Are We Too Afraid of Germs? Immunologist Dr. Steven Templeton on Healthy Infections, the Appearance of Safety, and Shutdown Culture

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Up until early 2020, the idea that you would wear a cloth face covering to prevent giving someone else a respiratory infection or acquiring it yourself—there was no evidence to support that. But after things had been shut down for a while, there seemed to be a need to give the public something that they could believe was going to make them safer—convince them that maybe they could go out if they just wore something over their face. That was enough. That was the appearance of safety, giving them that control—the illusion of control.”

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Steven Templeton, professor of immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine and the author of a new book, “Fear of a Microbial Planet: How a Germophobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe.”

“It’s offering people this idea that they can completely eliminate risks—for their children, for themselves,” says Dr. Templeton.

Could our fear and excessive avoidance of germs and microbes actually be backfiring? And how will the rise of what Dr. Templeton calls a “safety culture” impact future generations?

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Steve Templeton, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Steve Templeton:
Great to be back.

Mr. Jekielek:
It must have been about a year-and-a-half since we sat down for the first time. I remember it very well. You’re a quiet voice of reason amidst the pandemic madness. You’ve now written a book, and it’s one of the books that I’ve been waiting to read, actually. Let’s start with the microbes. We’ve come to believe that microbes are somehow bad, and should be eliminated. But you argue in this book that this type of mentality is part of the problem that got us here.

Dr. Templeton:
Yes, absolutely. It wasn’t that we’ve started thinking a certain way, because a lot of the thoughts about our relationship with microbes had been shifting in the decades leading up to the last three years. It was changing to microbial exposure being something that is, on balance, beneficial. You can see the opposite of that in old news stories, some of which I found doing research for the book, about antibiotics.

There was an era of what I call, “The only good bacteria is dead bacteria.” The advent of antibiotics was hailed as something that was going to cure every single infectious disease. Antibiotics would be something we’d be encountering in daily life, in things like toothpaste and candy, and that would make our lives better, sort of sterile, and bacteria-free.

Obviously, we know that’s not something that is desirable. That would definitely have serious trade-offs, such as in the treatment of livestock, and other areas where antibiotics have been used heavily. There are definitely downsides to those types of large environmental-large scale uses of antibiotics. Today, nobody would argue that there is no trade-off. But then, the idea that other things might have trade-offs, like infection with respiratory viruses, was starting to get into the scientific discussion a few years ago, but then took a direct pause sometime in 2020.

Part of my goal was to revive the idea that healthy people being exposed to respiratory viruses, colds, and flu is just part of normal life, and that actually strengthens people, and allows them to deal with similar infections and other pathogens that have similar structures. Part of the book was to revive that idea, and bring it into the context of the pandemic that we just had.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re not saying that you want to take the most lethal pathogens and consume them to see if you can make it. Basically, it’s a way we think about our relationship with these things, which in big concentrations can sometimes cause us harm. You say there are more bacterial cells or microbe cells in the body than human cells, do I have that right?

Dr. Templeton:
Right. In order of magnitude, it’s 10 times different.

Mr. Jekielek:
10 times, I certainly didn’t know that. What are these cells, why are there so many of them, and are they really a part of us?

Dr. Templeton:
That was gaining a lot of traction in the scientific world, and even in newspaper articles and science communication articles in the last 10, 15 years. Putting it in the context of the Covid pandemic was going to be unique, which others hadn’t necessarily thought of up to this point.

Mr. Jekielek:
I learned how important a role these various microbes play in our lives, and in our development all the way from birth, helping us gain immunity and protection from other diseases. It’s a very complex interplay, and you chart a lot of these different pathways.

Dr. Templeton:
Right. These are emerging areas. You always hear about some hot, new study that shows that you might be able to treat autism with a probiotic treatment, and these are things that haven’t necessarily panned out. But there’s a lot of promise there with various first world diseases, that there are some components of microbial exposure, or lack of, that someday could be mimicked, or induced in a therapeutic way to lower things like allergies, autoimmune-type diseases, and gluten sensitivity. There’s a lot of evidence that’s related to microbial dysbiosis. That means the microbes in our body are not in the form and composition that they should be.

