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Episode 236 - Antisemitism in the Anti-vaccine Movement

The House of Pod

CHAPTER

Battling Vaccine Misinformation

In this chapter, a vaccine scientist shares their journey, from developing affordable vaccines to fighting the anti-vaccine movement fueled by political extremism. Reflecting on personal experiences, including being a parent to a child with autism, they discuss the importance of debunking misinformation and highlight the societal consequences of neglecting scientific truths. The conversation connects historical antisemitism to contemporary anti-science sentiments, elucidating the urgent need for public engagement in vaccine advocacy.

00:00
Speaker 2
Well, you have contributed to the population in the world in many other ways. Let me introduce you. Dr. Peter Hotez, may I call you Peter? Sure. Okay. If you don't know my guest today, he's kind of a big deal. You've seen him, I'm sure, on some news channels discussing COVID or vaccines. He has over like a billion original papers, maybe what, 680 more? More or less. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And he is the author of multiple books. He is the Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. He's won tons of honorary titles and accolades, perhaps none more impressive to me than being named the OG villain of vaccines by RFK Jr. famed bear cub killer, which I think is a very impressive title. Are you a little proud about that? Yeah, Bobby's a very special person in my life. He's a very special person in general. Again, for people who don't know you, you started off essentially, correct me if I'm wrong, as a vaccine scientist. And you've grown into something more. I'm guessing that's not exactly what you wanted to do. But you've seemed to have grown into a larger presence in the US since then. I'm guessing that is, was not your plan.
Speaker 1
exactly right. There's the plan part and the unplanned part. The plan part was, ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a pediatrician scientist making vaccines. I did my MD-PhD in the 1980s in New York City or Rockefeller University. I used to be the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and Wild Cornell Medical College. And I worked on a human hookworm anemia vaccine as an MD-Ph. Now 40 years later, that's actually completing clinical trials and showing high levels of protection in human clinical trials, which is really exciting. And then we've since then devoted my life to making that and other parasitic disease vaccines for schistosomiasis and Shagas disease. The idea was make the vaccines that the big pharma companies wouldn't be interested in because they only affect, these are disease that only affect people living in extreme poverty. And then around 13 years ago, we got our approach by a group at the New York Blood Center who basically said, Hey, Peter, just like no one cares about your parasitic disease vaccines, no one cares about our coronavirus vaccines for SARS and MERS. So we started collaborating with them and wrote a grant, got it supported. We wound up making a SARS and MERS vaccine so that when COVID-19 hit, we were able to pivot and make that vaccine. It wound up reaching 100 million people in India and Indonesia as a low-cost alternative, highly effective. So that was very meaningful. The point is that was all planned. That was deliberate. That's what I wanted to do. But then as John Lennon says, life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, and to paraphrase, and I had four adult kids, including Rachel, who has autism and intellectual disabilities. And if you remember, kind of the original assertion against vaccines from RFK Jr. and others was phony baloney that vaccines cause autism. So I said, well, look, here I am, a vaccine scientist, a pediatrician, I have a daughter with autism, intellectual disabilities. If I don't say something, who does? So I wrote the book. The book was called Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism. And that's when I became a big target of anti-vaccine activists, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And so it was unplanned, but I also found it meaningful to be able to speak with a very authoritative voice explaining why vaccines don't cause autism, what autism is, how it begins in only fetal brain development. We actually did a whole exome genomic sequencing and Rachel and my wife, Ann, and I defined Rachel's autism gene to provide an alternative narrative. And then watched in horror as this anti-vaccine movement pivoted or expanded around to become a political enterprise on the far right. And that's when it got even worse, you know, around the time of COVID and now. And now when I'm being targeted, I'm being targeted by major political figures, even elected officials, linked to far right extremism. And so, you know, when it's, you know, people like Steve Bannon, you know, publicly, serious stuff. And, and because it's a dog whistle, right, for all the unglued people to really come after you. So it's taken this very dark turn, and we can talk about it a bit today.
Speaker 2
it's always amazing to me that they've found a way to shoehorn you in as a villain because if they were being logical about it and obviously they're not or this wouldn't be a conversation to begin with you're not the guy
Speaker 1
you're not you're taking money essentially from Big Pharma. You're right you're exactly right. I mean they you know the first thing they want to do is the term they use, and I'm sure you've seen this on social media, gazillion times, pharma shill, which basically, you know, claims that I'm secretly taking money from Pfizer and Moderna. And just the opposite, right? I don't, we don't take pharma money. We've done the opposite. We make, found a low way to make low cost vaccines that bypass the big pharma companies, providing a whole not model of arguably, you can even argue maybe we even kept Pfizer and Moderna out of markets in India, Indonesia. It's just the opposite. But that doesn't fit the narrative of what they want to get out. And unfortunately, they have a much bigger bandwidth than a professor at a medical school. So, you know, and Elon has given them a huge voice, of course, on X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it. And that's made it really problematic to keep up.
