Alex Berenson: Public Health's Wrongest Man

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Transcript:

Way back in the Spring of 2021, The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote a piece that went viral, christening writer Alex Berenson as “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man.” More than five years later, Berenson has worked hard to change that moniker, and I think today we can finally celebrate his success. The COVID pandemic has now transitioned into an endemic presence, and so Berenson has branched out to the point that I think we can now safely dub him “Public Health’s Wrongest Man.” And I know, that’s a tough title to take from someone like, say, RFK, Jr., and I certainly understand arguments in Bobby’s favor. But before you run to the comments, I need you to see what Berenson just posted on Xitter:

On August 25, 2026, he wrote, “UPDATED 2026 US MEASLES DEATHS, BY AGE:

0-5: None

6-17: Zip

18-39: Nada

40-59: Zeeeero

60+: Zilch

I blame 

@RobertKennedyJr”

An impressive NINETY MINUTES LATER he came back with this devastating update: “just after I posted this, Pennsylvania reported two deaths from measles, the first in the United States 2026.”

Whoops.

If you aren’t familiar with Berenson, he’s a former New York Times writer, of course, who is now a spy novelist and professional online dipshit opinion-haver. Prior to COVID he was best known for writing an entire book in which he argues that Reefer Madness was a documentary and that cannabis causes severe mental illness, which…it does not.

After COVID, he became best known for being wrong about COVID. As Thompson details in The Atlantic, Berenson went on Fox News to argue that it was ridiculous anyone could think half a million Americans would die by the spring of 2021 (which ended up being an undercount), that masks wouldn’t limit the spread, that vaccines wouldn’t work, and that vaccines would cause MORE deaths. Basically, he was wrong in every way it was possible to be wrong, but not only did he grow a huge audience on social media, and not only did media outlets continue to platform him, but apparently he’s still out there saying things and people are still listening.

He’s been downplaying measles for months now, despite the fact that cases have been growing and vaccination rates dropping for more than a year. Last year I talked about how serious of a disease this is and how safe and effective the vaccine is: immunizing children protects them for life from a virus that is horrifically contagious. As of March of 2025 when I made that video, there were three separate outbreaks encompassing 164 people and one child had already died. Two more deaths soon followed and by the end of 2025, there had been 2,286 cases. Experts say that one to three kids will die from every 1,000 cases, so that tracks.

This year, the numbers have been even more dire. By August, we already surpassed the total number of measles cases from the previous year, so statistically speaking it was only a matter of time before a child died. Sure enough, Pennsylvania authorities have now reported their first two measles deaths in 35 years. As of this recording, they haven’t revealed information on the victims besides the fact that they’re in Lancaster, a heavily Amish area, and that they were unvaccinated. That’s hardly a shock: the measles vaccine is one of the strongest, most effective, safest vaccines we have, which is why last year 96% of cases and 100% of deaths occurred in unvaccinated people.

And it’s worth noting that as I mentioned in my video last year, the alternative to dying of measles isn’t necessarily living a good and healthy life. Unvaccinated people who contract the disease risk “a week or two of high fever, coughing, and diarrhea, and a chance at seizures, brain inflammation, and blindness. About 60,000 children go blind from measles every year. As a fun bonus, if you aren’t vaccinated, then measles cripples your immune system, meaning that once you recover, you are more at risk of catching every other disease in existence.”

Despite these simple facts, Berenson shat out his sheets downplaying the risks associated with measles, like in June when he compared the total deaths from measles this year to those caused by drowning. Xitter is a Nazi-infested hellhole but I do sometimes scroll down to peep the comments, and I was amused to see this top reply from “Truthseeker73:”

“Need a drowning vaccine now,” a comment so close to getting it that I clicked the bio to confirm that no, this is a moron who did not get it. Because yeah, we don’t have a drowning vaccine. Unfortunately, the best we can do is regulate fences around pools and educate parents and teach kids to swim. 

But we DO have a vaccine for measles, which is how we eradicated it from the United States a quarter of a century ago, and which is the only reason why it’s taking as long as it is to maim and kill more kids. If we had a vaccine that you could give an infant and prevent them from drowning for the rest of their life, just like the measles vaccine, these idiots would say it gives you turbocancer. They’d put pools in their backyards and hold drowning parties because Joe Rogan told them that drowning and being given mouth to mouth makes you statistically less likely to drown.

