“I know you are, but what am I?” John Leake and Peter McCullough vs. conspiracy theories

I have argued that all antivaccine pseudoscience is based on variations of a conspiracy theory that I first dubbed in 2014 the “central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement.” Indeed, more than that, I’ve argued that all science denial is a form of conspiracy theory. Unsurprisingly, antivaxxers, quacks, and science deniers who rely on conspiracy theories to support their world view take umbrage at correctly being labeled as conspiracy theorists, to the point that I consider it almost a sine qua non of conspiracy theorists that they will defend their conspiracy theories as being about actual legitimate conspiracies and then engage in projection by accusing those pointing out their conspiracy theories of engaging in—you guessed it!—conspiratorial thinking and conspiracy theories. This brings us to an excellent example of just this phenomenon by John Leake and Dr. Peter McCullough in the form of a post on Dr. McCullough’s Substack by Leake entitled What Is A Conspiracy Theory? While this could be a fact-based description of how to differentiate a conspiracy theory from an actual conspiracy, the tagline (“Examining a pejorative label”) gives the game away. This is about portraying their conspiracy theories as actual conspiracies demonstrated by evidence. It’s all about projection.

Regular readers have likely heard of Dr. McCullough before. Most recently, I described his advocacy of yet more COVID-19 quackery, this time claiming that nattokinase can be used to “detox” yourself from spike protein from COVID-19 vaccines and thus treat “vaccine injury.” However, this was far from the first example of Dr. McCullough’s antivax stylings and quackery. Although Dr. McCullough had jumped on the antivax quack train far before, about two years ago I noted that he had been promoting the false claim based on the usual antivax misrepresentation of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database that COVID-19 vaccines were causing mass death and destruction—and dogs and cats living together—and that Mike Adams (yes, Mike Adams) and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (yes, RFK Jr.) were using his statements to support the conspiracy theory that these vaccines were part of a “depopulation agenda.” Since then, Dr. McCullough has been a regular fixture at conferences and rallies opposing vaccines, masks, “lockdowns,” and basically every other public health intervention against the pandemic, while promoting disinformation about vaccines by writing bad review articles (e.g., with longtime antivaxxer Stephanie Seneff), and promoting the false “died suddenly” conspiracy theory that vaccines are supposedly killing young people—especially young athletes—in huge numbers.

But who is John Leake? I hadn’t heard of him before, but apparently he is the co-author of a book with Dr. McCullough entitled The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex. Leake’s Amazon.com profile reveals that he’s studied history and philosophy and had been working as a freelance writer and investigative journalist before meeting up with Dr. McCullough, something that happened thusly:

In March 2020, when SARS-CoV-2 started to spread in the United States, he perceived that the pandemic response was illogical at best, and possibly criminal. He found it especially suspicious how quickly public health officials dismissed repurposed medications such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. In November of 2020, he watched a video of Dr. Peter McCullough’s U.S. Senate testimony about early treatment. He sensed from this performance that Dr. McCullough was likely to lead the way in developing a more rational, honest, and humane response to the crisis. He made contact with McCullough in Dallas, Texas, where both authors live, and together they wrote “The Courage to Face COVID-19.”

Leake “found it especially suspicious how quickly public health officials dismissed repurposed medications such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin”? On what basis? After all, Leake has no medical training that I have been able to find; so what made him qualified to “question” the public health establishment. As I have long said, anyone can “question” a scientific consensus, but if you don’t have the expertise and the data, there is no reason that scientists and physicians should take your “questioning” seriously. Also, as I’ve discussed, even though both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin did demonstrate antiviral activity in vitro against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the concentration required was at least an order of magnitude higher than what could be safely achieved in the human bloodstream with oral (or even intravenous) dosing, meaning that the prior plausibility that the drugs would work was always very, very low. Surprise! When tested in randomized clinical trials, neither drug was effective at treating or preventing COVID-19.

Unsurprisingly, though, Leake was drawn to a convenient quack who echoed the sorts of bad science that he wanted to hear and, more importantly, put the seeming imprimatur of a “brave maverick doctor” on COVID-19 minimization and antivax conspiracy theories. So the two wrote a book and appear to share credit for what I had initially thought was just Dr. McCullough’s Substack, Courageous Discourse. Perusing the Substack, I now see that Leake writes a fair amount of its content.

