Hi.
Today we have a special bonus episode of Fast Politics podcast with doctor Peter Hotez live from the Texas Tribune Festival. What you don't hear on the podcast is we had a quick and actually quite upsetting and terrifying visit from RFK Junior, who stared weirdly at us and walked by us several times. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the interview. I'm Mollie John Fast and I am oh, thank you,
thank you very much. I'm not you know, I have three teenage children, so I'm not used to saying that and have it clapping.
I've used to it. I'm used to them being like, are you going to go out like that?
And it is my great honor and privilege to get to interview doctor Peter Hotez.
Thank you, thank you. And I have four adult kids and I'm not used to getting.
Yes, and our children are quite mean to us.
It's good experience right before.
We turn this into therapy.
So I'm very excited because I.
Love doctor Hotez.
He's my buddy, he's my go to, he's my man, and I see him out there on the front lines and I just respect the hell out of him.
The feelings mutual, Molly, because you know, so much, as we'll talk about in the book, so much of the targeting now against me around vaccines or COVID is politically motivated. And who do you talk to about that? So you know, you're been my go to person to help me understand the underlying politics on so much of this.
We're like Captain and Taneil. We're going to break into song. But so anyway, just dated right exactly. Oh yes, we have a copy of the book.
Oh my god.
So I come from book World because I had all these writers in my family, so I know we are here to sell a product number one okay, and this is the book.
So we're first, we're going to talk about this book.
Okay, the Deadly Rise of Anti Science a scientist warning. Okay, I'm gonna Larry King this because I haven't read this book. Okay, please forgive me. I didn't get it. Don't be mad. So anyway, let's talk about this book first. Why did you write this book?
Yeah? I mean I've been sort of in this dual life, you know, for for decades. So I did my MD and PhD in New York at Rockefeller University in Cornell where the motto of the university is science for the benefit of humanity, and I became a vaccine scientist with that in mind. The hookworm vaccine I started as an mdphd student in New York forty years later, is now in phase two clinical trials, which is about the right time frame for a lot of instances and so on.
What I set out to do forty years ago, I'm actually doing. I'm actually living out my boyhood dream. I believe so that that's wonderful. But twenty plus years ago things kind of turned on its side where there were false accusations at vaccines cause autism. That was the original assertion from anti vaccine groups. That's when I benched mark the start of the movement. And as I mentioned, I have four adult kids, including Rachel, who has autism and
intellectual disabilities. And I wrote the book the book, the original book called vaccines did not cause Rachel's autism. That maybe public enemy number one or two with anti vaccine group. So all of a sudden, I had a front row seat to watching this anti vaccine movement grow and evolve. And the reason I wrote the book this one because I saw a pivot and a change, and it became more politically motivated and become a political movement. But the
major reason was it was killing Americans. And in the book I benchmarked that two hundred thousand Americans needless they lost their lives because they refused the COVID vaccine. They were victims from this very predatory, politically motivated enterprise. And so for me, now, saving lives has a two pronged approach. One making vaccines that no one else will make. And we made two COVID vaccines, reached one hundred million people in life.
Yeah, I want to tell you about it.
Thank you, thank you. But the other side of the coin is also Saving lives is countering this anti vaccine movement because so many Americans are dying because of including forty thousand Texans who needlessly lost their lives in Texas.
That's so I want to talk about Rachel for a minute. You have four kids, they're all adults. You have this child who has autism, so you really have like the story that these anti vaxxers, I mean, they're really using autism.
As a way to sell their.
Line, literally sell. That's how it started. They were monetizing the internet, selling phony autism cures or nutritional supplements. I mean, if you go to Amazon dot com and type in the word vaccinations, you could do it right now on your iPhone. It's almost all anti vaccine conspiracy books right there. So there, it's an industry, and they're making money. And so by my going up against it, I was hurting their bottom line. And so what you saw was they
would continually change what their assertion was. The original assertion was, I was sing tabella vaccine. That was the paper that was fraudulent paper that was publishing the Lancet in nineteen ninety eight. Wait so, and then.
Ellis the story. It started with a fraudulent paper when.