How to relieve that is another matter once you start getting into therapeutics, because there’s been a lot of research in this area that’s had promise, but hasn’t really panned out. It’s really fascinating to think about how, although we can’t avoid exposure to microbes, we are better at it than we ever have been. There has been a trade-off to that, which I talk about quite a bit in the book.

Mr. Jekielek:
Some of the trade-off is that some diseases which weren’t a big issue are suddenly a big issue.

Dr. Templeton:
Absolutely. You can show the maps pretty clearly with autoimmune diseases and asthma. It’s completely inverse in first world or developed countries vs. developing countries. If somebody moves before the age of 10 from a developing country to a developed country, they then take on that susceptibility to those first world diseases. The converse is also true. If somebody moves before the age of 10 to a developing country, they get that lower susceptibility. It’s definitely something that occurs earlier in life, and that’s the critical time point. Most of us have kind of missed that, so we’re stuck with whatever environment that we grew up with.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s been an observation recently that there’s a lower incidence in many of these first world diseases among the Amish. Have you thought about that?

Dr. Templeton:
Yes. I talk about a study comparing the Amish with a similar religious community called the Hutterites, that are not as adverse to modern conveniences. You have two semi-isolated communities, but they have completely different views on modernity, and how to utilize the things of modern life. The microflora and the microbiota in their guts were very different. Their predisposition to inflammation was much lower in Amish communities, and their exposure to microbes in their home environment was much higher, because they’re growing up on farms, they’re exposed to cattle, and they have large families.

I’ve seen that in talking with people in Indiana. In the book, I talk about a woman who delivered our second child at a home birth, which is very rare in places like Indiana, because it was illegal for a very long time. She had delivered for Amish women. She talked about the kind of environment that she would deliver a baby in, and it would make a lot of obstetricians cringe, with having people in the house that clearly had whooping cough, and things like that.

It’s fascinating to think that these folks are not unhealthy. They’re living at this level, but they still have some advantages to it. Not that everyone should go back and live like Amish people, I’m not certainly in favor of that. But there’s some interesting things that need to be researched and considered in future possibilities for therapies for first world diseases.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are all these different variables which end up confounding each other. They’re exposed to these different microflora and microfauna, and also they’re not vaccinated. There are many different factors that play, and it would be interesting to tease out what are the most significant.

Dr. Templeton:
If you can get the cooperation of the people for these studies, it’s fascinating. It’s a gold mine for immunologists, or microbiome microbiologists as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
How does this juxtapose with what happened with Covid?

Dr. Templeton:
I got the idea for writing a book about the time that the pandemic really took off in April of 2020, and it took about three years to get to the point where the book would then be released. I talk about the way that people reacted, and the things that people thought were going to be very effective, or at least did for a theatrical reason, or the appearance of safety. There were things like shutting down skate parks, putting sand in skate parks, shutting down hiking trails and outdoor activities, and people wearing masks while they’re biking. There’s really no evidence ever for that being effective.

Mr. Jekielek:
Or no logic even.

Dr. Templeton:
Right. In addition to writing a book about how that fit into our perception of our microbial world, I wanted to explain to myself how people were reacting. It was so shocking how wrong I was about how things were going to play out, and how people in my own community and in other communities across the United States, and other Western nations would react to it. Some of it was my own attempt at explaining it to myself, despite being very wrong about how things would be handled.

Mr. Jekielek:
What was your reaction?

Dr. Templeton:
I was floored by things like lockdowns. I never thought that entire sports would be completely shut down, and schools and businesses would be shut down. There was all this activity where leaders had shut down fever. They said, “We just want to shut down something else, what else can we shut down?” It became a competition. That was really surprising to me, because once you start doing that, there has to be a discussion of when you stop doing that, and that didn’t really happen.

I started to be really curious about why this was happening, and especially what was being said in public health circles, before thinking anything differently became controversial. That’s how I got started into it, with this idea that people are not acting in a rational way to keep themselves safer, or to avoid an infectious disease. But I was also not able to understand how the public health aspect of it could deviate from something that had been common sense up to that point.

