Aaron Rodgers called him a “bum.” Tucker Carlson said he is an “obvious lunatic.” Steve Bannon considers him a “criminal.” And then there are the hordes of mostly anonymous online critics who believe that Peter J. Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, is a “scumbag” and a “shill” who should be “tried for crimes against humanity,” or perhaps simply “hunted.”
It’s a lot of hate to direct at a bow-tied 65-year-old scientist who has encouraged people to get vaccinated during the pandemic. But Hotez is accustomed to the hostility by now, if not exactly comfortable with it. Like plenty of other scientists who have been outspoken during the Covid era, Hotez has been targeted by those who believe that the severity of the disease, which has killed millions, has been exaggerated, or that the vaccines, which have proven to be highly effective, are part of some nefarious government plot.
Hotez’s new book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning, tries to make sense of what he calls this “dark and tragic story.” He lays much of the blame at the feet of conservative news outlets, Republican lawmakers, and a “cadre of contrarian intellectuals and pseudointellectuals from universities and far-right think tanks.” The Chronicle spoke to Hotez about the anger he’s faced and the need to support scientists who find themselves, as he has, in the crosshairs. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve had all manner of insults and threats thrown at you. You quote some of the all-caps screeds in your book that you’ve received in your inbox. You’ve been confronted in public, including back in June at your house. At this point, can you shrug off that kind of vitriol?
During the working day, I’m busy doing what scientists do — lab meetings, writing papers and grants and reports. At night you wake up thinking about this stuff. So it does mess with your head, no question about it. And it comes in waves. It happened in 2021 when Laura Ingraham and the governor of Florida went after me on Fox News. And it happened in 2022 when Tucker Carlson went after me on the same day I got nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It manifests in online threats — social media and emails. The stalkings are pretty troubling as well.
In your book you write that we need “a new generation of scientists who are willing to defend science in the public square.” If I’m a member of that new generation of scientists, and I look at you and other prominent colleagues of yours who’ve been defending science in the public square, I might think: “Is that something I really want to take on?”
I don’t know that it’s the bad guys that are scaring them off. Here’s what’s scaring them off: It’s not having the backing of the scientific societies or the universities or university offices of communications. I have a lot of support here at Baylor, but that’s an exception. If you’re out there in the public domain and something you do gets attacked, too often the institution is more focused on protecting the institution, not so much concerned about the individual. They’ll basically say, “Well, get off Twitter now.” There’s no situational awareness or understanding from many university offices of communications that this is now a vital lifesaving activity that’s needed to preserve science. We need to create a more supportive infrastructure.
How do you do that?
It’s not only targeting the science, but the scientists, and portraying us as enemies of the state. And that’s very dangerous for our national security.
It’s about changing the culture of science to build in a system of training in science communication. Also incentivizing scientists who want to do it. I’m a full professor, but I get evaluated like everybody else. And what do they ask me about? They ask about my grant funding and my scientific papers. There’s nothing even on my evaluation form for single-author books I’ve written or opinion pieces that I’ve written or going on the cable-news channels or on podcasts and certainly not social media. So the message the institution sends is that it’s not important. We’ve got to find a way to alter the culture of science in academia to actually encourage it, but in a controlled manner that’s productive.
You write about “anti-science aggression” and how it warrants a more-coordinated counter response from scientific organizations and colleges. You also suggest that the White House might consider forming a task force. How do you do that without further fueling the perception that the government or the so-called scientific establishment is trying to silence contrarian voices?
I’m not sure I know the answer to your question, because that’s not my training. But there are smart people who do know this, whether it’s from Homeland Security or the Commerce Department or the Justice Department or the State Department. Because you’ve got the Russian bots and trolls flooding our internet with both pro- and anti-vaccine messages because they see this as a wedge issue to divide the country and to destabilize democracy. It’s not only targeting the science, but the scientists, and portraying us as enemies of the state. And that’s very dangerous for our national security since we’re a nation built on science and technology and our great research universities.
You focus on the attacks coming from conservative politicians and news outlets, but it’s not exclusively the political right that engages in what you call “anti-science,” is it?
So in the old days, pre-pandemic, you’d say the extreme left and the extreme right. People here in Texas are the extreme right, and Seattle, it’s more on the left — peace, love, granola, crunchy sort of thing. I think that’s dissipated quite a bit, so I see it now as very much a one-dimensional partisan attack, at least on the biomedicine side.
Joe Rogan offered you $100,000 to debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long been known for his anti-vaccine activism. You declined. Why?
I wasn’t interested in helping RFK Jr. because I think the major motivation was that they need to prop him up as a legitimate candidate. And by having a prominent U.S. scientist appear with him, that sort of gives him credibility, and I didn’t want to help him do that. Second, it’s not how science works. Science, with some rare exceptions, doesn’t operate by debate. Then they tried all sorts of financial inducements, and then the threats came because they were disappointed I wasn’t propping up their candidate. And that’s when Elon Musk weighed in and other billionaires. They were disappointed that I wasn’t going to help him.
Polls indicate that most Americans at this point believe that Covid-19 originated in a lab in China. You wrote in 2021 that it likely has natural origins, but it’s at least plausible that it emerged after a lab accident. I’m not asking you to delve into that thorny issue, but I wonder if your view is roughly the same as it was in 2021.
No, because what we didn’t have in 2021 were published scientific papers clearly making a very persuasive case for the zoonotic origins and the wet market origins of Covid-19. We have at least half a dozen papers in top journals like Science, as opposed to lab leak or gain of function. You know how many papers we have on that? Zero, because there’s no there there. It’s not airtight — there’s still pieces missing — but I’m worried by all this focus on lab leak or gain of function research when there’s still no credible evidence for it.
Do you see that as part of the general vilification of scientists?
I think so. And I see that playing out with the GOP House Covid-pandemic subcommittee. Parading prominent U.S. scientists and hauling them in front of C-SPAN cameras to try to humiliate them. And I think this is part of revisionist history. Rather than accept their role for the deaths of Americans through an active campaign of disinformation, they’re going to double down and they’re going to say, “No, it was the vaccines that killed Americans and the scientists made the virus.” What’s really interesting about that House subcommittee is that, even on their Twitter site, it says they’re going to sell popcorn. They’re not even trying to hide the fact that this is all for political theater.
