Hello, and welcome to the Texas Tribune trib Cast for March eighteenth, twenty twenty five. I am Matthew Watkins, editor in chief of the Texas Tribune. We are recording early this week. It's the Friday before as the Watkins family prepares for our trek to Lego Land in California, and this week, of course, as always, joined by our co host Eleanor Klibanoff.
Hello, Eleanor, Hello, I'm excited for you to go to Legoland.
I'm very excited missing it. My son could not be more thrilled. And my wife also told me last night that she said that you are the better host of the Tribe cast and that you do better banter than I do. So I just want to this open the floor for you for any banter you would like.
To provide high stakes. Now, I will say, every time I end up at a social event with your wife, it is just me and her talking in the corner. So I think she just likes me.
That can be right.
I'm not sure she's does not like me or doesn't like you, but yeah, you know, I'm honestly, Lego Land sounds pretty great. I've never been is that is your daughter excited.
It is my well, she's she's excited for my son, who is younger and obsessed with with Legos. She was also they were both very intrigued by the Legoland Hotel, which apparently outside each elevator has a whoope cushion. So they they've been talking about this for weeks. Okay, and maybe I will report back in future episodes, and.
Tells me there's gonna be like a big setup where they like are tricking you into where you are well aware you're being tricked into using a whoopy cushion. Yes, yes, yes, well that'll be great, we hear meanwhile, recording this on Friday. It is the bill filing deadline, so we're sort of we're in the weeds, but we're so glad you're getting some time off.
Yes, yes, yes, it's good to be the editor. Yeah, exactly sure, all.
Right, and this week we are joined by a special guest as well, doctor Peter Hotez, who's dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine and author of the recently published book The Deadly Rise of Anti Science. Doctor Hotez, thank you so much for joining us.
Oh, thanks so much for having me.
I'm wondering if you could have your kids when they're a legal and make me a funded grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Out of legos.
Absolutely, that may be the only ones left. So see if you can work on that. I will, I will see what I can do.
Worst case scenario will give you a whoope question. That's what we can offer.
Do do medical schools good spring break?
You know, that's the problem with the medical schools and academic health centers versus you know, the typical you know, four year colleges because every day, you know, it's just it's all based on sponsored research and grants, the seeing patients, and so summers, the summers don't mean as much in that sort of thing.
All right, well, we will do our lego work for you and on your behalf in California. The reason we have doctor Hotez on this edition of the podcast is because it is March. Therefore, it is the fifth anniversary of the sort of ramping up of the COVID pandemic in Texas. It's the end of March where Texas really started to impose the restrictions. It was the early part of March where the first sort of cases started popping up.
It has been a challenging five years for many of us, doctor Hotez in particular, in the aftermath of that, and of course, now five years later, we are dealing with another public health crime, at least not maybe not on the scale of COVID five years ago, but still a scale that is very concerning. This is, of course measles and the large number of cases of measles as of Friday. As of today, the day we're recording this, Texas has had more than two hundred and fifty measles cases in
thirty four hospitalizations, one death. Eleanor you and the health team have been involved in covering this. Let's just start this conversation by telling us a little bit about what's been happening with these cases in recent weeks and months, where we sort of stand in this crisis right now?
Sure, So, this outbreak started in West Texas in Gaines County, which is a small rural county in West Texas, you know, sort of southwest of Lubbock along the New Mexico border. And it started in a Mennonite community, which is actually pretty common for measles outbreaks. To start in, you know, more tight knit, closed off communities. In this case, the Mennonite community has very low vaccination rates, and you know, it just spread from there. As I'm sure we're going
to get into. Texas has seen declining vaccination rates for measles in recent years, which just means there's a lot more people who are sort of susceptible to getting measles is spreading really fast. Basically, the experts we're talking to, we've not really been able to get put a lid on this, as I think many people had hoped in those early days.
Doctor you are one of those experts. I mean, what are you watching when you see these cases in what's happening out there in West Texas.
Well, you know, I think the numbers are probably low ball estimates. You know, from talking to some of the public health officials in the ground and colleagues, I'm getting a sense that the numbers are far higher than two hundred and fifty because some are not seeking medical attention and others, you know, trying to do remedies at home and that sort of thing, So the real number could be several hundred. And of course, the one thing you
cannot hide or hospitalization. So thirty four hospitalizations. That's pretty rough, especially since probably most of those are kids, and most of those are probably hitting one children's hospital in the region. So the outbreak is centered on Gaines County on near the New Mexico border, as you point out, but the children's hospital is about one hundred miles away in Lubbock. It's connected with Texas Tech. So they're getting hit pretty hard. I would imagine those kids are sick. I mean, measles
is a bad actor. You know, roughly a high percentage of hospitalizations. The reason they're hospitalized is because of measles.