Mr. Jekielek:
What was common sense to you?

Dr. Templeton:
There was not one person that knew everything about this topic, because you have immunologists like myself that understand natural immunity. But then you have epidemiologists and other public health people that don’t know absolutely every aspect of this, or can explain it. But I felt like you didn’t have to know everything about it, because everyone was being affected by it. I wasn’t just a scientist, I wasn’t just an immunologist, I was a father of children in public schools.

Anybody would have certain opinions, and were allowed to have those opinions. I put it into the context of how children were treated in other subjects and areas. What I came to was the idea that there was a safety culture, and I talked about this in our first interview more than 18 months ago. That ended up being one way in which I could reconcile what happened, and how people reacted.

I came to the conclusion that there was this cultural moment that we’re at where the idea of safety, or even the appearance of it is an overriding factor. That really explains a large portion of what happened and how people reacted, not just leaders, but my own neighbors and people I work with and know personally.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve explored this issue of us wanting safety as a society. In the book, you reference Lenore Skenazy and her project Let Grow, and she’s been looking at this. She became infamous by letting her kid go on the subway on their own, and then she dared to write about it. This highlights exactly what you’re talking about, that we’ve become very risk-averse to the point where there’s a performative aspect to it. That is very disturbing because you can cause huge damage while doing this performative safety. That’s what happened.

Dr. Templeton:
Yes, absolutely. When you let your kids go outside and do some activity independently outside of your supervision, not only do you think, “Are my kids going to be safe? What are the chances something bad’s going to happen?” But you also think, “What are other parents going to think about it? What are the neighbors going to think about it?” I give some examples in the book about that.

One example is, my mother-in-law gave a ride to the kids a few years ago. My youngest daughter was age two at the time, and she was absolutely refusing to come inside after my mother-in-law pulled up in front of the house. She’s older, and cannot wrestle a two-year-old into the house, so she just left her in the car. She came into the house, and left her there for a while. It wasn’t hot, and she figured, “She’ll stew there a bit, and then she’ll be willing to come in.” That’s exactly what happened.

A few days later, I had some neighbors approach me, saying, “I want you to know what your mother-in-law did. There are people out there that might want to abduct a child, and we just wanted to make sure you knew about this.” The idea that someone is hiding behind a tree waiting to abduct a child is just simply not true. The vast majority of children are abducted by their relative, or someone that the family knows. Very rarely is it a case other than that.

But it’s not helpful to tell neighbors that. They think they’re doing something nice, they think they’re helping your child be safe, and they don’t understand the difference between something being likely, probable, or even possible. Even something being possible is enough that we have to take safety measures, and keep an eye on our kids all the time.

This has evolved over the last few decades into something that unfortunately has hurt children. It is now to the point where many of these children have grown up to be adults, and they’re making decisions about businesses, work, and healthcare. They’ve grown up in this world where they think the world is a very, very dangerous place. That’s one thing that goes a long way in explaining how people behaved during the Covid pandemic.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re saying that as long as you assume the worst case scenario, you’ll be on the safe side, but the consequences be damned.

Dr. Templeton:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
You don’t need to think of the consequences. It’s a very strange mentality.

Dr. Templeton:
You don’t think of the trade-offs. My worry is that my daughter will grow up entitled and trying to control everyone. What my mother-in-law did was the right thing to do in that case. What is a bigger deal is this unfounded fear of being abducted right up front of your house. But people don’t think of it that way. They think anyone who allows even the slightest risk to intrude, especially with children, is being incredibly reckless, and that there’s no advantage to any risk whatsoever. The idea that you would take a risk with anything 20 or 30 years ago implied that there was a reward that was possible. Today, that thinking has been lost somehow .

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about the virus. You argue, to use your words, “There’s a monomaniacal focus on one possible threat, to the exclusion of other much more real and immediate threats.”

