Some news; and get tickets for LIVE in DC!

Come to my DC book launch event!

By popular demand, I am doing a THIRD book launch event! This one is in DC, on Friday 5/2 at 6pm. More info on this below! But first, some news:

Most of you have likely heard that Jay Bhattacharya was confirmed this week by the senate to be the next head of the NIH. It would be hard to have scripted a more satisfying narrative arc than for the man who was maligned in 2020 as a “fringe” epidemiologist by Francis Collins, the head of the NIH at the time, to now be the head of the NIH himself.

Another heretic, who dared to question the establishment, Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and researcher, in addition has been confirmed as the new Commissioner of the FDA. Marty is a brilliant and gifted man (and I’m also honored that he blurbed my book).

Whether one agrees or disagrees with some or many of Bhattacharya’s views, it’s inarguable that he’s a man of integrity. Bhattacharya, who has an MD from Stanford School of Medicine, and a PhD in economics, also from Stanford, has spent decades as a scholar and researcher, devoting his professional life to trying to improve public health.

I first met Jay in the fall of 2020 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at an event spearheaded by Martin Kulldorff, at the time a Harvard biostatistician. Kulldorff had invited me to hear his and Jay’s pitch, which they made with the Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, for an alternative approach to the pandemic. At some point I’ll tell the full story of what happened in Great Barrington. But for now I can just report that, needless to say, as I chatted with Jay by a fireplace late into the night, I never, in my oddest flight of fancy, would have imagined this turn of events.

Another person in Great Barrington I met that weekend was Jenin Younes. A fellow burgeoning outcast, Jenin and I hit it off, and have remained friends ever since. And so, in my own plot twist, four-and-a-half years later Jenin is joining me at my book launch event in Washington, DC.

Like my NYC and Berkeley events, which are co-hosted by my friends Jesse Singal and Lee Fang, Jenin will lead a conversation with me about my new book, An Abundance of Caution, followed by a Q&A, and then some serious partying!

Tickets for the DC event on 5/2 are on sale now! The ticket is $30 and includes a book (which retails for $40), so the event is essentially free. Because we are ordering the books in bulk, they must be ordered far in advance, so the free book offer will expire soon. We’ll update the ticket page when books are no longer on offer.

Tickets are still available for the Berkeley launch event on 4/26 and the NYC launch event on 4/28! Berkeley is getting close to selling out, and NYC tickets are also moving fast. And the free book offer will expire soon. So order your tickets for Berkeley and NYC now!

And if you’re in the DC area, get your tickets now!

See you in Berkeley, NYC, or DC soon!

Dave