John Tierney, September 2020: “You should be exposing yourself to the virus in order to promote herd immunity.”

About that writer for The Atlantic.

By Dr. Jonathan Howard                                                                                                                              Published: 7/14/25

The end of 2020 was perhaps the most pivotal moment of the pandemic.  Life-saving vaccines would arrive in December, but so would the pandemic’s deadliest wave when 3,000 Americans would die daily.  In September that year, journalist John Tierney wrote an article titled The Moral Case for Reopening Schools—Without Masks that lamented the lack of infections. He wrote:

You should be careful not to endanger the vulnerable, but otherwise you should be exposing yourself to the virus in order to promote herd immunity.

That’s enough for me. Countless more Americans would have suffered and died had they listened to the pro-infection inanity of sheltered journalists like Tierney. Unless he were begging for forgiveness, nothing he said about the pandemic after this should be taken seriously. As someone who saw what COVID could do when it was left to spread unchecked, that sentence alone is completely and permanently disqualifying. 

Tierney does not feel this way about himself, however. Incredibly, he still feels he has unique and special insights to share, specifically regarding errors made by others. Tierney recently published an article in The Atlantic titled How Public Health Discredited Itself that shows how the history of the pandemic is being rewritten in real time by the pundits who experienced the whole thing from their laptops.  

Predictably, Tierny hid his prior statements. Though his article from 2020 mentioned “herd immunity” 16 times, his 2025 article didn’t mention the phrase once. Instead of having the integrity to revisit his pro-virus rhetoric and poor predictions, Tierny glorified other sheltered advocates of herd immunity via mass infection, saying their feelings and YouTube videos were the central casualties of the pandemic.  He wrote:

Early in the pandemic, a few prominent researchers echoed Henderson’s warning that the unprecedented restrictions on liberty were not justified by the scientific literature and could cause much more harm than the virus. But these researchers—including Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas—were promptly vilified by colleagues, smeared in the press, and censored on social-media platforms.

It has taken me volumes to categorize the disinformation of these doctors, none of whom treated COVID patients, and all of them are doing just fine today, despite being “smeared” in the press.  They predicted that COVID would kill 10,000-40,000 Americans, that the worst was over in the spring of 2020, and that the mass infection of unvaccinated people under age 60-70 would end the pandemic in 3-6 months. Though Tierney refused to share this with his readers, unlike him I don’t feel these doctors are owed a safe space or that it is appropriate to silence their words. Since Tierney won’t tell you, here is a small sample of what they said in 2020:

Dr. Martin Kulldorff: 

Dr. John Ioannidis: 

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya:

Dr. Scott Atlas: 

The next time Tierney had the audacity to write about a virus that he wanted to spread, the only thing readers should care about is the information he is deliberately hiding from them.