Dr. Templeton:
Here’s a good example. In New York, they were proposing giving kids $100 to get vaccinated. Mayor de Blasio said, “There is so much candy you could buy with this.” Childhood obesity is exploding in the United States, so that’s an actual threat towards children, and a long-term threat. Instead, it was a mechanism for helping them avoid an almost non-existent threat. There’s a lot of irony here that goes a long way, and it describes how people were just unwilling to acknowledge any sort of trade-off.

Mr. Jekielek:
Even worse than that, it exposed them to a potential threat that they didn’t need to be exposed to. It’s stunning. This is actually one of your chapters in your book. You discuss this question, “How did we forget about actually protecting our children?”

Dr. Templeton:
Yes, you’re exactly right. I like to use the term the appearance of safety, because it’s not even safety. Offering people this idea that they can completely eliminate risks for their children, for themselves, and for anyone ends up replacing considerations of actual safety. Up until early 2020, there was no evidence to support the idea that you would wear a cloth face-covering to prevent giving someone else a respiratory infection.

But after things had been shut down for a while, there seemed to be a need to give the public something that they could believe was going to make them safe, or convince them maybe they could go out if they just wore something over their face. That was enough, and that was the appearance of safety, giving them that illusion of control.

This was before the vaccine. The vaccine provided the exact same type of feeling, despite only having a small amount of evidence that it was effective for a short period of time. It gave people this illusion of control, as one person put it, “A suit of armor came over me when I got my vaccination. I felt like there was this impermeable barrier protecting me from infection.” That illusion was really important to people, even if they didn’t realize it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, who we both know, had a paper that talked about similarities between the Covid response, and the response to HIV. In your book, you describe the HIV-industrial complex. I didn’t realize that a third of NIH funding was actually HIV-oriented. That is an amazing number. Please tell us what happened with AIDS and HIV?

Dr. Templeton:
Yes, you’re right. There’s a lot of similarities there with HIV and how it became this funded industry because of development of drugs and things that inhibit progression to AIDS. It is a somewhat manageable disease at this point, but the research-industrial complex remains. If you’re an immunologist, this is a thing that you’ve had to live with your whole career.

I’ve been a professor for at least a dozen years, and if you’re not seeking HIV-related funds, it’s a lot harder to get your research funded. Having to deal with that is a point of contention for a lot of us. The fact is, there are other diseases worldwide, like malaria, which have a much greater burden on human populations, even in the United States, than HIV does at this time.

To this day, one third of funding for NIAID, the infectious and allergy immunology division of NIH, is HIV-oriented. That doesn’t seem like it will ever go away, because it was built over a certain amount of time, and through a very large lobbying campaign. Some of that was very fascinating. If you go back and look at how it was done, it was selling fear to average people, despite the fact that the vulnerable population for HIV was a very specific population of homosexual men that had 10 or more partners.

Despite the fact that it was possible that heterosexuals could get HIV through sexual contact, or IV drug use, the same level of risk just wasn’t there. Yet there was this very concerted effort to paint heterosexuals as being very in danger, and that this disease would soon spread outside of the population of what was accepted as very vulnerable people.

It was a fear campaign. I remember when I was 12 or 13 and just getting sex education at school. I was hearing about this and trying to decide, “If somebody was just bleeding, am I going to get exposed to HIV, and get it that easily?” There was so much misinformation, but then there was an attempt to capitalize on that to increase power and influence. Some of that playbook survived into the response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Mr. Jekielek:
What were those things that survived?

Dr. Templeton:
There was the idea with Covid of including people as vulnerable that weren’t actually vulnerable, with children being the main example. To this day, the CDC likes to cite that 2,000-something children died from Covid. That number, no matter how small it might be, or whether it represents healthy children or not, or whether it’s even accurate, is not important. It’s important to say that it’s possible that a child could die. It doesn’t matter whether it’s likely, they are trying to eliminate risk completely. They were saying that anybody can get it, and anybody can die from it, which is not really true.

For a healthy child, the risk is almost zero. That was completely lost in the media coverage. It’s a very interesting parallel to how there was this surge of media articles about HIV cases, and one where a guy saw a prostitute 10 years before and came down with HIV. These rare, amplified examples were made to look like they were going to be very common in fact. That same playbook was very evident with Covid.

