We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace the Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID by Jonathan Howard
Published 2023 · 150,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Health & Medicine, Politics & Current Affairs, Investigative Journalism, Nonfiction
How hard is We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace the Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID to read?
We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace the Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID scores 39 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Howard writes for a general audience and defines epidemiological terms — herd immunity, seroprevalence, focused protection — as he introduces them, closer to popular science writing than to a medical journal. Occasional clinical vocabulary from his own specialty (neuro-immune disease) surfaces but the prose stays well short of jargon-dense nonfiction.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Sentences are short and declarative, built for a courtroom rhythm: state a claim, quote the source verbatim, state the contradiction. That directness reads closer to 1984's plain prose than to anything syntactically demanding.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The book stays grounded in dated, named, sourced claims — quotations from specific doctors on specific days, checked against what happened next — rather than abstract theory. It has to explain the logic of herd immunity itself along the way, which pushes it slightly above purely narrative nonfiction.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- At 606 pages and described by outside reviewers as 'painstakingly documented,' the book tracks a shifting cast of doctors, their public statements across more than three years, and the epidemiological record those statements are checked against — a layered historical density well above a single-thread narrative.
How We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace the Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID is regarded
We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace the Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID holds a literary regard score of 23 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.