Speaker 2
I think it might surprise people, especially those that accuse you of being part of a big pharma company or being a shill for pharma or somehow making millions secretly off of this because you weren't even part of the Operation Warp Speed project, correct? Because you weren't even one of those big companies. You were doing all your vaccine work was independent of those. We tried. We tried to get on the radar screen of Operation Speed in the
Speaker 1
Trump White House, but they were totally into pharma companies, right? They only, they, their thinking was only the big pharma companies have the chops to pull this off. And we did get interesting technologies like mRNA and particle vaccines and that sort of stuff. But, you know, we had a low cost alternative that would have cost the American taxpayers a tiny fraction of the cost of what, they wound up paying $30 billion in development costs and advanced purchase costs with the big pharma companies. And in India, we did this in Indonesia and with two vaccine producers there, Biologically, and Hyderabad, and Beofarma in Indonesia for $3 a dose. So you couldn't get better than that. And I
Speaker 2
mean, I love you've dedicated your life to the study of diseases that aren't getting enough attention. Because you knew that if you weren't doing it, big pharmaceuticals weren't going to do it either because that's not their market. That's not who they're going to be selling to. Can you explain to our Goium listeners what the concept of tikum olam is? I have to preface this by saying I steal a lot of Jewish valor. I'm not Jewish myself, but I know some of the terms. So can you explain what Tikom Olam is?
Speaker 1
Well, your Hebrew is better than my Persian, so I'll give you that credit. Probably not by much. Probably not by much. Yeah, it's a concept that's actually taught to me by a cousin who's a Holocaust survivor, obviously much older. He's in his 90s, Rabbi Phil Lizowski in Bloomfield, Connecticut. He was a Holocaust survivor and taught me this concept of Tikhonalam, repairing the world and different interpretations of it. One says, you know, God deliberately didn't finish the job because he expected us to do it, to fix the world. And that's one interpretation. But, you know, I put it in this scientific concept. I even wrote an article called Science de Koon, this idea of using science for humanitarian purposes and science for the public good. And that's something I've tried to adhere to and do, using science for the benefit of humankind. And in fact, when I did my MD PhD at Rockefeller University, that's the motto of the university, as translates from the Latin, science for the benefit of humanity. And I truly believe that. And that's, for me, the fullest expression of that is making these low-cost, often patent-free vaccines for low and middle income countries that the big pharma companies won't make. And not to demonize the big pharma companies either. They do provide a lot of vaccines for the Gavi Alliance that the biggest distributor of vaccines. We couldn't do it without them. But certain vaccines like for hook or manemia and schistosomiasis and Shaga's disease were falling through the cracks. And so we, I've always had this lifelong ambition and dream to take those on ever since I can remember. And so it's very meaningful for me at multiple levels.
Speaker 2
you know, I'll say this probably more than once in this episode, and it is not unappreciated by everyone. And I know we'll talk more about it, the hate and vitriology you receive, but I mean, there is always going to be at least some population that really appreciates that. And I'm one of them. You mentioned that you kind of got on the radar back when you wrote the book about your daughter Rachel and her autism. And we could go more into that, but I think feel like that's been covered quite a bit. And on the show, we've talked about how much damage Andrew Wakefield has done and what happened since then. But it sounds like your particular situation in terms of the focus on you really started to worsen around 2015 if I'm correct when there was that measles epidemic in Orange County in California here and the California legislature responded by by pulling back some of these vaccine exemptions which I'm sure like you like myself supported that and it did seem to help if I'm correct, but that seemed to really sort of be the trigger for this backlash, this push for quote medical freedom from a political perspective. Is that does that seem about right to you?
Speaker 1
I call that version 2.0 of the anti-vaccine movement in modern times anyway, the version 1.0, you're right, after the Wakefield paper, false claims that it was the MMR vaccine that caused autism and then Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote an article after that in a very important medical journal called Rolling Stone claiming it was the thimerosal preservative causing autism and gradually debunking that. And I think, you know, we, in writing the book, and I think that did take some of the wind out of their sails. So they needed a new thing. And the new thing, I think you said it well, it's, it became a political enterprise linked to this concept of medical freedom, health freedom. And it found, and even though it started in Orange County in Southern California, it found a special home in Texas where the anti-vaccine groups started getting PAC money, political action committee money from the far right. And to convince the legislatures that vaccines should be totally optional and vaccines are something unsavory about them and paying, raising money for candidates to run on anti-vaccine platforms. And the propaganda banner was health freedom, medical freedom, you can't tell us what to do. And it became linked very much to the Republican Tea Party in Texas. And that's when it became really hard for me to talk about also, and while when being in Texas, but also because we're a training conveyor, I'm sure you'd agree, it was always about we're supposed to be politically neutral, right? We're not supposed to talk about Republicans, Democrats, and liberals or conservatives or red states and blue states, red being Republican, blue being Democrat. And I think it's fair to say that we actually don't care. I mean, that's your right as an American citizen, that you're entitled to your political views. But how do you say don't embrace this one because it's so dangerous to the health of your children? So how do you delink the politics from these anti-vaccine activist viewpoints? Because as I like to say, I didn't politicize it, they did it and I'm just trying to find ways to uncouple it. But unfortunately, it really accelerated during COVID-19. And here's where it became truly deadly. You started to see people not taking COVID vaccines for political reasons. And it started with the Delta wave in the last half of 2021. And in my previous book, The Deadly Rise of Antiscience, I detail the role of far-right extremist politics in the United States and inciting all of that.