Back to Leake’s projection about conspiracy theories. His Substack entry starts out:

In our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, Dr. McCullough and I give numerous examples of how anyone—even eminently qualified scientists and researchers—who questions the prevailing orthodoxy about a range of public policy issues will likely be labelled a “conspiracy theorist.”Since the JFK assassination, “conspiracy theorist” has become a pejorative, accusatory label like “racist” or “sexist.” Through common usage, the label has become charged with the power to smear and dismiss someone outright without supporting evidence. 

The greatest trick that powerful interest groups ever pulled was convincing the world that everyone who detects and reports their activities is a conspiracy theorist. Only the naivest consumer of mainstream news reporting would fail to recognize that powerful interest groups in the military, financial, and bio-pharmaceutical industries work in concert to further their interests. Their activities cross the line into conspiracy when they commit fraud or other crimes to advance their interests. The term “conspiracy theory” suggests the feverish imaginings of a crackpot mind. This ignores the fact that the United States government prosecutes the crime of conspiracy all the time.

There you have it, a succinct encapsulation of how conspiracy theorists push back against the accusation that they are conspiracy theorists by invoking real conspiracies throughout history, as Leake immediately pivots to do:

A person may be charged with conspiracy to commit a crime even if he doesn’t know all of the details of the crime. History is full of well-documented conspiracies. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, there were three major conspiracies to murder her and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. All were detected and foiled. The final “Babington Plot” was discovered by Elizabeth’s secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham (an astute intelligence gatherer) and this led to Mary’s execution for treason.

Are we really to believe that there are no longer power-hungry men who conspire to acquire greater power and wealth?

That last rhetorical question is what we in the biz call a straw man argument. After all, no one calling out conspiracy theories claims that there are no real criminal conspiracies like the ones described by the history-trained Mr. Leake in his quote above or that there are “no longer power-hungry men [note to Mr. Leake: don’t forget power-hungry women, too, as anyone can be power-hungry!] who conspire to acquire greater power and wealth.” Of course there are and have been throughout history! The issue is to distinguish between a conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. I will even concede that occasionally there might even be gray areas between the two—although I will also add that these borderline cases are apparently so rare that I have a hard time thinking of even just one right now as I write this.

Mr. Leake also invokes what is meant by the word “theory,” in which he comes so very, very close to the difference between a real criminal conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, while skating right past it:

As far as “theory” goes, every prosecutor develops a theory of a crime and presents it to the jury. If you are a concerned citizen and you perceive that your government officials and media are not telling the truth about a vitally important matter, you have no choice but to formulate a theory of what is going on. Developing a theory to explain a pattern of ascertainable facts is a rational attempt to detect and expose criminal conduct. To be sure, some theories are more plausible than others. Some are logical and coherent; others are wild and contradictory.

So very close, but yet so far! Predictably, Leake then pivots to try to give credence to his and McCullough’s conspiracy theories by appealing to a famous warning by President Eisenhower in his farewell speech as he was about to leave the Presidency:

When President Eisenhower left office in 1961, he expressly warned about what he called the Military-Industrial Complex acquiring “unwarranted influence” that could “endanger our liberties and democratic processes.” When COVID-19 arrived, the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex vigorously and exclusively pursued the vaccine solution instead of the early treatment solution. In order to realize their ambition, multiple actors simultaneously waged a propaganda campaign against hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other repurposed drugs.

I note that President Eisenhower was not exactly suggesting a conspiracy by the military-industrial complex, but rather warning about how this complex could acquire too much power and influence in the context of the government partnering with industry to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Ironically, in making this comparison, Leake actually outright states a common conspiracy theory among antivaxxers, namely that “they” were only interested in a vaccine to combat the pandemic and ignored the supposedly “inexpensive” sorts of “early treatment” fake “cures” that quacks like McCullough were selling (e.g., ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and various combinations of repurposed drugs, vitamins, and supplements like zinc). It also never occurs to Leake that the reason that public health officials dismissed these “early treatment” protocols was not due to nefarious intent, but because there was no evidence that they worked. Quite correctly, they viewed these treatments as dangerous because they didn’t work.

