted.

The onslaught against American public health includes the calculated paralysis and internal gutting of agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, through what the AP calls “an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law.”

From the earliest months of the pandemic, long before the first Trump administration gave Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines emergency approval in December 2000, the disinformation was already a blizzard. By March that year, it involved a coordinated effort to remove all mitigations, for a campaign of intentional mass infection among the unvaccinated, based on the discredited idea that doing so with a novel pathogen would pave the way to lasting immunity.

It hasn’t so far. As in the UK, mass infection across the States has instead driven outsized rises in long-term sickness. Thousands of research papers on PubMed and other healthcare databases now confirm that repeat reinfection from SARS-CoV2, the virus causing COVID, is commonly associated with lasting immune system dysfunction, lymphopenia (damage to T cells), long COVID, and multiorgan inflammation.

In Everyone Else Is Lying to You, Jonathan Howard’s outstanding, clear-eyed sequel to We Want Them Infected, the same pro-infection lobby that battled each mitigation now seeks to blame U.S. health agencies and vaccines, not the virus, for the nation’s devastating rates of excess death and injury from SARS-CoV2 since 2020.

Disproportionate damage

The United States makes up 4 percent of the world’s population, but by mid-2020 had 25 percent of COVID cases worldwide, itself likely an undercount.

That means disproportionate damage relative to peer countries, but also disproportionately fatal errors in response. Almost from the start, Howard shows from meticulous reporting, a battle was pitched against conventional, widely-adopted methods for reducing infectious disease: testing and isolating; masking and ventilating, especially in hospitals and healthcare settings; vaccinating; and adopting air filtration methods for SARS-CoV2 and other airborne pathogens.

“The lockdowns are killing people,” was the key refrain (here, Scott Atlas, quoted in 2020, p. 293). According to current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and other academics associated with the Brownstone Institute’s Great Barrington Declaration, school closures in particular were causing “catastrophic” harm to children, including by shielding them from a virus they somehow had an “obligation” to catch. Other distortions included the suggestion, in the spring of 2000, when morgues were already full, that NYC Emergency Departments weren’t overrun by people with COVID, and, when disputed, that NYC Emergency Room respiratory visits may have been panic-driven.

For more than five years, the anti-public health campaign ran on the theme, “Fear the vaccine, not the virus” (224, 250). Concerning the last, whose severity has repeatedly been contested and minimized, the public ought to “stop living in fear” altogether (468).

Fear the vaccine, not the virus

Cavalier from the start about the supposedly “limited” risk of SARS-CoV2 infection to all but the elderly in care, leaving unvaccinated children and teens to suffer the consequences, a group of fringe doctors backed by the partisan Brownstone Institute pushed out a contrarian narrative that, Howard shows, had devastating real-world consequences.

The narrative had to minimize all COVID harms but also, somehow, to maximize the damage caused by harm reduction—in this case, from trying to limit and reduce infection. Hence, the group’s coordinated attacks on schools closing from illness among pupils and staff, over the same purposive infection the group was in fact openly encouraging. When contested, its tack with schools changed to concern about “learning loss,” “lockdown damage,” and the supposed “epidemic” of mental health damage that both had caused.

The Brownstone Institute published dozens of articles blaming lockdowns for sky-rocketing rates of long-term sickness; blaming long COVID on masking; blaming doctors for faulty and “excessive” intubation of their COVID patients; even casting doubt on the actual numbers reported dead and dying, and whether they were inflated.

A coordinated attack on pandemic interventions

In July 2020 and December 2021, investigative reporters Stephanie M. Lee at BuzzFeed and Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch at the Center for Media and Democracy independently confirmed, a coordinated “attack on pandemic interventions” was underway by a pro-infection lobby that was loudest as the Omicron variant surged—and loudest in dismissing the deathly wave it caused as “mild.” As cases and deaths rose, Bragman and Kotch warned, “a shadowy institute filled with fringe doctors” had become “part of big business’ two-year strategy to legitimize attacks on pandemic interventions.” Their report, a major contribution to Howard’s Everyone Else Is Lying to You, focused on pro-infection lobbyists and academics whose central push was to “Hijack the War on COVID”—to dismantle all remaining mitigations, leaving the virus free to infect almost everyone.

Claiming victory after 1.2 million deaths

For the COVID contrarians, an anti-lockdown, pro-infection lobby from the start, the national loss of more than 1.2 million people, a population equivalent to Dallas or San Diego, fails to move or generate concern. Their fame and influence came from podcasts and YouTube channels quick to hypothesize better outcomes from almost-complete inaction. Among the most critical, because tied to greatest risk: that herd immunity would be reached by April 2021 from fewer than 10,000 deaths, mostly from viral infection; that children and teens would not get dangerously ill from SARS-CoV2, and should thus not be “deprived of the opportunity” for infection.

In reality, Howard shows in exhaustive and devastating detail, the COVID contrarians not only claim victory even after more than 1.2 million U.S. deaths, but now run the same agencies that are charged with protecting us from the continuing pandemic, as from future ones. According to BNO News, tracking the limited data still reported, “So far this year, more than 5.2 million COVID cases have been reported in the U.S., causing 365,302 hospitalizations and 22,658 deaths.”

“Not only is COVID their responsibility,” Howard warns, but “outbreaks of once-controlled diseases are happening on their watch, and it is their job to contain them.” Instead of taking steps to contain outbreaks of COVID and measles in schools from Florida to Utah, including by recommending mass vaccination, the same infectious disease contrarians are now sitting on their hands, part of a “movement to deny the entire plan for herd immunity through mass infection even existed.”

Among the most-troubling takeaways from Everyone Else Is Lying: while medical disinformation helps a handful of its sponsors, it does untold damage to the agencies entrusted with protecting from the ravages of infectious disease, and to a public still submitting to repeat reinfection on the doubtful assurance that doing so will at some point result in lasting immunity.

Howard, J. Everyone Else Is Lying to You: How the Medical Establishment Weaponized Doubt to Spread COVID, Normalize Quackery, and Undermine Public Health. Redhawk Publications.

Featured image is Anti-vaccination protest near Leicester clock tower, by Pierre Marshall