One renowned vaccine scientist became the voice of reason during the COVID 19 pandemic. Dr. Peter Hotez is professor and Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. His new book is called The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.
This is part two of Jerry's Clayton’s conversation with Dr. Hotez about the book and his personal battles against the anti-science movement.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
Clayton: As one of the world's leading experts on vaccines, you — during the pandemic — got a lot of threats from people, death threats, etc. Is that still going on?
Hotez: It manifests in different ways. The online threats, the scary emails, and I wrote about those in the book. If you look at my Twitter (now known as X), I have to spend every day going through blocking ten, twenty people because they come up with these things. There's a QAnon conspiracy thing that all the vaccine scientists are going to be hanged at a Nazi type tribunal at Nuremberg.
And so, blocking all that nonsense and then the physical stalkings, where it's announced, I'm giving a lecture at a university or medical grand rounds at a hospital or a scientific conference, people will lay in wait. I have to have extra security, or even in some cases, they've come to my home. And so it's taken this very dark chapter as a consequence.
Clayton: I know there are a lot of other people who share your concerns about this, but in your mind, what can people do to help stem the rising tide of anti-science that's going on?
Hotez: Yeah, I think it's the hardest question of all, because in the past, parents would download the misinformation and disinformation from the Internet and you could kind of talk them through it and they'd agree to vaccinate their child.
And now if you're watching Fox News every night or listening to the anti-vaccine activists that Joe Rogan brings on his show and downloading all the conspiracy sites, you sort of go down that rabbit hole and it's very hard to pull people out of it. And people start tying their identity to believing it. And it's very tragic.
And you try to say, look, these people don't care about you or your family and be careful where you get your health information from. It's still a minority, but it's a sizable minority. And as I said, it's already led to 40,000 deaths in our state of Texas and we're still not out of COVID and people still aren't getting vaccinated or taking their boosters.
And certainly for the next pandemic, we're going to start off in a very and in a real dark place in a hole. And people aren't going to get their vaccines once again.
Clayton: Does this battle against anti-science sometimes feel overwhelming to you?
Hotez: It's an interesting time to be in Texas. It's the best of the best and the worst of the worst. The Texas Medical Center is the most extraordinary place I've ever worked in my life, the most productive time scientifically. My colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children's Hospital, as well as the other Texas Medical Center institutions like M.D. Anderson, are amazing. It's a great time to be a scientist here.
On the other hand, Texas, paradoxically, is also the epicenter of the anti-science movement. And you're seeing this play out through some elected officials and in the media as well. So I've got now a very interesting life: saving lives through making new vaccines, but also saving lives by countering the anti-science disinformation.
The first part I planned on 40 years ago when I became an M.D., Ph.D. scientist. The second part was unplanned, but seems to be just as necessary.