Pneumonia causes the virus when it causes the rash. Because the virus gets into the blood and goes to the skin, it also goes to the lung and causes this very severe It's called giant cell pneumonia because of a particular type of cell that appears in the lung, and they require respiratory assistance sometimes even in ICU ad mission in debation of course to one death and encephalitis, permanent neurologic injury, deafness from metals, measles otitis, and ear infection and dehydration
from from diarrheal disease. We forget that at one time measles was the single leading killer of children globally, and now it's hitting Texas really hard. So this is this is a humanitarian tragedy of sorts because none of this had to happen. These are almost all among unvaccinated kids and adults that could have been prevented with an MMR vaccine. Measles Monster Bell vaccines one of the best vaccines we have.
You know, I make vaccines for a living. We you know, my our laboratory at the Text Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development in Baylor. You know, we developed new vaccines for virus infections, for parasitic disease vaccines. When we design a vaccine, our gold standard is the MMR vaccine because you can't do better, you know, that's our dream, that's our aspiration to make something as good as the MMR vaccine.
We never quite get there, but that's the aspirations. But just to give you a sense, that's how good the MMR vaccine is. And the fact that it's been withheld from these kids because parents have been victimized by this disinformation wave is just so demoralizing and sad, and so it's a lot of sadness all around.
And then the last point.
Before I'll let you get a word in edgewise, is it's still going this evergreens every two weeks.
The reason I say that.
Is each time the number goes higher. Remember the incubation period from the time you're infected with the virus to you show the symptoms the rash and the three seas, the cariiza, conjunctivitis, and cough. It takes about twelve to thirteen days. So we know at least this epidemic will lasts to the end of the month. And I think at this point it's going to go well into the spring. And so this rint for the long haul in this one, unfortunately.
Right.
And one of the things they say about measles, right is when you're not vaccinated, vaccinated, it's just kind of unbelievably you.
Know, so contagious. Yeah, so contagious. Yeah, It's like I think it's like if you are unvaccinated and you're in the room two hours after someone with measles has been there, even ninety percent chance of getting it.
Yeah, it's there's there's two there's two factors in that one the inoculum required to be for you to become infected. That is, the number of virus particles is very small. And as as you just pointed out, the virus can linger in the atmosphere, so you don't even have to be in direct contact with someone with measles. Someone could have been there, coughed, sneezed, spread virus particles in the atmosphere.
It aerosolizes.
You can go in two hours later and then contract the virus. And that's why the measles virus has one of the highest what we call reproductive numbers that we know about and infectious diseases. A reproductive number means the number of people you'll infect.
If those individuals are not vaccinated.
So in the case of measles, it's twelve to eighteen, which is even far higher than coronavirus, which itself has a lot very high reproductive number, especially the omicrob. But this is the mother of all reproductive numbers coming from the measles virus.
Doctor, I hear your frustration, right. It's such an effective vaccine. When people who are not vaccinated catch the illness and get sick, it feels like something that was preventable, should have been prevented, and things like that. I wonder if you could help me try to understand as I kind of grapple with the context of this is, of course,
and we're going to talk more about this. We are coming off of a pandemic right where vaccine skepticism hit kind of all high new levels, where public officials have in some ways encouraged that skepticism. We're also talking about an outbreak within a kind of you know, contained religious community that has perhaps been traditionally you know, you know, dating back even before COVID, you know, somewhat suspicious of
modern science and things like that. I'm wondering what since you have of how different this individual case is because of what's happened, you know, during and post kind of the worst part of COVID, or how much of this is just a type of outbreak that we see sometimes from very particular communities that might not be as vaccinated as the population as a whole.