So, what did Berenson do after acknowledging that two people were revealed to have died within 90 minutes of his disgusting post pretending that measles isn’t a big deal? Simple: he threw a distraction grenade. Currently pinned to the top of his profile, he writes, “You'll hear a LOT in the media about those two measles deaths today.

“Know what you won't hear? If this trial is right, Tamiflu has killed tens of thousands of elderly, sick Americans since 2000, while Roche has made $20 billion on it. And the media's hyped it at every step.”

Forget about those two probable-innocent-unvaccinated-children who died needlessly of a preventable disease! Look over here! The media REFUSES to talk about this much worse thing, which is “tens of thousands” of people being killed by a common drug!

Let’s set aside the fact that this is an obvious, desperate attempt to change the subject. Let’s deal with this brand new, unrelated argument head on: he’s right! You won’t hear the media talking about a new study that says Tamiflu has killed tens of thousands of people since 2000, because there isn’t one that says that. My source is the actual study that Berenson is desperately flailing towards.

So, the biggest issue with what Berenson is whining about, here, is that the study has not yet been through peer review. It’s a pre-print, and what do I say ALL THE TIME ABOUT PRE-PRINTS? You must take them with a grain of salt. Actually, an entire shaker of salt. Peer review is not perfect, but it is a very important step towards verifying that a study actually found what its authors claim they found.

For that reason, it’s totally fine for professionals in the field to chat about the study and its possible implications, as Paul Sax does here in NEJM Voices, but it is grossly unethical for a mainstream news source to trumpet the findings before they’ve been published. So, it’s actually a great thing that you aren’t hearing about this study right now.

The other issue I have with Berenson’s post is that the study itself does not claim that Tamiflu has killed tens of thousands of people. Maybe it has! But that’s not what this study found and that data is not even in the study to extrapolate.

Tamiflu, or oseltamivir, is an antiviral that was approved in the US in 1999 to treat influenza, following two double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials. For the entirety of its history, it has been the subject of great scrutiny concerning whether or not it actually works, with Cochrane conducting several reviews that found it was pretty worthless, starting with one in 2006 that was later retracted and another in 2014 that still stands but which has been criticized by organizations like the CDC and, of course, the manufacturer of the drug, Roche.

Whether or not it works for the average person who gets the flu is one question; another is how it affects people who are hospitalized and critically ill. That’s the target of this recent study, in which investigators sorted 442 critically ill patients into one of three categories: 5 days of Tamiflu, 10 days of Tamiflu, or no antiviral at all.

They found that not only did the Tamiflu groups not do better than the control, but they did much worse. After 90 days, 13.7% of the control group had died, while 19.8% assigned to 5 days of Tamiflu and 19.4% assigned to 10 days of Tamiflu had died.

That’s pretty bad! But here’s the thing: that’s ONLY for critically ill people over the age of 12 who were in the hospital and receiving organ support–hooked up to machines that are helping to keep them alive. This study says nothing about children and adults who are otherwise healthy and who take Tamiflu as recommended immediately after symptoms appear.

The researchers suggest that when someone is too far gone, the antiviral might negatively impact their immune system, which makes things worse for them, but more research would be needed to say for sure.

So, does this mean that Tamiflu has killed tens of thousands of people? Again, no, not necessarily. This needs to pass peer review, and then it should be replicated, and then someone needs to add up all the patients who have taken Tamiflu while hospitalized with influenza and on organ support and crunch the numbers to figure out an estimate of how many of those people may have survived had they not taken Tamiflu. At that point, we can talk numbers, and maybe class action lawsuits. I mean, this is the United States, after all, where multibillion dollar pharmaceutical conglomerates can push for their medications to be approved and prescribed on scant evidence and then we, the consumers–I mean patients–can sue them decades later after those medications kill us. It’s the American way.

So that’s the actual story behind the Tamiflu study that no one, rightfully, is talking about.

But here’s the really crazy thing that someone should tell Alex Berenson: even if this study is published as-is tomorrow, we can still talk about two things at once. We can talk about ineffective and even dangerous medicine sneaking past our crumbling safeguards, AND we can talk about how children MUST be immunized against measles using a vaccine that has been proven safe and effective throughout the past 57 years, because if those vaccination rates continue to fall, then we are very likely to see more children maimed and killed in the coming months and years.

Alex Berenson: Public Health's Wrongest Man (YouTube)