In nineteen ninety eight was when it was published, and it claimed that the measles mumpsterbella vaccine, a live virus vaccine, had the ability to replicate in the colon of kids, and somehow that led to what they then called pervasive developmental disorder. Now we call it autism. And it never sounded right to me, how because clearly autism was something that was beginning in pregnancy, right, I mean, that's why
the pervasive part comes in. And sure enough, you know Rachel was diagnosed at the l Child Study Center when I was on the faculty at Yale, and sure enough, large cohort studies showed that kids who got the MMR vaccine were no more likely to acquire auten than the kids who didn't. The paper that was publishing the Lancet was a twelve person study that had numerous errors and there was conflicts of interest I weren't disclosed, and it
showed it to be not to be not true. And and so the scientific community, though, responded in a very robust way doing large coords. So he's sewing kids who got the MMR no more likely to acquire autism than kids who didn't get the MMR. And similarly, kids on the autism spectrum were no more likely to have gotten
MMR the kids not on the autism spectrum. And that should have been the end of it, But what you started to see is they weren't taking no for an answer, so they started all Propert F. Kennedy Junior got involved in two thousand and five. He wrote an article claiming it was the thimerosol preservative that it used to be, and that got debunks some kind of thing, and then it was spacing vaccines too close together an element. So became this exhausting exercise.
So it started with the mercury. The mercury was MMR, then MMR.
I then moved to mercury which wasn't even is now not even used in vaccines.
And then it went to.
Spacing vaccines too close. Now that's when Jenny McCarthy got so we had to talk about greening our vaccines. And then it was ali in vaccine. Then they pivoted to the HPV vaccine for cervical cancer and other cancers, has said it was causing infertility or autoimmunity. How many people here have heard that COVID vaccines caused infertility or autoimmunity. Yeah, that's what they got it from. They copy pasted the false assertion from FPV vaccine onto covid and then it
was then they pivoted something called chronic illness. You know, how do you you know, how do you even start that? And and I, you know, I think we did a pretty good job taking the wind out of the sales.
I wrote the book about Rachel, which does it talks about her life and also the evidence showing there's no linking vaccines and autism but also providing an alternative narrative that we did whole exum genomic sequencing on Rachel and my wife Anne and I and found Rachel's autism gene which was similar but different from the one hundred others identified by the Broad Institute.
So it was it was genetic, right.
So it's genetics and epigenetic. So the point is there's an alternative narrative right out, and that's important for parents and I, and and that they loved me at that point. So that's you know this, So I that's when I started to get heavily targeted, but I get this front row seat to the movement to see what it was all about.
One of the things I think is so interesting about the anti vax movement is it's not so different than some of the other far right conservative movements, right that they sort of come up with an idea, it gets debunked. I mean, if you think of like the twenty twenty election, right they were like Hugo Chavez voting machines, you know, or you're like, no, Hugo, the ghost of Hugo Shaves. I mean, right, Like we've debunked and debunked and debunked and it just keeps what going.
But this is when it became so pernicious. I mean, it was always problematic and kids weren't getting their full complement of vaccines. But then it took this very dark turn when it got adopted by the Republican d Party in Texas and started getting PAC money, political action committee money for anti vaccine activities. And that's what came off the rails during COVID nineteen, because what you started to see was Texas was one of the worst affected states
from COVID nineteen. One hundred thousand Texans perished in this pandemic, but tragically, almost as many Texans died after vaccines became widely available as before. Forty thousand Texans needlessly died because they refused to COVID vaccine. And this was happening because of a predatory movement coming from the far right. It started at the SEAPAC conference in Dallas in twenty twenty one, right as the Delta Wave was starting to take off
in the summer of twenty twenty one. You know, the language was first they're going to vaccination, and then they're going to take away your guns and your bibles, and as ridiculous as that sounds to us people, especially in the conservative parts of Texas, East Texas, Central Texas to Panhandle. Except that, and then you saw the pilon. The pylon came from members of Congress, Senator Groan Johnson, members of the House Freedom Caucus, and then amplified on Fox News.
So it became this whole far right ecosystem right and that was doing this, And it was very hard to talk about, especially because you know, as a physician and scientist, you're not supposed to talk about Republicans and Democrats. You're not so conservative. But what do you do when this aggressions coming from It's not that I care about someone's extreme views, but somehow, I mean, that's your right as
an American. But my point was, somehow we have to uncouple the anti science from it because it's killing too many mess too many America. Two hundred thousand Americans needlessly perished because they refused to COVID and there and they were victims of this predatory movement.