Yeah, so a lot to unpack there, So let me let me start unpacking. The First of all, I'm told I don't have a deep knowledge of the Mennonite community. I'm told they really do not have prohibitions against vaccination that in general, but that some anti vaccine activists somehow got to them and convinced them of this. So so park that thought for a minute. But let's go back
about ten years. So the point is that the anti vaccine movement in Texas, which is probably the most active of any state in the country and maybe the world, started about a decade ago. And in fact it was a decade ago. I wrote an article in the Public
Library of Science more or less predicting this. It was called Texas and its Measles Epidemic, and the reason was, if you remember twenty years ago, over twenty five years ago, the original assertion against vaccines was false claims that vaccines caused autism, and that started with the measles mumpsterbella vaccine and then pivoted to thimerosol and a lot.
Of other things.
And that's how I got involved with this, fighting the anti vaccine movement because I'm a vaccine scientist developing low
cost vaccines for global health. But then I'm also the parent of four adult kids, including Rachel, who has autism and intellectual disabilities, and I wounded up writing a book called Vaccines Did not cause Rachel's autism about my daughter, which wound up making me public enemy number one or two with anti vaccine groups, but it also gave me a front row seat to seeing what this thing was
all about. And what I saw about ten years ago was kind of a shift or a pivot in the nature of the anti vaccine movement from the main focus aroun of fears that vaccines cause autism, which had actually started to dissipate a bit until our good friend Robert F.
Kennedy Junior just became Healthy Human Services Secretary. Now he's resurrecting it, but it was actually going down in favor of a different aspect to the anti vaccine movement, where it became more political in nature, around the spanner of health freedom, medical freedom, where it got picked up by And this is where it gets hard to talk about because we're not supposed to talk about politics, at least physicians. Scientists are not supposed to talk about politics, right, We're
supposed to be politically neutral or not. But you know, I haven't found a way to talk about it other than to talk about it.
So I talk about it or I write about it.
Not because I care about politics that you're right as an American citizen, your right as a Texan, but to say, let's uncouple the anti science stuff from it, because it's so dangerous. But about ten years ago it got picked up by the Republican what was then called the Republican Tea Party in Texas and it started giving pac money political action committee money to anti vaccine groups because they were rallying around this concept, which I consider it kind
of a propaganda concept around health freedom, medical freedom. You can't tell us what to do with our kids. And these anti vaccine groups were, you know, convincing parents that vaccines were instruments of political control. You don't need to get vaccinated. They were dompling the severity of the diseases
they're designed to prevent. They were exaggerating the side effects of the vaccine, and basically working on our state legislature to you know, file anti vaccine language to make it easier to exempt kids out of vaccinations and put in a lot of onerous language around the legislation and even
support candidates to run an anti vaccine platforms. It made no sense, but I guess it made sense because that this became kind of a platform of the far right and the consequence of that was, starting around twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, you started to see this very steep rise in the number of parents requesting non medical exemptions for their kids to the point where we got it. You know, now over one hundred thousand kids in Texas not getting
their full complement of vaccines. And this doesn't say anything about the homeschool kids. We have no idea what's happening with the homeschool kids because they're homeschooled, and probably hundreds of thousands more. And it had this unique kind of flavor to Texas. But Texas is now being the tip of the spear for the rest of the country, or at least the rest of the Red States. And that's
and that took us up to the pandemic. So things were already bad for the fibrus six years prior to the pandemic, and then during the pandemic, COVID hit and it even became more political and more dangerous. So you know, I wrote about this in the book The Deadly Rise of Anti Science. It got picked up at the SEAPAC Conference of Conservatives in Dallas in twenty twenty one, where you know, they were in there and this is after
mRNA vaccines became available for COVID. There was a big pushback around vaccine mandates, which you could kind of understand. But what they did was they went the next measure
and falsely discredited the effectiveness and safety of vaccine. So the rhetoric at that SEAPAC conference, you know, Matthew Catherine, the representative from North Carolina, who is there, you know, to paraphrase them, I don't remember the exact words, was more or less to the effect of, first they went to vaccination and then they're going to take away your guns and bibles, which is again this health freedom medical
freedom concept. But then they paraded out all of the most toks anti vaccine activists to falsely discredit the effectiveness and safety of vaccines. And that was what was so dangerous. And then the pylon came from the US Congress, you know, you know, congress or Margery Taylor Green you know, called people like me medical brown shirts, comparing vaccines to the Holocaust, or Lauren Baybart, you know, started calling them fauci auchies.