Mr. Jekielek:
You say, and I’ll quote you, “Highlight four tried-and-true strategies that media outlets use to keep their audience engaged, and their already minimal potential for disbelief suspended.” What you just described is one of them.

Dr. Templeton:
Right. Share the rare example enough times so that it appears as if it’s common. That’s tried-and-true. You see that with, not just HIV and Covid, but in all sorts of areas. People are more likely to click on articles that are negative, and that have some sort of scare factor. The news outlets rely on advertising and clicks. That gets people’s attention, so that’s what they go with.

Mr. Jekielek:
You said the first thing is to cherry-pick statistics, or present them in the worst context. The second thing is to amplify the tragic anecdotes of young healthy people dying to make the audience believe these cases are common. That’s the one we just discussed—use scary models, and pretend their predictions are not just hypotheses or worst case scenarios, but the most likely outcomes. The third thing is to include scare quotes from experts, because the right expert can provide a veneer of authority in your otherwise subjective, bias-confirming piece.

Dr. Templeton:
Yes, the media tactics were enormously successful. Somebody did a poll which I mentioned in the book, about what Americans thought about their risks. It was late in 2020, and only 10 percent of the people could actually get the hospitalization rate for Covid correct—10 percent. That’s how misinformed people were, and that information was actually out there.

If you really wanted to find what the hospitalization rate and the mortality rate for Covid was, you could find that, but not as easily as it should have been. That’s because so much of this fear was being amplified, they were at home, they were isolated, they were a captive audience, and it was something that the media outlets couldn’t resist tapping into, unfortunately.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell me about mass hysteria. What have you learned about this? This is an area I didn’t know much about prior to what happened in the last few years.

Dr. Templeton:
It is fascinating. I give some examples in the book of mass hysterias outside of the Covid pandemic itself. One was from a teen soap opera in Portugal where they portrayed a pandemic, and this was years before Covid. All of these girls in Portugal started coming down with symptoms after this episode aired. It turns out it was an emotional contagion that was a mass hysteria that had spread independently of any infectious agent.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is just a soap opera?

Dr. Templeton:
Yes, but that shows how effective it is. Something that’s real, something that’s tangible, but you don’t necessarily have access to real information about if it is going to be even worse. There are examples with other pandemic psychology studies, that if you’re right next to a hot epicenter of infection and disease, but you’re not quite there yet, that’s when the fear is the highest. But then actually, when it starts to sweep through your community, you see the actual risks, and you can see them with your own eyes.

As more and more communities got swept through with Covid, people got to actually see, “Okay, kids really didn’t get sick at all, and healthy adults were by and large fine.” Yes, people in assisted-living facilities and nursing homes definitely had it worse than anyone else. But the vulnerable population was fairly easy to identify, despite what they had already heard before. They had actual real-life exposure.

Psychologically, there’s a term for that, it’s called the typhoon eye effect. Right when you’re in the middle of the storm, you’re actually calmer, you don’t have as much anxiety, but that’s because you’re dealing with the real effects, and not the fear that comes beforehand.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell me about Covid stress syndrome. I hadn’t heard of this.

Dr. Templeton:
That’s just basically a version of being a germaphobe, activated by Covid, that a psychologist, Steven Taylor, wrote about in a very interesting book called The Psychology of Pandemics. It was very timely, and came out right before the Covid pandemic. Later on, he wrote articles tying that into the pandemic itself, where somebody who’s been prone to OCD [Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder], other types of obsessive disorders, could be driven into Covid stress syndrome. They are constantly going to the doctor, constantly thinking they’re feeling symptoms, constantly thinking they’re being exposed to the virus, and being afraid of other people.

There are articles about people who were already germaphobes before, and obviously, they went completely off the charts; being isolated and feeling like they had to treat others like they were disease vectors, something they were already prone to doing. It was devastating for those people.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell me about the placebo effect, which many people have heard about, but also nocebo, which in some ways is more important here, and less people know about.

