Fear of a Microbial Planet

How a Germophobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe

By: Steve Templeton

Narrated by: David Turner

Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

Fear of a Microbial Planet, a sweeping treatise on the COVID era published by Brownstone Institute, offers desperately needed clarity and science on the organization and management of individual social life in the presence of pathogenic infection. It can be read as a definitive answer to expert arrogance, political overreach, and population panic.

For three years following the arrival of the virus that causes Covid, the dominant response from governments and the public has been to be afraid and stay far away through any means possible. This has further mutated into a population-wide germophobia that is actually being promoted by elite opinion.

Steve Templeton, senior scholar at Brownstone Institute and associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine: Terre Haute, argues that this response is primitive, unscientific, and ultimately contrary to individual and public health.

If a public health response is like an immune response, then consider this book as immunization against germophobia, politicized science, a self-defeating safety culture, and misplaced faith in experts. Dr. Templeton is our guide to helping us gain a new and more robust understanding of the relationship between the microbial kingdom and our own lives.

The pandemic forecasts in the United States were very grim. Experts were predicting that 60-70 percent of the population would ultimately be infected resulting in over 1.5 million deaths in just a few months. People on social media were in an absolute panic. Stories about empty shelves and runs on toilet paper were everywhere. Those who tried to refute these doomsday predictions were shouted down and eventually silenced.

And yet, the science on the virus was very clear. Disease severity was age-stratified. Extreme measures would not drive it away and would cause a tremendous amount of collateral damage. Even if the worse-case scenarios were true, it was extremely important that we take measures based on evidence.

But eventually, the cry to “do something” became overwhelming, and the costs no longer mattered. Trying to calm people with wisdom about infectious disease became nearly pointless. Germophobia swept through society and political culture.

Hardly anyone wanted to hear the truth that microbes are everywhere, and they cannot be avoided. There are an estimated 6x10^30 bacterial cells on Earth at any given time. By any standard, this is a huge amount of biomass, second only to plants, and exceeding that of all animals by more than 30-fold.

To live at peace with the microbial kingdom requires trained immune systems, as George Carlin said years ago. That means exposure and the protection of normal social functioning even under pandemic conditions with a new virus.

Many books have been and will be written about pandemic response mistakes, and that’s a good thing. There can’t possibly be enough reflection on what went wrong—otherwise we will be doomed to follow the same path, or an even worse one, next time. This book argues that the safety-at-all-costs culture will continue to result in counterproductive policies until it is challenged at its root.

How did people in our communities and around the world get to the point of hysteria over a pandemic with a clear age-stratified and comorbidity-amplified morality? Why were young and healthy people with very little risk for disease and death treated as if they were a grave danger to others?

It was always pointless to try to stop much less eradicate this virus. We’ve evolved with pathogens and need to learn to live with them without imposing mass psychological, social, economic, and public-health damage.

©2023 Brownstone Institute (P)2023 Brownstone Institute

Essential microbial perspective through COVID lens

Bottom line up front: I after going through this book in audiobook format, I picked it up on Kindle just so I could search, revisit, highlight, and re-read multiple parts. It was THAT good. An immunologist writes about COVID and the toxic underlying germophobic and safety culture that turned the response to COVID into such a disaster.

The discussions of Sweden, Florida and immune response tradeoffs, alone, make this book worth the price of admission. I found the mask-related section to be especially edifying, because I have personally read all the studies he discusses, and can vouch for his analysis. This book has earned a permanent place in my personal digital library of books on the COVIDcrisis.

The writing is astute, engaging and the audiobook production quality was excellent (though the pronunciation of a handful of medical terminology words was off, this did not detract from the overall quality). Its essential perspective about the complex and often mutually-beneficial relationship between humans and microbes – including infectious microbes – was a welcome dose of sanity after the mass psychosis of the COVIDcrisis. I wish more doctors and everyday citizens had shared his perspective on microbes and safety in general, as well as the core philosophy of individual liberty, and done a fraction of his research. The author supports his statements with careful citations to scientific sources (which is one of the reasons I picked up the book in kindle, to use as a convenient link to those papers he cites).

This book also gets 5 stars for its content, style, presentation, and structure. The audiobook production quality was good, though the narrator mispronounced a couple dozen names and medical terms.

An Outstanding Review of Infectious Diseases!

The author tackles what has been a very emotional topic for all people for a variety of reasons. He does this in an informational and unemotional way.

The reader’s performance is outstanding. Many times, I’ve wondered how narrators are able to tackle a subject where they may not have agreed with the content of the author’s work. This narrator’s performance hits all the right inflections in all the right places! I walked away from listening to this book learning more and enjoying it more than if I’d read the hard copy.

Highly recommended

This book was referred to me by a friend of mine that is a surgeon. This is more than just a recap of the pandemic, but went over a history of viruses and how they were treated by scientists and the public at large. There was a lot of great material in here around natural childbirth versus C-section, and many others that I took away from it, and I’ve already shared with some friends. it’s a must read to better understand how our body works within this world.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!

That quote from President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the beginning of WWII is the perfect encapsulation of the point of this book by Steve Templeton. The author shows how our desire to kill germs and keep ourselves safe from viruses and bacteria is actually counterproductive in many cases. Our bodies are amazingly designed machines and the microbes we are saturated in every day have both risks and benefits to our health and wellbeing.
While this is a highly technical subject and the text is liberally sprinkled with polysyllabic terms, the author manages to present the material in a way that is accessible through the use of humor and real-world metaphors. It is quite entertaining to listen to, especially as he takes a sledge hammer to some of the myths we have believed about germs throughout our lives.
I also want to give props to narrator David Turner whose clear and expressive voice and excellent diction makes this a thoroughly enjoyable listen! Two thumbs up from this vantage point!