So one of the things I wanted to ask you about was doctor Fauci was kind of a villain for the anti ivax crowd, and they were furious with him for being a scientist and devoting his life to public service.
And then he resigned and they set their sights on you.
Yeah, it became sort of faucy light. They'd always had their sights on me, but now with Tony out of public office, he just wasn't as visible. So I became the next rung down. And then the weirdness really unfolded. Well, it was always weird, right I was, you know. I this first happened on the far Rights on twenty twenty one, Laura Ingram and Fox News and Governor desanct Us of Florida started mocking me for predicting the Delta Way was going to slam Florida in a couple of weeks, which
it absolutely did. It hammered Florida. But you know, that's you know, when it first started, and then I became a regular topic of targeting. Tucker Carlson went after me actually on the on the same day I was co nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for our COVID vaccine. Tucker, maybe because of it, he went on this horrible rant saying, you know, I was totally unqualified. I'm with Charlotte and I'd made a covid vaccine. What else?
And it's not just a will you talk about this COVID vaccine, because it's not just a covid vaccine. It's a covid vaccine that is for places where you can't have the fancy Fizer vaccine, right talker.
So we, in addition to making vaccines for parasitic infections for decades, about twelve years ago, we started making coronavirus vaccines for SARS. Remember the original Severque respiratory syndrome came out of southern China in two thousand and two, and mayors, because they were orphaned as well, nobody cared about coronavirus vaccine. So we became really good at making a low cost COVID vaccine that could be done through microbial fermentation in yeast.
And so when the COVID nineteen sequence hit, we were able to pivot and change our program to make the COVID nineteen vaccine, which we then licensed no no patent, no strings attached to India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and they were able to scale it up and make it so that one hundred million people got either korby Vax, which was the name of the vaccine in India or Indovac, which
is in Indonesia. Indovak became the first halal covid vaccine because they came in and inspected our labs and realized that all of our ingredients in the vaccine came from a non animal, non human source. So in a sense, it was a vegan vaccine. Although somebody pointed out, no, it's not reductor, it's not a vegan vaccineuse you did animal testing, so okay, so I don't know it's a vegetarian vaccine se.
So one of the things about the original Fizer and Maderna vaccines is that they need to be at least in the earliest stages, they needed to be stored in very cold storage. They were expensive to store, and there were parts.
I mean, we told they have been that companies were charging a lot and ours we were doing for two to three dollars a dose. Yeah, was about the cheapest you could get, and they were at the time charging thirty dollars a dose. Of course, now after taking twenty five billion dollars in taxpayer money for advanced purchase and development costs, they jet what do they do for these boot this new booster they jack up the price to
one hundred and thirty dollars a dose. Yeah, I say, guys say that you're trying to get the American people to hate you. I mean, you know, so they are. Lack of situational awareness is something, but you know, we continue to do this at very low But the other interesting thing, of course is you know, when you know people like RFK Junior, Joe Rogan go after me or Elon Musk, you know, they they say the term the uses a shill for the pharma companies, and I'm secretly
being paid by Fizer. Wait a minute, we made two vaccines that kept Fighter indeed with five. Yeah, but you know, the reality means nothing is fire. Pfizer is not.
Really they're not really fans, right, since your make a low cost vaccine that's available for Fred.
Yeah, I'm in a funny position because we have our vaccine, and yet the only vaccine really available in the US pretty much is the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer Maderna, and I want the American people to take that vaccine, so I wind up having to also you know, promote those as well, and so that's also problematic. So yeah, but you know, our vaccine now has reached one hundred million people. No patent. Those strings attached low cost to three dollars a day.
So there are parts of India where you can't.
Refrigerate, parts of Africa where there is we're freeze or freeze. What do you really need a vaccine that is more durable And that was one of the things that your vaccine was able to accomplish.
Yeah, it's low cost, no limited the amount you can make super cheap, you know, and we did that technology deliberately. So our whole approach is we make the prototype, then we partner with vaccine producers in low and middle income countries of scale up, kind of create this alternative model to the big pharma company.