Dr. Templeton:
Right. They both have physiological components. With a placebo, you’re taking something, or you actually have an active component, but you’re still feeling the benefits. One example I give in the book is Parkinson’s disease, where the placebo treatment for Parkinson’s actually has beneficial effects, because there are releases of hormones like Dopamine that give the person with Parkinson’s some improvement.

Nocebo effects are the opposite of that, where you’re feeling the negative effects of something, despite actually not being exposed to whatever toxin or virus that you think you’ve been exposed to. An example I give is about a guy who overdosed on depression medication, and thought he was dying, until the doctor showed up and told him he was actually taking the placebo. But his blood pressure had dropped into dangerously low levels, and physiologically, he was actually having a response to that, but nothing could cure him faster than being told that he wasn’t actually taking medication.

Mr. Jekielek:
There were a few days where I thought I’d lost my sense of smell, but then I thought to myself, “That must be because of the suggestibility of Covid.” That was probably the time when I actually had Covid. I realized later I had robust antibodies. I just went through it without thinking much about it.

Dr. Templeton:
Long Covid is a good example of this too. People were reporting their own symptoms, and they’re associating them with being infected with Covid prior to this. But it’s very difficult to have a causation there, where exactly what they’re experiencing is directly related to the infection. The same thing happens with vaccine responses, especially something that doesn’t happen immediately after getting vaccinated, you don’t know if that’s actually caused by the vaccine or not.

One of the strong indicators of somebody with long Covid was women who had a history of anxiety and depression, and that suggests that there is a component there that it’s kind of a nocebo effect and psychosomatic. That’s really fascinating. But anytime you have to deal with this type of self-reported data, you have to figure out a way to get that noise out, and that’s extremely difficult for that type of a study, especially something that’s very diffusely defined, where there are a lot of possible manifestations. Things got kind of out of control with long Covid, where people were saying they were losing their teeth, had rashes, and toe problems. It got kind of crazy how many things were supposedly connected.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right, Covid toe. I hadn’t heard of that until I read your book. Someone made a joke about having Covid toe, and some people took it seriously.

Dr. Templeton:
Aaron Rodgers, the Packer’s quarterback, made a joke about it. It was actually a thing. How relevant it was to Covid is still not quite clear. One subheading in my book is, “From Hearts and Minds to Teeth and Toes.” It’s about myocarditis, brain fog, losing your teeth, and getting Covid toes. That’s the whole gamut, and it’s gotten out of hand.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have a section about the behavioral immune system gone awry. The behavioral immune system, what are you talking about here?

Dr. Templeton:
I’m not a psychologist, but I find it fascinating. The idea that we’re hardwired to avoid infectious disease with our behavior makes a lot of sense, and that’s where the behavioral immune system comes in. People can smell when somebody’s infected. If you inject somebody with LPS [lipopolysaccharide], which is part of a bacterial cell wall, then you can take a shirt they’re wearing, and give it to someone else, and they’ll rate your shirt as not smelling as attractive as somebody who didn’t get the injection.

There are examples of this where things that we find disgusting seem to be hardwired, to some extent. If you had a brand new toilet that had never been used, and you ask someone to eat food out of it, no one’s going to do that, despite the fact that it has no actual exposure to human waste at all, it would be perfectly fine. But that’s just something that we’re hardwired to not want to do, and basically expose ourselves to that, or at least even the thought of it.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s the behavioral immune system functioning effectively, because in most cases you probably don’t want to do that. How has it gone awry?

Dr. Templeton:
That’s getting into the Covid stress syndrome, or going from rational ways of avoiding infectious disease, to the irrational ways of avoiding disease. In that book, The Psychology of Pandemics, an example is given. During SARS-1, a woman went to the bank, and got some cash, and tried to microwave it after she came home to sterilize it, which doesn’t work on money, it actually-

Mr. Jekielek:
Burns it.

Dr. Templeton:
Burnt it up in flames. That’s obviously an extreme example, but we saw that over and over again, where people were dousing their groceries with bleach, even when they were delivered and left on the front porch. There was really no evidence that surface transmission was a major route of transmission for Covid. It was very soon when we started to realize that, but people were still doing these types of things.

