COVID response
In October 2021, Prasad prompted social media controversy when he published a blog post comparing the
U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response to the beginnings of
Adolf Hitler's
Third Reich. Bioethicist
Arthur L. Caplan said that Prasad's arguments were specious and ignorant, and science historian
Robert N. Proctor said that Prasad was "overplaying the dangers of vaccination mandates and trivializing the genuine harms to liberty posed by 1930s fascism".
[28]
In November 2021, Prasad expressed his opinion that pediatricians should warn parents about risks of COVID immunization such as myocarditis.
[29] However, physician Jonathan Howard noted that Prasad was selectively omitting the risks of COVID disease
[30] which would not be consistent with the tenets of medical
informed consent.
In January 2022, the conservative periodical
City Journal published an opinion piece by Prasad in which he attempted to demonstrate that the American public health organizations were not being honest in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
[31] Writing for
Science-Based Medicine, epidemiologist Lynn Shaffer criticized Prasad's article for the various "mistruths" it contained about face masks as a COVID-19 mitigation measure, for example the unevidenced claim that mask wearing was stunting children's language development. In Shaffer's view Prasad's writing "lean heavily on pushing people's emotional hot buttons" and amounted to a form of fearmongering.
[32]
Prasad was an early member of the Urgency of Normal, a group that in 2022 campaigned against quarantines and mask mandates in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.
[33] He spoke in support of repealing such mandates in a March 2022 interview.
[34]
Earlier in 2023, Prasad showed support for the ideas of
Robert Kennedy Jr.
[35] However, according to physician David Gorski, Prasad did not show sufficient understanding of bad faith debate.
[36] In November 2023, the levels of kindergarten vaccine exemptions rose to the highest level in years.
[37] Prasad mentioned about this outcome
[38] but did not acknowledge his role in causing this outcome, per physician Jonathan Howard.
[39]
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