So I want to ask you another question about this deadly rise of anti science. It's not just vaccines that these people are against.
Will you talk about that?
Yeah, it's now spilling over to other Well, first of all, it's I worry it's spilling over to vaccines for low and middle income countries as well, and childhood immunizations. That's one. And it's globalizing now, this US style anti vaccine movements, you know, into Canada now with the Health Freedom convoys and Central Europe, and in low and middle income countries on the African continent, and now it's other aspects of
biomedical science. It's targeting the virologists falsely claiming that you know that we made the COVID virus, which it's ridiculous. And so what you're seeing is this kind of revisionist history happened in the Congress. They you know, after I pointed out that two hundred thousand Americans died because of their predatory behavior. There's this revisionist history going on, and no when they want to say, no, it was the COVID vaccines that killed Americans, not COVID, total nonsense, and
the scientists made the virus. And you're seeing this play out now in these ridiculous house hearings.
Yeah, so talk to me.
I want you to first talk about being targeted by the dumbest Senator, Ron Johnson. I do not use the phrase dumbest senator lightly because the competition is fierce. But Ron Johnson I do think has brain worms, and he has taken you as.
A real He is really into bully.
Well, they're they're all I mean, Marjorie Taylor Green. You know when at Shawn the Senate going now in the House. The House says the poenut power the Yeah, you know he's going after me Steve Benn's war room a couple of times.
But tell us about Ron Johnson because he has I mean, I've seen, you know, Mandela Barnes ran against him and really could have won had the polling not been so inaccurate. And Mandela Barnes was selling a T shirt because Ron Johnson had said on television that the f I was after him. So Mandela Barnes has a tea shirt that says the FBI is after.
Me Ron Johnson. So I have that T shirt still, I mean, it's the beast.
But so I want to know how he targeted you, and also what the repercussions of being targeted by elected officials are, because if you think about that, it's so scary to me to think of, like, these people have been put in the United States Senate to represent the people of Wisconsin and they're you know, I mean, going after your doctor.
I mean I have Ram Paul. I mean, why is Ram Paul, a center from Kentucky, you know, targeting me on Twitter? Right? I mean, I mean, what is that I'm a medical school professor in Texas, right, I mean, or you know Marjorie Taylor Green, or you know, all of these guys. And and that's the other reason I wrote the book. That's scary that it's got this. It's adopted by a major political party, It's adopted by a section of the United States government targeting science and scientists.
And I said, look, this is a country that's built on the greatness of our research universities and institutions. They gave us the Manhattan Project in Silicon Valley and NASA, and so you know, when you know, after one of these guys goes after me, and or the war room podcaster Steve Bannon calls me your criminal. Steve Banner called me a criminal, right, And then you know the threats come, the online threats, the physical stockings. What do they say?
They say, the army of patriots is coming to hunt me down. And first I say, first of all, you don't need an army of patriots, just me and Ann and Rachel and Kat. Now, one patriot should do patriots should do it. But I said, wait a minute, you know who are the patriots here? The scientists are the patriots. You know, we're not these chuckleheads. And and how we bring that back, Yeah, I think is really critical because once you start targeting science scientists, this, this will undermine
our democracy. It's a it's an attack on the intelligency. And one of the things that you helped me to understand, Molly. You and another person who's very helpful in this is Ruth ben Gap.
Yeah, who studies extreme as well.
He studies extreme at NYU and New York University, and you know, and she points out, this is what authoritarian totalitarian states do. They target the intelligents. This is what Stalin did. This is what Hannah Rent wrote about in the Origins of Totalitarianism. So I had to take a quick crash course in political science to write this book because that's what it's about. This is about authoritarian political control.
One of the things I think is really interesting if you look at someone like Elon Musk, my favorite, and that's ironic. His business is electric vehicles. He does all these rockets, right, these are all made possible by science. He's on ozempic, right, or wavy or whatever it's called.
So he tweeted that he was on ozempic.
But he's critical of the vaccine, and a lot of these people they're on some kind of steroid, they're on a diet medicine, but they are worried about the vaccine, which literally billions of people have taken. And so I just wonder how you thread this anti science needle of like I send rockets to Mars, I inject myself with this drug that descends my bowels, but I don't trust this vaccine that billions of people have taken.