Mr. Jekielek:
We were talking about this performative safety, but this assertive behavior suggests something that’s not performative. These people are putting bleach on their vegetables, potentially hurting themselves. No one’s seeing them put the bleach on. There’s something else happening here.

Dr. Templeton:
Right. That’s a subset of people who really are taking it seriously in a way that’s counterproductive. These aren’t obviously the same people that are doing it for performative reasons. But the whole cultural moment where we’re at has increased both of those populations; people who were taking it seriously to the point of irrational behavior, and people who are humoring the people who are taking it seriously by doing these performative, appearance of safety-type measures.

Mr. Jekielek:
Humoring or demonstrating that they’re on the team.

Dr. Templeton:
That’s a whole other thing I get into, that demonstrating your fealty to your political team became a big thing. The Left was very much into demonstrating the virtue of wearing masks, and becoming vaccinated. It was less so with people on the Right, or those that supported President Trump, however you want to label them. It just became this thing, where you had to be in one group or another. If you expressed anything that fit into one of those categories, you were automatically put into that box, which is another aspect of the cultural time we find ourselves in.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re contending this is all because of our increasingly irrational fear of microbes or risk.

Dr. Templeton:
When Covid actually happened, and people started behaving in similar ways, I thought back to another incident. I had gotten in a fight with my daughter’s daycare after she came down with hand-foot-and-mouth disease. A lot of toddlers get it, especially if they’re in daycare. There’s germs everywhere, you can’t avoid it, and kids get sick all the time. That’s just a part of it.

Hand-foot-and-mouth disease that gets into a daycare is not getting out until everybody’s got it, and gotten over it. It is so contagious that even daycare workers can spread it, and still be completely asymptomatic, because it’s really only affecting, symptomatically, the very small children. My daughter got it and had the lesions in her mouth, on her hands, and on her body. The pediatrician said, “After the fever has resided and stopped for 24 hours, she can go back to daycare.”

Then the daycare director said, “No, she has to have all of her lesions on her hands, and feet, and extremities healed completely before she can come back.” That would be two weeks. The reality is, children are contagious well beyond when everything is healed. They can secrete the virus in their stool. You’re going to always have some kid that’s transmitting it there in that daycare. It doesn’t matter how long you keep them at home. You’re basically wasting people’s time and money by keeping them home for two weeks, and you’re not actually making anyone safer.

The daycare owner called the health department, and the health department actually agreed with her, which really surprised me. I went and talked to them specifically. They really wouldn’t budge on it, despite the fact that there was really no evidence it was going to make things safer.

That made me think, first, about the idea of the appearance of safety. Because in this case, it didn’t matter that there were facts that this didn’t make anyone safer. It was the action that they were taking, “We are just doing this because other people will think it looks like we’re taking safety seriously.” That really stuck with me when the Covid pandemic hit, and people started to act in that very same way. To me, it wasn’t a coincidence.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are regulations that are being written as we speak that suggest that what was done during Covid was the correct course of action, and just should be done better next time. When I read your book, it’s very clear that the decision-making was very flawed in many of the ways that we described. What do you make of the fact that some people believe this was the correct course of action?

Dr. Templeton:
It’s hard to get people to go back on what they felt so strongly about for two or three years. They’re going to want to look out and find some validation for how they behaved. That’s the big challenge. Clearly, my goal is to have an effect on people in my immediate environment, my neighborhood, and at the school level. I didn’t feel like I had much of an effect at all. Now, it’s more about the historical record. The evidence is all there that this was a huge mistake. It has to be documented, and this story has to be told over, and over, and over again. That’s where we’re at, and why it’s important for many books to be written about it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you think that’s enough?

Dr. Templeton:
Yes, what else can you hope for? You look at things like school closures, there’s very stark differences. Places that didn’t close schools for the children did better. They didn’t suffer learning losses, they didn’t gain a bunch of weight, they didn’t have the same level of suicide ideation and drug abuse, that type of thing. That evidence is all there, and it’s becoming more clear. The key is to not let people deny that, because there’s going to be a large segment of the population that wants to deny it, and wants it to not be true.

