Interview with Jonathan Howard on Covid Contrarians

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2023

⏱️ 128 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The pandemic was a confusing time with public health messages from officials and institutions that were sometimes confused, conflicting, or misrepresented and anti-vaccine misinformation being spread widely. Into this mix, a new phenomenon emerged, that of the covid contrarian. Contrarian doctors usually possessed some relevant qualifications and positioned themselves as independent critical thinkers willing to challenge the dogmas of the mainstream and take a more nuanced perspective on the claims made by anti-vaccine advocates.

These contrarian figures are the voices that you would usually hear on 'heterodox' podcasts. Figures like the medical doctor Vinay Prasad, the Stanford professor of Medicine Jay Bhattacharya, or the retired nurse, John Campbell.

But did they really offer an alternative critical perspective? Our guest today, Jonathan Howard, a practising doctor and professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, argues no. And he should know, he has spent the pandemic not only treating patients but tirelessly documenting (and refuting) the claims made by the contrarian set.

This episode is unfortunately topical due to the recent online fracas surrounding Joe Rogan's credulous promotion of RFK Jnr and the subsequent 'calls for debate' and targeted harassment of Dr Peter Hotez -a public health specialist and advocate for affordable vaccines.

In any case, we learnt a lot and enjoyed the discussion with Jonathan and hope you will too. Also covered in this episode: How many pull-ups Matt can do, why Chris is drinking a chalky green potion, and the psychology of placebos.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	And the So, Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's the podcast where an anthropologist and a
0:28.4	psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to
0:32.0	understand what they're talking about.
0:34.0	I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavatar.
0:36.0	How are you doing today, Chris? You feel unhealthy, feeling chipper.
0:39.0	I'm a regular Mr. Motivator. You won't't know him at, he's a celebrity from the 90s, I think, in the UK.
0:47.0	He was like a kind of exercise, TV exercise man who wore bright rainbow clothes black British guy yeah mr
0:56.1	motivated I don't know of him but you're my motivator because you have a pull-up
1:01.6	bar in your office and you have been doing pull-ups and that inspired me to buy my own pull-up bar and attempt to do pull-ups.
1:08.0	But I think the ratio of my arm muscle to belly fat is prejudicial and I've managed just a few and then I
1:17.5	hurt my arm so I waste some ways to go there Chris. I could be an evangelical person for pull up bars because I think
1:28.9	they're kind of exercise and there's lots of variations of stuff that you can do right but like
1:34.1	they're easy to do in a set amount of time that's what I need my I need efficiency I'm an
1:40.8	optimizer I've got things to be doing so I need to and I you know have
1:45.4	young kids have jobs and have a podcast and whatnot so I need to make my exercise time
1:51.2	extremely efficient.
1:52.6	It is efficient.
1:53.6	I'll grant that because it totally
1:56.2	fucked my arms in like three minutes.
1:58.1	Yeah, you know, I'm one of these people.
2:01.4	I like the sense of progress right like that you
2:05.2	initially can do X amount and now you can do Desamine and so on so yeah that's that's good
	...

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