And and then you had Senator Ron Johnson and Wisconsin hold these phony blowny vaccine injury round tables and Ran Paul was piling on and then Fox News joined in. And this was documented by two groups, Media Matters, a watchdog group, and in a research group out of the Federal University in Switzerland documented how Fox News during that delta wave, you know, that started around the time of
the Seapac coffers. Unfortunately, when vaccines were widely available every night, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity were falsely discrediting the effectiveness and safety of vaccines. And then there was another amplification effect with Joe Rogan podcast at that time. He was not really very anti vaccine at all prior to this and decided to flip to that and started pushing ivermectin, which does nothing for COVID in lieu of vaccines. So
it became this whole ecosystem. So people in our state of Texas started, you know, going down that rabbit hole. And then I'll stop in a second, and the point is, you know, Texas had the worst experience with COVID of any state in the country terms of total numbers of death. It's tied with California with one hundred thousand deaths. Although
Texas is a considerably smaller population. But of those, half the deaths were needless deaths because just like the measles cases, now, those fifty thousand unnecessary deaths were in people who refused to take a COVID vaccine because they went down that rabbit hole on Fox News and everything else and made an executive decision not to vaccinate. And that's what we're dealing with. This is you know, it's not some academic
discussion or theoretical discussion. This anti vaccine activism in our state of Texas is a lethal force right now.
Yeah, you know, I think back at some of the public health crises I've covered as a journalist while while living and working in Texas. The first one that comes to mind for me is I was at the Dallas Morning News covering County government when the Ebola scare happened, right, And I remember the very sort of unified and together approached that Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkin's a Democrat, and the governor at the time, Rick Perry, took in terms of fighting this illness.
I mean, I think if I remember, yeah, he was terrific.
I actually, Governor Perry invited me to serve on his Infectious Disease task Force right right there you go, And that was it was all hands on deck, and you know when and Governor Perry was all into the universities and proud.
Of that, and.
Yeah, so it was it was a point is it was normal.
It wasn't crazy, right.
And then you have COVID right, and and in the early days you have Governor Abbott, you know, giving regular press conferences, you know, shutting down businesses and in schools and everything like that.
He then, you know, as.
And I was on his task force then, and it was normal.
The normal response was exactly yeah, you know that he he loosened a lot of those restrictions later on, of course. And then but you know, when the vaccine came, I remember him, you know, giving a press conference receiving the vaccine, you know, on on television cameras, everything like that. But of course, this backlash that you just described continues to grow and emerge and everything like that. Fast forward to this measles pandemic andreak sorry excuse me, measles outbreak.
I call it an epidemic diaesels epidemic outbreak.
Yes, yeah, and you know, Eleanor you have written about this just even just the public response to this has been very different, right, and it's been largely silenced.
Yeah, I mean, I think our government officials have been pretty publicly quiet about this, like we should say, like the state has mobilized. They've sent you know, the Department of State Health Services have sent folks out to West Texas to help. They've launched vaccine clinics. They are doing a lot on the ground. But you know, Governor Abbott has not really addressed this publicly at all. He has tweeted out his statement at a certain point, but saying
that the state is responding. But you know, the leaders from that area, elected leaders from West Texas have not said anything about this. You know, these are people who
are very active on social media. Right there, They're talking about a lot if what we have heard from certain lawmakers is the opposite, right, I mean Representive Nate Shatt's line from Fort Worth, which has not yet been hit by measles, but he was on Twitter this week bragging about how his child's children's school district is the has the lowest MMR vaccine rate in the state, and was you know, really bragging about that and saying, you know,
thank you for being patriots, thank you for honoring medical freedom of moms and dads and not you know.
Yeah, I mean I don't know where this comes from. But well, I mean I don't know where it comes from.
It started ten years ago.
Amplify with COVID, and now it's spilling back over to childhood immunization. So the Gallipol did a survey in August last year, August twenty twenty four, and you're now seeing the same partisan divide among parents in terms of making vaccine decisions. So the question they ask is do you think the vaccine is more dangerous for childhood vaccines? The childhod vaccine is more dangerous than the diseases designed to prevent. And there's that clear partisan divide.
And and you're right.
The Texas Health Department has been great. I mean, both the state Health Department and the County Health Department. They've been good all you know, no criticisms at all. They've been setting up vaccination clinics there. God, it's it's you have no idea how hard it is to combat a measles epidemic because it is so highly contagious. I don't even know how you do contact tracing. So they're they're doing a terrific job. But how do you now start walking this back? How do you say? And this is
my biggest struggle. Everyone's in your entitled your political views. I don't care about your political views, you know, but don't adopt this one because it's so dangerous to you, the health of your family, to you. And and and this concept of medical freedom health freedom, it's it's it's really pernicious. And I do think you see it not playing out with what RFK Junior is saying in.