Speaker 2
Yes, it's a fantastic book. And I also agree with you. I feel like there was two factors where we might have failed as doctors to help curb some of this. One, for many years, and I've talked about this on my show before, we allowed a lot of pseudoscience to sort of just exist down the world and not go after it and not fight it. Just because, for the most part, it seemed fine. It didn't seem to bother most people. Most of it seems safe. What if somebody wants to take a supplement that they don't need? What if somebody has, wants to do UV light therapy on their butthole, you know? There's always something that we just were like, it's silly, but we'll let it slide, because we're gonna focus on the important things. And that in and of itself has led to this murkiness around science and these ridiculous takes that now can be seen as legitimate. But then on top of that, just like you said, we've, we were never taught to talk about things that could be viewed as political. So we always veered away from them. People did not want to engage in this sort of thing. You're very, you're one of the few people that's been willing to, and again, not in a political way, you're just saying the facts, take the political heat that comes with it. Most people don't want to do that and we weren't trained for that. And I think because of those two things we put ourselves in medicine at a disadvantage. We've we're not the only reason obviously we'll get into the other reasons, but we're it didn't help the situation. It didn't we weren't. I mean, I remember
Speaker 1
I wrote a an op-ed piece for the New York Times about describing what was going on. This was 2017. And, you know, when you write an opinion piece for a newspaper, you don't get to pick the title. That's the editor that writes the title. And the editor, not surprisingly, picked the most provocative title he or she could. It was entitled, How the Anti-Vaxxers are Winning. And it basically predicted a lot of what came to pass. A title that was probably more provocative than even I would have liked, but there you are. And I remember when it came out the next day, I got a message that a group of pretty high up individuals from the Centers for Disease Control would like to have a Zoom call with me. And I said, oh, crap. Oh, dude. And it was three individuals who I've known and with great respect for, and they're really important people in the vaccine world. And the way the Zoom call started out was, Peter, we want to let you know we're not mad. And I said, holy fuck. Okay. It's not a good start. It's not a great start, though. not going to go well. It's like, it's going to get even worse. It's like the guy who says it's not about the money. And you know, it's I mean, you know, when someone says the zoom call starts, we're going to let you know you're not mad. You know, we're just disappointed. We're just disappointed. And okay, so what were they mad about? Because it was the policy of HHS, Health and Human Services and CDC, not to talk about it. They said, Peter, you're just going to call attention to it. You'll give it oxygen. And we don't want to do that. And I said, well, what do you mean? It's got all the oxygen attention that it needs. You've got all these massive vaccine exemptions. And I even said to them, I said something to the effect of, guess what? The American people have moved on beyond compact computers and dial up modem and asked Jeeves as their search engine. This thing is a monster now. And so that was part of the problem was the leadership in the government. And then of course all of the societies, academic societies and professional societies followed suit. That was the policy, we're not going to talk about it. And I just was watching this thing blow up and explode and knew it was going to be a monster. And unfortunately, it wound up killing 200,000 Americans who refused to take a COVID vaccine during the Delta and being one wave. So the point is anti-vaccine activism was now always concerning in terms of its potential impact for public health. Now it was a lethal force in the United States and, and that was the genesis for the next book, The Deadly Rise of Antiscience.
Speaker 2
links to them too. But you've experienced both overt antisemitism and more subtle things. I hesitate to call it subtle because I don't think it's that much more subtle. But when did the antisemitism start to creep into this process? When did you notice it?