Yeah, I don't think it's he could care. I don't think he cares less one way or the other about the vaccine. I think it's what the vaccine represents, that it's targeted by the extremists, by the far right. Therefore he's going to adopt that contrarian view to show that he's part of the club, that he's part of it. And that's what they did to so many Americans. I
mean I was. I gave medical grand rounds at University of Texas Tyler, which is out in East Texas, very conservative part of the state, and almost everyone you talk to has lost a loved one because they refuse the COVID vaccine. That's where you really start to see it. And you know, these are the most extraordinary people. I had given a medical grand routes to Stanford University and Palo Alto, California, a very wealthy part of all of
California is expensive, but Palo Alto was uber expensive. And I said, look, if you gave me the choice of having my car broken down in Tyler, Texas or Palo Alto, California, I'd take Tyler, Texas anytime, because they'd all be fighting over who's going to help change your tire, right, I mean, as you know, palow out the little drive right by. But and the point is, these are the kindest, most remarkable people you could ever hope to meet. And they
were victims. They were victimized by this Fox News jugger, not together with the House Freedom Caucus, Media Matters and Research group out of et Zurich, which is where Einstein studied, you know, documented how Tucker Carlson, Laura and Graham Hannity every night during that Delta Way filled their nighttime broadcast three million viewers each with anti vaccine content, falsely discrediting the effectiveness and safety of vaccines. People went down that
rabbit hole and paid for it with their lives. And that's what we have to stop from ever happening again.
My last question for you, doctor Hotes is why do you do it?
Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is there's a vacuum you know, people, you know, because you're starting to see the scientific societies and not really speaking out. The college presidents aren't really speaking because nobody well when they don't, they see how I get beat up and they don't want that to happen. Right. But also I think because of this commitment to political neutrality, they feel they can't talk about it. And I said, look, I don't know how to talk about it other than to
talk about it. So I talked about it, wrote about it's again. It's this is what I feel is this is part of the deal of being a vaccine scientist and saving lives. And believe me, it's not fun, right, I mean, it's not fun having the Houston Police Department of Harris County Sheriff park down in front of your house and dealing with the FBI because they're sending swastikas to your home. And yeah, it's it's tough. It's tough, it's tough sledding.
Yeah, doctor Hotes, thank you, thank you.
I'm very excited for your good saying not anti vax question.
So, and I'm very cranky and mean. So just remember I.
Got to bring you along with me everyone. No, no, I'm your bodyguard.
Here we go.
Scientific research is getting really politicized, not only in terms of vaccination, and our legislature here in Texas has been very increasingly engaged in trying to regulate universities in different ways. How concerned should we be about our research universities potentially being subject to political interference in their mission?
Yeah, I know this.
That's a great question. More of those, very good, Thank you.
No, it's great, and it does worry me. And I mean just and it's bizarre, right, I mean, you had a professor at Texas A and I'm a pharmacy professor, works on the fat mental crisis, gives a talk at UTMB Galveston. I've been invited there many times, given talks and apparently says something about the lieutenant governor that people didn't like. Said they censure her for the place she's visiting, which is and then she gets put on administrative leave
by her home institution. And it worked out okay at the end. But that's very intimidating. I mean, I mean, you have to draw a line in the sand. Otherwise, you know, you don't have a university. And and you know, I mean, this is part of the greatness of our state. Right, I mean I didn't move to Texas because of the weather, right,
I mean I move I didn't move to Texas with this. Well, I mean I moved to Texas because of the Texas Medical Center, Baylor College of Medicine, and Texas Children's Hospital. Then you know, University of Texas A and these are amazing universities. Don't mess with them. They're also economic drivers for our states. Yeah, so it's self so self defeating.
I wanted to just point out that you are in a position where you're able to speak a lot of younger profefe and people who are less established are.
Not able to write.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting the way offices of communications work at universities. And they're pretty good at Baylor and Texas Children's. But you know, usually the works like this, They say, hey, you're an academic, you could speak on whatever you want dot dot dot, but don't screw this up and get the institution in trouble. So you do this with kind of the sort of damocles over your head. And of course if you out there enough in the public public sphere, you will screw it up.
