Medical misinformation has a peculiar advantage: it can outlive the evidence that disproves it, especially when yesterday’s contrarians become today’s policymakers. In Everyone Else Is Lying to You, physician Jonathan Howard keeps the receipts, documenting what prominent COVID dissenters actually said—and asking how being spectacularly wrong became, for some, a pathway to influence rather than irrelevance.
Jonathan Howard, MD, is committed to public service. He’s a physician and a warrior in the battle against medical misinformation. His first book, We Want Them Infected (2023), explained the nature of the Great Barrington Declaration and the thoughts of its signatories, as documented in their own words. In his follow-up, Everyone Else Is Lying to You: How Our Medical Establishment Weaponized Doubt to Spread COVID, Normalize Quackery, and Undermine Public Health(2025), he explains how we’ve arrived at this moment where those “contrarians” and “fringe” scientists are now in charge of our healthcare research and regulatory establishments.
Howard is the self-appointed archivist of all the nonsense that was spewed during the pandemic and since. He’s done such a thorough job documenting the words of COVID-19 contrarian doctors that when YouTube took down his channel that simply reposted Vinay Prasad’s videos to remind the public of what the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research said during the pandemic, Howard didn’t miss a beat: “I’ve worked diligently to preserve their words. I don’t want them to be censored or have their voices erased. Quite the opposite. They deserve to have their pandemic pronouncements amplified and remembered for the rest of their careers” (see “An Open Letter to the President of Stanford, Jonathan Levin” at sciencebasedmedicine.org).
Everyone Else Is Lying to You includes many bulleted lists of headlines, articles, quotes, and more from the relevant actors. This can go on for pages. Without this thorough documentation, the relevant views and words from this group of people—many of whom, like Prasad, are in positions of great power and influence—would be memory-holed. Even with this record, society has been quick to dismiss and forget under their constant barrage of nonsense.
Related on the SLP
It’s easy to dunk on people for silly errors. Science communication is hard, so when people make it easy by fumbling a statistic or making a patently absurd statement, taking a quick victory lap is understandable. But that’s not the case here. Howard was never looking for the quick victory lap; he is looking to make the case against actual arguments. Everyone Else Is Lying to You contains dozens of examples for every person, every false claim, and every problematic policy declaration. Howard comes across as trying to understand how people with a long record of being horribly wrong seem to be winning the fight by misinterpreting science (the charitable interpretation), playing politics while accusing opponents of doing exactly the same, and using popularity and platforms to justify their correctness.
Everyone Else Is Lying to You is a public service. We’ve been witnessing revisionist history related to the pandemic and, more broadly, over the past six years in general. This book helps level-set reality and demonstrates that it’s too easy to be a dissenting voice screaming about the corruption of the powers that be (with no evidence), especially when the dissenter feels no real responsibility to patients or society at large. Howard has sounded the alarm over this story for the masses.
Katie Suleta is a regional director of research in graduate medical education. Her background is in public health, health informatics, and infectious diseases. Follow Katie on Instagram @dr.katiesuleta
A version of this article was originally posted at Skeptical Inquirer and American Council on Science and Health and has been reposted here. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find American Council on Science and Health on X @ACSHorg and Skeptical Inquirer @SkeptInquirer
