He's faced death threats, but that's not stopping vaccine scientist Peter Hotez

White Coat Black Art26:30Taking on the anti-science movement

Originally published on Sept. 23, 2023. 

Peter Hotez is no stranger to anti-vaccine rhetoric.

For 40 years, the pediatrician and vaccine scientist has been developing shots to treat tropical diseases. He was part of the team that brought the low-cost COVID-19 vaccination Corbevax to market. And, he wrote a book combating the notion that vaccines can cause autism. 

But anti-vaccine blowback is reaching new heights, he says.

According to Hotez, politicians, contrarian scientists and certain media players on the right used the COVID-19 pandemic to usher in what he calls "anti-science" rhetoric. Hotez spoke with White Coat, Black Art host Dr. Brian Goldman about how the anti-vaccine movement has evolved into all-out anti-science.

You're a physician and a scientist and you've been threatened with violence. Can you tell me about the first time that happened? 

Well, it's been going on actually for a couple of decades, [since] I decided to confront this rising anti-vaccine activism here in the United States, which is particularly strong here in Texas. 

I have four adult kids, including Rachel who has autism. And when I wrote the book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, that kind've made me public enemy number one or two with anti-vaccine groups because the movement was largely founded on false claims that vaccines cause autism. 

Has your family been threatened?

Not so much directly, but, you know, we've had people stalk me — in public [when] I'm giving a lecture or even at home. And online there's just nasty references to everything, including Rachel.

Who's behind the threats?

Lately it's changed. It's become more political extremists on the far right. You've got Proud Boys marching. I can't tell you exactly who's threatening me. Oftentimes it's anonymous — they don't leave a lot of information in their emails when they say the army of patriots is coming to hunt me down. But the nature of the attacks, in terms of its political references, leads me to think that a lot of [them] are base extremists on the far right.

There are some famous people who have dissed you, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. He mentioned you previously, [saying "Hotez is a pediatrician who spent his life studying tropical parasites. He wouldn't seem to be the obvious go to guest for COVID. He's a misinformation machine."]

As a creator of a COVID vaccine, how do you react to that?

Yeah, he neglects to say a whole aspect of my scientific research career, which is developing coronavirus vaccines. And the irony [is that] I think he went on that rant the day it was announced that I was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for that work. 

So, you know, whether that was in response to [the nomination] or it was just coincidence, I can't say. But this is how the disinformation empire works. They only give half the story or a part of the story and they neglect to tell the most important part.

Media Matters which is a watchdog group, [and] another social science research group at ETH Zurich, which is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, did a deep dive analysis and looked at the role of the nighttime Fox News anchors at disseminating disinformation. And their findings [were that nearly] every night during that horrible Delta wave, Fox News broadcasters, including Carlson, were filling their airwaves with false information about COVID-19 vaccines, discrediting their effectiveness or safety. So they did a lot of damage.

Can you talk about anti-science and anti-science aggression — what do you mean by those terms?

Well, I use [those terms] to differentiate it from what people too often call misinformation or infodemic — as though [the rhetoric that came out of the pandemic] were just some random junk that showed up on social media or on the Internet. And I make the point that, no, not in this case. 

It was organized. It was well financed. It was led by powerful organizations such as the GOP House Freedom Caucus and certain senators in the United States Senate actively promoting disinformation. It was Fox News. It was contrarian intellectuals and pseudo intellectuals, talking heads, it was a whole ecosystem. 

More recently, I gather anti-science aggression has been grafted onto the culture wars in the United States.

Seems that way, doesn't it? [But] you can't treat this one the same way. Because unlike other aspects of the culture wars, this one is a killer. This one is taking lives.

And it's not like now that [we're on the other side of] COVID-19, the anti-science movement is going to go away. It's now looking at other things to target, like all childhood and adult immunizations or targeting virology in general. And … this is no longer confined to the United States; You see this, in part, from what's going on in Canada with some of the health freedom and medical freedom rhetoric, or in Central Europe … low and middle income countries. This is globalized and it's going to affect global public health at multiple levels.

What role has COVID played in the origins of anti-science and hostility towards scientists?  

I think it was an accelerant. In the few years before COVID, you started to see the politicization of this.

Many of us were successful at debunking a lot of the autism links — you know, providing … the genetic and epigenetic basis of autism rather than vaccines — I think that took the wind out of their sails. And so to reinvent themselves, they started rallying around these concepts of health freedom, medical freedom and basically saying, "You can't tell us what we want to do about our kids." And vaccination rates started to decline locally in some counties in Texas, Idaho, other Western states. And that really amplified during COVID-19 because that same kind of health freedom rhetoric really took off.

A lot of scientists were wrong about COVID being spread only by droplets and not being airborne, just as they were wrong about masking at least early on. To what extent did things like that give critics issues with which to discredit scientists?

Well, it didn't help. But during a new pandemic with a new virus agent, one should expect that there are going to be missteps. I think in the past, you know, people understood that and one could explain that: say, "Look, this has changed. We've learned new things about the virus and we have to really recalculate accordingly." 

But when you have all of this anti-vaccine, anti-science aggression, [people are] looking for slips and then amplifying it and blowing it up. I think that's what caused the damage. 

So I think too often, mainstream journalists are starting to say, well, maybe it was the miscommunication from the scientists and the public health experts. And sure, there was some miscommunication. But, each time it gets blown up by groups with a political agenda, then it makes it really, really tough.

Watch | Dr. Hotez on why Johnson & Johnson vaccines were paused

U.S. pauses Johnson & Johnson vaccinations

4 years ago

Duration 3:11

Leading vaccine expert Dr. Peter Hotez says this pause allows authorities to "fine-tune which groups" to potentially hold off on giving the vaccine, such as certain groups of women who are already at risk of blood clotting.

What do you think it's going to take to combat anti-science here in Canada and the United States?

Let's bring in experts who understand how other dangerous political movements operate, like global terrorism or nuclear proliferation or cyber attacks, and get some input — what are some of the legal levers that we can pull and push.

I don't know that on its own, the World Health Organization can do this because it's so tightly linked to the political sector. Let's bring in other U.N. agencies or security organizations like NATO or the Munich Security Summit to really help us understand what the options are to do something about this.

Paint us a picture of what the stakes are in the future if we don't address anti-science and anti-science aggression. 

If this anti-vaccine movement spills over into all childhood immunizations, and I think there's some evidence that that's starting to happen, then we could see the return of measles. And we've had polio, for instance, in the wastewater in New York, in the wastewater in London. And that would be terrible if we allowed that one to come back.

So I am worried [that] all these extraordinary gains that we've had over the last two decades — because of the hard work of the Global Alliance of Vaccines and Immunization, working with the World Health Organization, UNICEF and governments of Canada and the United States — I worry about that unraveling.