And it's only a matter of time. So we need to make our faculty. And you're right, especially the junior people. I mean, I have I have resources, right, I have people I can go to. I'm established, I have you, I have I do a weekly call with Mike Osterholme and Peggy Hamburg and Bruce Gllen and Nark Topel that can sort of guide me through this stuff. But young people don't.
Have that right, and so it's you know, dogor again, thank you for all your work. My question, it's a sad question, is how many millions of kids are going to have to die of measles, mumps, rebella or any of the other diseases that were gone from this country.
Yeah, no, it's a century. It's a great question. You know, in the past, before this new political phase, I would have said, there's always this sort of inherent autocorrection mechanism. Right if you stop vaccinating, the first breakthrough infection you see is measles. Measles because it's so highly transmissible. Once you go below in ninety percent. You see measles kids go into the hospital, the intensive carrion. It word gets around the community and the parents say, oh my god,
measles is really bad, and they start vaccinating agains. So there was always this self correcting mechanism, but not two hundred thousand Americans have just died for nothing right because of this, And now you're just seeing this doubling down. So I'm not seeing the self correcting mechanism, not seeing the auto correction, and that worries me along because people's political leanings now, people's political identity is time to this stuff, and that that's new. Thank you, doctor Hotez.
You're are a hero to so many of us and we appreciate it.
Thank you, Thank you well two thirds of the country. Anyway, I'm hoping that's not watching fires.
I'm hoping you can help me understand the dynamic that makes no sense to me, and that is why some doctors are not necessarily anti vaxed, but anti precautionary measures. The doctors that are saying no masks needed in the in their offices, or the ones that don't wear it. My own brother is a doctor who is on the front lines of COVID in New York, and he mocks me for wearing a mask in public.
I'm trying to understand that.
I don't think it's limited to a few people. I think it's actually fairly widespread.
Yeah, I mean it runs the full spectrum. It's especially demoralizing when you see physicians, even physicians scientists take these contrarian in views and and and some of them are medical school professors at places like Stanford and UCSF and Johns Hopkins and and that, and not typically working on vaccines or infectious disease. They're experts in other areas that decide their way and what's their motivation and doing that.
And it causes so much damage because the average layperson doesn't know the difference, you know, between someone like me has worked on COVID vaccines for one hundred years and and and and that and so this is a very long I don't know the answer to your question, but but I can tell you that it does and then and then it and then everything from that to just not you know, following the literature that closely and not understanding. But it's it's that deliberate contrarian stuff from people who
should know better that I find it very alarming. Got Gandhi towards the end of his life, did an interview with an episco I think he's episcopalian. Minute disturb and you know, is asked what disturbed him most during his life and his answer was the hardness of heart of the educated. And we've seen a lot of that in COVID.
So I'm an epidemiologist by training. I worked through COVID doing social media campaigns and one of the things that I noticed is not everyone who is refusing the COVID vaccine is an anti vaxer.
A lot of the.
People who are literally just don't know better, Like they want to know more.
There's an interest to know more.
And I have to admit, even as a scientist that our communication throughout the pandemic was not the best. So what can scientists and the science community do to one rebuild that trust? Because it's a good question when when like messaging is changing so much, I can understand that fear and to how can we also improve like science literacy or health literacy for the public so they can make informed decisions because that seems to be a problem as well.
Yeah, that's a really good question about ten different questions and that.
What about rebuilding public trust?
Well, first of all, you know, I had a different way of you know, when I was started in talking to the public, some of the professional communications people said to me, you've got to talk to the American people like they're in the fourth grade or sixth grade. And I found that what didn't work for my style? And
I found that wasn't the case. I mean, either you were really worried about your family and wanted whatever it took to protect your family or not and or why, or you were watching Fox News and and if you were in the former, I found that the American people were willing to tolerate quite a level of complexity and and went into that, and I think it was appreciated. I think there was sort of this still old fashioned way of communicating that often came out sounding like baby
talk and it didn't really ring true. So there was those mistakes in communication. But of course you had the anti vaccine and you know, anti science people weaponizing every little slip up also, so that didn't help. So, yes, there's a lot of room to improve communication, but it was also every effort made to weaponize it as well.
