The city of Nuremberg is a powerful, historic symbol of both Hitler’s rise and the Nazi demise. It was a city roiling with Nazi fervor while under Hitler’s control, and the site of tightly choreographed rallies that became the subject of ignominious propaganda films.
Then, as the Allies sought to bring those who committed crimes against humanity in World War II to justice, all eyes turned to Nuremberg again, when it became the site of the Nuremberg trials.
Modern references to Nuremberg tend to get your attention, especially if you’re a vaccine scientist who has experienced years of unrelenting attacks during the COVID pandemic. Especially if you’re a Jewish vaccine scientist who has made it a personal mission to fight medical misinformation.
That is a good description of Dr. Peter Hotez, who, in early December, was in his comfort zone, standing in front of a screen illuminated by a PowerPoint slide and talking to a room full of people.
The audience was rapt, being taught by this professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, who is also the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and the author of several books, including The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.
But this crowd was not made up of medical students, and this was not an academic lecture.
Hotez was speaking at the Jewish Federation of San Antonio for the Myron B. Zinn Memorial Lecture, and he was talking about some of his recent experiences with antisemitism. And Nuremberg.
“One idea that's out there is that there's going to be a day of reckoning for all the COVID scientists when we're going to be tried and executed after a tribunal at Nuremberg,” Hotez explained, “They're calling it Nuremberg 2.0.”
Hotez shared the contents of an email he’d received. “So this fellow says, ‘Peter, 75 years ago people like you were tried, convicted, hung by the neck until dead. There's a lawyer’s committee right now collecting names of people to be indicted for Nuremberg crimes, so I'm turning your name over to the prosecutor’s legal team.’”
The writer closed the email with a reference to Star Wars, writing “May the force be with you.”
“So I have that going for me,” Hotez laughed, but later admitted that it’s not funny. Anti-science rhetoric can turn deadly, and too often it takes on the stain of antisemitism.
"That's a very dark aspect," Hotez said about those who have anti-science and those who have antisemitic beliefs. "If you think of them as two circles of the Venn diagram, they're not totally overlapping, but there is some overlap, no doubt about it."
Still, Hotez said he was surprised when their antisemitism came for him, though he admits he shouldn’t have been. “I'm a scientist. I'm a vaccine scientist, and I'm a Jewish vaccine scientist,” he said. “I’m the trifecta.”
Anti-science activism became a part of Hotez’s daily reality back in 2018 when he wrote and published a book called Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism.
Hotez’s now-grown daughter Rachel was diagnosed with autism when she was 19 months old back in 1994, and the book details his experience as an autism dad and vaccine scientist. It also outlines the evidence against the contention that vaccines cause autism.
This made Hotez a lightning rod for the anxiety and even anger of some in the anti-vaccine movement, including President-elect Trump’s nominee for the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Kennedy has called Hotez the anti-vaccine movement’s “OG villain,” Hotez told the crowd at the Jewish Federation.
“And I'm so old and square I had to google that,” he said. “What that means is the ‘original gangster villain.’”
Kennedy is an environmental lawyer who began proclaiming in the early 2000s that vaccines — specifically the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine — cause autism, writing a since-retracted article for Rolling Stone and Salon.com in 2005. Still, President-elect Trump has given Kennedy the go-ahead to “get to the bottom of” vaccines and autism.
“Well, we've gotten to the bottom of vaccines and autism,” Hotez said, “and we know there's no link. This has been investigated now for 20 years, and we have a massive volume of published scientific papers in the peer-reviewed literature and some of the best journals.”
The increase in cases, Hotez said, is probably down to several things, including the broadening of the diagnostic criteria that catches more people in the diagnostic net. Also, schools now offer support to children with autism, which gives parents an incentive to overcome their discomfort with the potential stigma of a diagnosis and seek out an assessment for their child.
The greatest relative increases in autism diagnosis rates are happening among adults between the ages of 26 to 34. Adults were not diagnosed in large numbers with autism a generation ago, so that could account for some of the increase.
There also may be an environmental component to the increase in cases, Hotez said.
“In fact, back in 2017 when I was speaking to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I said, ‘Bobby, you're an environmental lawyer. Why aren't you looking into this?”
It’s conceivable that Kennedy has looked into it. That may be why the president-elect keeps repeating that Kennedy can do anything he wants — including rewriting dietary guidelines for Americans and reigning in ultra-processed foods — but he cannot go near oil and gas. Fossil fuels.
A growing body of evidence suggests that fossil fuels are making people sick. Specifically, particulate pollution might have a role to play in the rising number of autism cases in the United States. Pediatrician Debra Hendrickson, author of The Air They Breathe, said in a recent episode of Petrie Dish that the fossil fuel industry is a source — directly and indirectly — for much of that pollution.
The prospect of having someone who questions the safety and efficacy of vaccines in charge of the department that oversees agencies that research, develop, and approve vaccines is troubling to Hotez.
“My worry is that we're going to permanently disrupt our whole vaccine ecosystem,” Hotez explained, saying that while the federal government doesn’t make the rules about childhood vaccines, he does think it could have a chilling effect on state legislatures. “I'm worried they're going to lift all school-based vaccine requirements, and that won't be good.”
Trump’s nominees to head the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health also have controversial views on vaccine safety or vaccine mandates. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has called them “disruptors," saying they will shake up the status quo. Hotez took issue with that description.
“That's a euphemism,” he said. “They're not disruptors. They're destroyers. I worry about the destruction of our whole childhood vaccination system. If that happens, it could take us decades to recover.”
With the CDC reporting the first human death from H5N1 bird flu in the United States this week, these concerns take on additional significance, Hotez said.
“We've got some big picture worries that are going to have to be taken by this new administration very seriously,” he said. “If it's not going to be RFK, the next tier down has to take it seriously and be empowered to do it.”