Public, right. And I do think, like you know, so many people got brought into this medical freedom movement into all of this not I mean, yes, in part because of the COVID vaccine, but also because of real and perceived vaccine mandates, right, the idea that I am being required after months of you know, anger growing about COVID lockdowns, COVID restrictions, you know, all these things, then it was like, here's another thing you have to do to go back to your job as a healthcare worker or a pilot
or And I think that brought a lot of people into this movement that maybe otherwise would not have been you know, they didn't care before they would just get their kids the vaccine because they you know, vaccines, because they were told to. So I do think that was like a pivot moment in a lot of ways that you know, and it's hard to know, like it's hard to say in hindsight, you know what could have been done differently, But I do think that is what galvanized a lot of people.
Yeah, And I would say, like when we talk about Governor Abbot, right, I think, correct me if I'm if any of you think I'm wrong here that there is a slight difference between what Abbot has said. He has maybe been more skeptical of vaccine mandates, but has not been out there saying like don't get the vaccine or anything.
No, Right, I do wonder.
I've spoken to the governor about vaccines. Here's no problem.
Yeah, he got the COVID shot, right. He did also sue the federal four times over vaccine mandates, right, Like that's the gap.
I think.
I do wonder though, Like I mean, one of the thing about the COVID vaccine was, of course COVID we knew disproportionately affected older people. The risk when a younger person, particularly a child, got it, the risk of transmission appeared to be lower. The risk of kind of serious illness was lower when a kid got COVID measles. Seems to sort of be the opposite, right, and it is very
dangerous for these young children. Is there any indication that this incident, this case is inspiring people to rethink their aversion to vaccines, or are people getting their children vaccinated when they might have otherwise. Not, because this is such a particularly scary thing for children.
Yeah, you'd like it.
But you know, if you look at a map of COVID vaccination rates in Texas, and you can get this from the New York Times, it looks just like a geopolitical map of Texas. So what is the geopolitical map of Texas? Looks like you got these big blue blobs in the shape of a triangle right the cities, and then you've got South Texas mostly in blue, and then there's a sea of red on top of that. And
that's what the COVID vaccination rate looks. It's I mean, it's almost a mirror image of really low vaccination rates in West Texas, the Panhandle, East Texas, the rural counties, everywhere except for South Texas and the cities. And it's not a coincidence that measles is accelerating now in West Texas. That's you know, if you were to predict where that was going to happen, this is where it would either be in East Texas or West Texas in the Panhandle,
and it began it in the Mennoni community. But I think it's now continuing to accelerate. And this is like a hurricane over warm water. I mean, as long as the hurricanes over warm Caribbean water, it'll continue to accelerate. And here the warm water in the unvaccinated rates, which are substantial now in many parts of West Texas. So I don't so the only hope for bringing this to an end is to as the state and local health departments are doing, setting up vaccination clinics, mobile clinics, and
encouraging people to get vaccinated. The only thing that stops this is of enough parents agreed to vaccinate their kids.
And I think anecdotally there are stories from West Texas that, you know, I think Lubbick last time we talked to them, had seen you know, a couple hundred families come out to get vaccinated. I think a lot of families who maybe weren't as ardently bought into this idea. They just sort of hesitated when their kids were young to get the shot, and now are like, hang on, like, you know, okay, there is a real measles threat out there, detrue.
Does I wonder just like if you could put this threat into context for us, like you know we talked earlier. I have two kids, both of whom are vaccinated. Both of them go to public schools. We're about to go to a busy airport and fly to you know, and hang out with a bunch of other kids.
And make my lego and make your lego. Yes exactly.
I mean how much do I, you know, using me just as an example for you know, millions of other families in Texas right now? How much do I need to be concerned about the immediate or even mid term health and safety of my children with this going on right now?
Well? How old are your kids? So I have a third grader and a sixth grader. Yeah, so you're fine.