One of the things I thought was really interesting about you know, I wrote about all of this throughout, and you know, they they were going with the information they had, right, so they so when it started, the information they had was they you know, remember the tape of Trump talking to a journalist. I think it was the Watergate guy, not Carl, but the other guy, Woodward, Right, the tapes with Woodward were he's saying, it's airborne.
You know, we didn't know what it was. We didn't know.
I mean I remember, like we kept our Amazon boxes outside because we were worried that we're going to get something from it, you know, and like.
Remember those scrubbing down door dash.
Right and could you order food? I mean, we just were. We just were sort of getting the information in real time, which I think caused a lot of you know, just information was changing because we were it was happening in real time. And I think that the anti vax world really weaponized that.
And for instance, when the when the two doses came out of Pfizer, it was it was designed to prevent symptomatic illness. And I was out there saying, well, you know, it's two doses, but you know, if it's anything like any pediatric vaccine. The way it works as you give a series of immunizations, you wait six months to a year, and then you boost. So it's don't be surprised if it's not going to be one and done and two
and done, but it could be three and done. And by the time the delta way fit, I was looking really good. And then you know, the disappointment was the mRNA just weren't holding up as boosters as well as we thought, right, And that was a big disappointment for everyone. So there was that need to, you know, say, there's news.
I want to ask you one more question about m RNA because m RNA, with all of this anti vax nonsense, we haven't talked about how mRNA vaccines could the future of curing cancer and amazing stuff.
I mean, can you just.
Talk a little bit about what mRNA can do maybe or eventually.
Well, most people know I've taken the mRNA vaccines. It induces a pretty reactive inflammatory response, and the hope is that this will work against not only infectious disease, but noncommunicable diseases. I think I'm pretty sure that's why Pfizer and Maderna and biotech are in this. They didn't because the money to be made for infectious disease ordinarily is not so high. The biggest, the big ticketized cancer autoimmune disease. So the hope is that there will be some benefit for that.
I mean, it'll be so ironic if that, if that ushers in a whole new world of cancer treatment.
Oh sorry, Hi, let.
Me just say add my thank yous to everybody else's. I really appreciate everything you've done. I love your books. I'm learning a lot. So I'm a retired science teacher and once a teacher, always a teacher. So I'm having trouble educating people about vaccines and explaining what they are and words like peer reviewed and all that. So how do you suggest we educate others about common sense, factual science.
Well, the first thing is all K through twelve STEM teachers need to be paid one hundred thousand dollars a year started starting actually, and I shouldn't qualify the STEM because we need to teach we a low to read, write right and everything and write a sentence. So that's
the first thing we do. The second is we need to get the American people to better understand what a scientist actually does on a day basis, you know, and what it means to go to a lab meeting or do a major revision of a paper, or to get a grant not discussed because it didn't make the first cut. A great organization out in rest in Virginia or McLean
Virginia called Research America did a study. It said over ninety percent of Americans cannot name a living scientist, and of those who attempted to, they name people like Jonah Salker Einstein, and then the others named you know, Fauci or Bill Ny the science guy. So you know, the point is the American people have no idea what we do.
And that's that's partly our fault as a scientific profession because we're so inward looking and so focused on our grants and our papers and writing and speaking for each other that we've not done that public outreach. And so there's got to be a sea change I think in that as well, working hand in glove with the K through twelve teachers to do so. The point is there's a whole ecosystem or that has to be created that's not there right now, Doctor Hotest minds, I see.
But the resident here in Austin speaking of trust, like even the Biden administration regarding the actual origins of the COVID has some of their intelligence has said with low confidence it may have came from a lab in China. As an evolutionary biologist like yourself, what evidence would you have to have? I think you're still saying it's natural, isn't it? And because this is a government that genocide its own citizens, so if they have something to lose,
they're not going to you know, divulge it. So what evidence would you need to say, Okay, yeah, this is something that came from the last well.
So this question is what market versus.
Lab leak right or gain a function? I mean the point is, you know, we've gotten now six or seven published papers and some of the top journals like Science magazine clearly showing the natural origins and zoanotic spillover of the COVID nineteen virus.
So it's a crossover species like you.