Speaker 1
It had been there since the beginning, saying there was vaccines or kind of a Jewish cabal or you know, or referring always to the globalist, which is always kind of a, not much of a euphemism, but it's a euphemism, you know, of sorts. And then it really took off during COVID-19, where they said, you know, the Jews were secretly creating the virus and they have all these caricatures of the stereo exaggerated Jewish features of a person, you know, with a hazmat suit on making the virus or that the Jews were making vaccines for profit and that's why they invented the virus. And then they would start putting up these memes with pictures of me with what's the name Borla, the head of the CEO of Pfizer, who's Jewish and Rochelle Walensky. And you got to have George Soros in there. Yeah, why not? And so and and I I actually got interested in it You know, I tried to take us. I mean once you get over the horror of it Yeah, I actually quite kind of got interested and started reading about the history of links between What I call anti-science and anti-semitism if you think of it as two circles of the Venn diagram, one being anti-science, one being anti-Semitism, they're not totally overlapping, but there is a piece of overlap. And so I started reading about this and with, you know, during the Weimar Republic, you know, Einstein's relativity was considered by the experimental physicists of his day in Germany as part of a Jewish fraud. That was the term used. There's this wonderful book by this kind, I think it's Philip Ball who wrote about this in the history of looking at this while it was going on, the Weimar Republic or what Freud was doing also in psychoanalysis. And so there's that history. And then it even goes back to the 1300s, the time of the grid, the Black Death, and when Jews were blamed for causing the Black Death across Europe, and there were programs and massacres. And so I put it all together actually in a couple of papers. And it was not easy to, it was really hard to get unpublished because I'm not a social scientist. I don't speak the language of so was I going to get into a social science journal and and it you know, it's not your typical kind of biomedical journal. Also, I finally found a couple of journals where the Maimonides medical journal took a rambam. And rambam exactly. That's good. And then perspectives in biology and medicine. And, and, and I think it was an important statement and people are finding it interesting. In fact, now I'm working with the head of the Jewish Studies Program at Rice University, which is right across the street from the Texas Medical Center. And we're looking at putting something on maybe the Holocaust Museum Houston on it, a symposium on the links between anti-science and anti-Semitism because it is very interesting and an important story, I think. Yeah,
Speaker 2
no, I read the articles. and biology, I believe, and the Ram Bambaimonides journal. And one of the, there's a lot of interesting parts to it. Terrible, terrible things that I'm sure you had to research about. Can you tell us a little bit about how the communities that, in that time, the 1300s, when there was this, they were blaming Jewish people for the plague. Can you tell us how the communities that actually supported the Jews in their communities, how they fared as opposed to the communities that didn't? Yeah,
Speaker 1
I found, well, I found one reference which was quite extensive. They did a pretty, it was a pretty impressive economic analysis of the cities and towns that expelled the Jews and the cities and towns that didn't blame the Jews. And economically, the ones that did not blame the Jews had a much faster economic recovery after the Black Death, which was kind of interesting. Yeah, there you go. It's a lesson to be learned. Yeah.
Speaker 2
So you talked about the very overt ones you get and some of the less overt ones, but some of the things that have been leveled at scientists like yourself.
Speaker 1
I'm a trifecta, right? Because I'm a scientist, a vaccine scientist, and a Jewish vaccine scientist. Right. Well, when I was a kid, I used to go with my grandfather, Morris Goldberg. He used to like to go to the
Speaker 2
race tracks. And he taught me about the trifecta. That's right. But what's interesting is you, they've leveled criticisms at you, these real politicians, like, not like inconsequential people in this country, real politicians, but calling you things like a medical brown shirt, which I can only imagine is one of the most offensive, stupid things you could call a Jewish doctor. Can you, let's actually let's start with our listeners who are not like me and reach that age, that middle age, where they're interested in learning about like World War Two and smoked meats. Like for people who haven't reached that point, can you tell people what a medical or what a brown shirt is first, and how they're what they're accusing you of here? The
Speaker 1
Brownshirts were a Nazi paramilitary force that dressed in these, had military parades, and they dressed in brown clothing with armbands, with swastikas on them. They were Hitler's paramilitary force early on. continued. And also, you know, getting these just horrible accusations from people like Senator Rand Paul, you know, who even wrote about me in his book, you know, extensively. It was all made up. I mean, there's no truth to it. And it's so bizarre having a senator from the state of Kentucky write about a medical, I mean, I'm not a public figure in the sense I'm not employed by the government. I'm not employed by CNN or I don't take money from any of the cable news channels and just saying all this nonsense about a medical school professor at a medical school in Texas. It's just so bizarre and so surreal. And so it's the pile on, you know, it's people like Steve Bannon, I had Roger Stone go after me, I had, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Rand Paul, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, you know, and it's very, very dark and troubling, you know, to see something like that, because, well, one, just aside from my personal safety and all that kind of stuff, but also the fact that it shows a profound ignorance of American history. As I like to say, we are a nation built on science, right? We're built on the strength of our research universities institutions. And that's what gave us the Manhattan Project. It's what gave us Silicon Valley. It's what gave us, you name it, NASA. And to see that flipped down its side and portraying scientists as public enemies or enemies of the state, that to me was going to really take us down a terrible path and could even affect our national security as well. So I was deeply troubled by that.

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