At this point, I also can’t help but note once again that in those early dark days of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, reputable hospitals (mine included, unfortunately) included hydroxychloroquine in their recommended treatments for COVID-19. As I’ve discussed before, these recommendations were based on dubious, confirmation bias-filled observations by physicians in Wuhan that 80 of their patients with the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosis who were taking hydroxychloroquine for their disease appeared to avoid infection with the novel coronavirus, as well as a small and hastily run clinical trial. These very weak lines of evidence led Chinese health authorities, probably out of desperation because there was nothing else, to recommend hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. These reports, plus some very bad science by a famous French scientist, Didier Raoult, inspired the FDA to make the horrible decision to issue an emergency use authorization for the drug in late March 2020. The EUA was eventually rescinded, as randomized controlled clinical trials increasingly showed that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective against COVID-19. This is hardly public health officials rejecting hydroxychloroquine out of hand.

Perhaps this is a good time to discuss briefly again the key characteristics of conspiracy theories versus actual conspiracies (which I’ve discussed before in much greater length), because conspiracy theorists like Leake and McCullough frequently conflate the two, to make it seem as though they conspiracy theories that they spin are in reality just actual criminal conspiracies, backed by evidence. To that end, I like to refer to Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook’s excellent e-book  The Conspiracy Theory Handbook. Again, as I do every time I discuss the general concept of conspiracy theories, I will reiterate that, of course, actual conspiracies do exist, but that such real conspiracies are not discovered by the methods of conspiracy theorists. Instead, they are uncovered by much more conventional methods of investigation, such as those used (for example) by investigative journalists, police, historians, forensic auditors, and, yes, scientists and physicians—in other words, the methods of skeptical inquiry and science. I also note that, predictably, COVID-19 very quickly became a magnet for conspiracy theories. (In fact, I noticed the first ones in January 2020, including the first version of the lab leak conspiracy theory) two months before the World Health Organization even declared COVID-19 a pandemic.)

This brings us to Lewandowsky and Cook’s useful mnemonic describing the key features of conspiracy theories, CONSPIR:

• Contradictory.
• Overriding suspicion.
• Nefarious intent.
• Something must be wrong.
• Persecuted victim.
• Immune to evidence.
• Re-interpreting randomness.

Personally, I tend to view many of these as different sides of a conspiracy die—yes, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons—for example, overriding suspicion plus “something must be wrong” combine to result in a belief that there must be nefarious intent, leading to the reinterpretation of randomness that rapidly becomes immune to evidence. If it weren’t for the “CONSPIR” acronym, there’s no way I would put the part about conspiracy theories being contradictory first, because, as Cook and Lewandowsky note, the contradictoriness of conspiracy theories is secondary to the overriding suspicion, which drowns out any obvious contradictions, which conspiracy theorists rarely care that much about anyway. The contradictoriness inherent within conspiracy theories is, however, a useful marker for skeptics that they are probably dealing with conspiracy theory not conspiracy.

Leake concludes by dividing “them” into the true conspirators and the useful idiots spreading the conspiracy theories:

It’s likely that only a relatively small number of these actors knew they were making fraudulent claims about the generic, repurposed drugs, and knew they were taking action to impede access to these drugs based on fraudulent claims. These actors were the conspirators. Countless others unwittingly played roles in the conspiracy because they themselves believed the propaganda.

Just like the FDA issued an EUA for hydroxychloroquine, whose use was, unwisely, actually encouraged based on very shaky evidence plus desperation by many doctors for a few months early in the pandemic! In fact, for a few months, hydroxychloroquine became a de facto standard of care for COVID-19, even at some very reputable hospitals; that is, until the evidence made it clear that it was not effective against COVID-19. Yes, that’s sarcasm. Leake apparently does not remember that history, although no doubt he will claim that the reason the FDA, government, doctors, and the public health establishment eventually turned against hydroxychloroquine was because big pharma wanted to profit from a vaccine and expensive monoclonal antibody cocktails, viewing a cheap drug like hydroxychloroquine as a threat.

Just like nearly all conspiracy theorists, in the end, even as he tries to blur the line between real conspiracies from history and the conspiracy theories that he believes and promotes in order to conflate the two, Locke can’t help promoting a conspiracy theory himself. In this case, it is the conspiracy theory that there exist inexpensive and highly effective treatments for COVID-19 (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and various “early treatment protocols”) that “They” don’t want you to know about because “They” want to control you and profit. Same as it ever was for conspiracy theorists trying to convince you that their conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory at all, but a real conspiracy. They engage in projection—but will never admit that it is projection.

The only thing I can’t decide is whether Leake and McCullough are the conspirators or just true believers who serve as useful idiots to spread the conspiracy theories. Perhaps they’re both, depending on the specific claims.