Know, these viruses circulating bats, and then through a combination of climate change and human migrations and deforestation, people are coming into closer contact with bats. This is true not only for the coronaviruses. It's true for NIPPA, which is in India. It's true for Ebola. That's why we're seeing the Ebola.
I'm right.
One of the most common questions I'm asked is, hey, Doc, what the heck is going on? By that, they mean, you know, Ebola, Zeka. This is all because of these twenty first century forces. So the point is, COVID nineteen is the third major corona pandemic of this century. We've had SARS Mayor's now COVID nineteen pretty much all the rising by the same set of circumstances. And that's why we're going to have a fourth major coronavirus pandemic before
twenty thirty, I predict Wait what, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean because we're not doing the outbreak investigation that we need. On the other hand, there is not a single published paper in a scientific journal on gain of function or lab leak because nobody's been forthcoming and any evidence for it. And I've said, look, if there's any I said in the very beginning, if there's any evidence for a lab leak, we could say that for any epidemic or pandemic, you know, we'll look into it. And
I said that back in twenty twenty one. But since then there's been no evidence forthcoming from lab leak or gain of function, and a huge amount of evidence for the natural origin, so much so that Michael Warabee looks into this. I'm not an evolutionary biologist. I'm a vaccine scientist, but Michael Warabe is evolutionary biologists. Has come out and said there's probably more evidence for the origins of COVID nineteen that we've had than compared to any other pandemic.
So it's pretty solid. And the evidence for that is no one's written a paper on lab leak or gain of function because there's no there there, And if there is some there there, we'll look into it.
But right the right is obsessed with this idea that it's a lab leak. But I don't think that you guys can I mean, you just want to have vaccines and solve the problem.
That's right. But the other reason it's important is because we still don't understand at a very granular level how these viruses are jumping from bats to people, maybe through secondary intermediate animal hosts, maybe livestock. And that's a problem because we're going to have the fourth one soon and so we've never done that outbreak investigation that needs to be done, which means going into Central China, collecting samples from bats, some other animal hosts humans, and really detailing
that at a grandeur level. That's what needs to be done. That's why I get so frustrated with the Chinese not being transparent, because we're going to be set up to have that same There's baths infective with coronavirus all over the face to vasa Asia from Central China down the unon on the Vietnam, going all the way up into Japan and Korea, and we still don't really understand that
at a detailed level. And I worry that all of this labily gainer function is a distraction because it's keeping our eyes off the prize of what we really need to do, which is to do that detailed outbreak investigation.
Okay, so one last question.
Hi, Thanks for your talk. I really appreciate everything you're doing. I'm in medicine myself and I work in clinical trials, but one of the things I think that go hand in hand where you're talking about is medical misinformation basically, and I heard that the NIH just solved that project.
They were going to do medical misinformation, and can you tell us a little bit about what medical associations are doing for people that are saying things that aren't untruthed with like ivermectin or vaccines or any of those things.
Right, I think, you know, we don't know how to manage this. And so the NIH, I think was going to allocate funds, I forget what it was, maybe one hundred and fifty million dollars to really support groups that are looking at misinformation. But that's getting tired. Those groups are getting targeted now by Jim Jordan and trying to block it. And this is what's going to undermine our country and it's a killer. And the evidence of that of the two hundred thousand deaths, So we really need
to understand that. I just I'm reviewing a paper now where now people can use AI artificial intelligence to generate blogs, to generate all of this disinformation about health at a very high level and very quickly. And so when people start applying AI to this stuff, forget it. It's just going to be this you know, over rush and and make matters worse. You've got foreign actors, you know, using
this to destabilize the country. You have, you know, these Russian bots and roles that what they're doing in Russia is interesting. Is what Putin's doing is he's flooding our internet with both anti vaccine and pro vaccine messages because his deal is he looks at, you know, the big issues that are destabilizing our countries and you know, the elections one of them, but also vaccines, and so he does this to so discontent and destabilized democracy. And guess
what it's working. And that's that's really worries.
Doctor Hotels is signing books at a different time.
I don't know anything.
It's the main place where you signed books, at.
The main place when you sign books, next.
To there and next to the Omni hotel in the Omni.
And he's the best. So thank you the best, thank you, thank you very much. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going.
And again, thanks for listening.
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