Mr. Jekielek:
Especially if you committed, as a parent, to doing something to your kid, which turns out to have hurt them. That happened to millions of parents, who were given the wrong information. Maybe some of them suspected something, but went along with it anyway. Now, they have to deal with that as a person, so it must be very difficult. Again, as a parent, you would hope that the person would make the decision to make sure they don’t do such a thing again.

Dr. Templeton:
Right. People have to act on the information that they have, and the fact that much of it was not correct, and actually willfully misleading. We really need to shine a light on it in the most visible way possible.

Mr. Jekielek:
In one of the anecdotes you use, you’re looking at some cases of experts being very wrong in the past on the causes of disease. In one case you were describing, it was actually the priests and the religious people who were bringing the scientifically valid viewpoint, when the experts didn’t.

Dr. Templeton:
Yes. That example is about smallpox variolation. I love to use the historical examples in the first part of the book to lead into the second part of the book to show that, yes, a lot of this stuff has happened before in terms of experts being wrong, somebody trying to point it out and getting attacked. But then also, in the second part, showing why we do have a unique moment here, why we were susceptible to certain types of behaviors, and got a certain type of response.

But the one example was smallpox, and variolation was there before vaccination, where you were just exposing people to a small amount of actual smallpox from other people’s lesions, trying to scratch it on the back of their hand, or their arm. Obviously, there was a risk of people getting full-blown smallpox, but it reduced the risk of getting full-blown smallpox from some other means of transmission.

But the example I gave was in Boston in 1721. The physicians were the ones that were opposed to it in the city. Remember, medicine at the time consisted of doing some crazy things like bleeding people to make them lose the bad humors that were in their blood, and purify them. The concept of infectious disease wasn’t really understood. It was thought of to be miasma, just like bad air and noxious fumes.

That’s what the experts were believing. Here was a minister who had been convinced by a slave who had been variolated back in Africa, that this is something that worked. He and another doctor began to propose that this be done widespread to avoid the ravages of a smallpox outbreak, and of course, they were attacked by the experts.

Another good example I give is about John Snow. In terms of the cholera outbreak, he identified the water of the Broad Street pump as being the source of the cholera outbreak in London, and he was attacked by all the experts at that point, too. After the Boston smallpox story, 150 years later, they were still believing the miasma theory. He was proven right several years later. Those are really interesting examples, where the experts were on the wrong side of reality.

Mr. Jekielek:
We believe that we’re somehow immune from that, and you chart this very well. We imagine that the experts should have all this figured out. There were a lot of experts like yourself that were shouting in the wilderness. There was this huge deluge of information in one direction, and you felt hopeless to offer your perspective.

Dr. Templeton:
Yes, and I wouldn’t even call myself an expert. That’s one of those terms that’s lost a lot of its meaning and a lot of the power behind it. That’s because it’s been shown that if the experts try to predict things, they’re not very good at it. They’re actually terrible at it. They’re not better than any average person in terms of prediction. Sometimes their knowledge can be a hindrance to understanding something new that might have some different properties. The first SARS virus people thought the second one’s going to be exactly like it, and it turns out that wasn’t true at all. Having too much knowledge about that actually made predictions much less likely to happen.

The term expert has really lost a lot of its meaning. It’s like the anti-vaxxer. What is an anti-vaxxer nowadays? It’s somebody who just thinks vaccine safety should be a priority. I’m an immunologist, and I’m certainly not an anti-vaxxer. But even if you just question safety, people think the process has been subverted in some way and that makes you an anti-vaxxer.

Mr. Jekielek:
If you’re asking for better safety studies, that makes you an anti-vaxxer.

Dr. Templeton:
Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is an amazing conversation, Steve. Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Dr. Templeton:
Yes. I hope people read my book. It’s important to have as many books about this type of topic as possible. The marriage of the safety culture and the microbial understanding of the microbial world that we live in is a unique way of looking at things that will resonate with a lot of people. I tried to write the book in a way that was accessible to a wide audience, so I hope many people find it and enjoy it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Steve Templeton, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Dr. Templeton:
Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Dr. Steve Templeton and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.