I mean because after the late nineteen eighties, kids got two doses of vaccines. So your first dose, which you typically give at one year of age, is around ninety percent protection protective. Your second dose is gives you up to ninety seven percent protection. That's about as good as it can get, and even if there is some breakthrough measles,
it'll be greatly mitigated. The most problematic one right now is if you have an infant child and you're that infant's not yet old enough to be get their first
Meetzel's dose. So if you have particularly between six and eleven months of age, because prior to that, you know, four months, three months, the infant will still have maternal antibodies on board because if mom was vaccinated, But then there's that window period of vulnerability evening six and eleven months where maternal antibody is waning and you don't give the first dose yet. We don't give the first dose earlier because the maternal antibody will interfere with the vaccine.
So that's what I worry about an hour the parents with infants six to eleven months, and then what do you do? Well, if you're in a measl's endemic area right now, if you're in West Texas, the state Health Department has issued an alert to encourage parents and pediatricians to vaccinate earlier, starting between six and eleven months, depending on how old they are, and then you wind up getting three doses of the vaccine instead of two doses
of the vaccine. See, you vaccinate now you don't know how well the vaccine takes because there might be still maternal antibodies on board, and then vaccine again at twelve to fifteen months, and then four to six years of age.
So we've talked a lot about the vaccine hesitancy, the politics about this, but there's also just the general public health apparatus. There was a lot of talk, you know, when the COVID vaccine hit about hit sorry, yeah, well, well when COVID and the vaccine came about about the the underfunding of public health departments, you know at the state and local and maybe even federal level, about you know, the exhaustion of these folks having to work with this
for years. How do you feel like that apparatus, that government system, maybe below the politician level, is holding up. And what are we learning about that system from from what's happening with measles in West Texas right now?
Well, I know a lot of people who work in state and local health departments, you know, feel a bit demoralized because they feel like they can't have open discussions like we're having here and uh and and they feel a little bit under siege. There's an added problem that I only learned about recently. So I do a weekly phone zoom call with some amazing colleague. I mean, I'm more of a laboratory science guy and making vaccines and
infectio disease in the laboratory. But I do this weekly call with Mike Osterholme, who's who's an amazing epidemiologist the University of Minnesota, together with Margaret Hamburg, former FDA commissioner, and Penny Heaton and Eric Topel and Ruth Berkeleman from CDC and others. And one of the things that I learned, I didn't realize this that most state health departments get the lions share their budget from the CDC, and I didn't It wasn't aware of that, and now that's being
cut dramatically in many states. I don't know what's happening in Texas, So that could be another big problem that we're that we may be facing as well. So it's just getting tougher and tougher to implement public health measures. You know, my experience with the state Health Department. It's outstanding. My experience with you know, here in Houston, we have two public health departments because we have to have two of everything, right, we have county and city, So the
county and city health departments are top, top notch. I often wonder why they stay with it, you know, given the you know that the low pay and the stress and everything else. But they're amazing people.
So we actually are.
The two The heroes in Texas are the public health experts and the journalists and people like you.
Or I think.
I tell because I come from the Northeast and I and I tell people that the smartest, most committed journalists and reporters I've ever met her from the state of Texas and part because you.
Have to be right.
I mean it, and it goes across. It's not just the text tribute is wonderful, but it's also true of reporters from every paper I've met, you know, San Antonio, Dallas Morning News, in Houston Chronicle, I mean, Austin Standing an incredible group of people. That's why I'm willing to spend time with you guys, because I'm so impressed with what you do.
I appreciate that.
I want to ask you just briefly too. I you know, I follow you on Twitter. You mentioned kind of being the target of a lot of these vaccine skeptics, you know, from from even the days before the COVID pandemic. It seems like due to technological issues, political issues, and maybe cultural issues with with our country right now that that abuse has it, it's alarming, right. I mean, I see some of the of what you're subjected to for saying
these things publicly. I mean, tell me just about like what this has been like for you as someone who advocates for these things and believes that these things are our messages that the public needs to know.
Yeah, I mean, I'm the for for my adversaries, I'm the trifecta. I'm a scientist. I'm a vaccine scientist and a Jewish vaccine scientist. So I check all the boxes for attack, and and uh, it's it is gotten to be a very scary place. And you know, part of it is because I've spoken about the anti vaccine movement in such direct terms. I don't use euphemisms. I I I write the same way I'm speaking to you, and and I try as hard as I can't to thread the needle to say, look, don't think of me as
a political political figure. I don't care about politics. You know, I that that's not what I'm interested in. I just want you to uncouple the stuff that's going to put your family and harms away. Does a matter how much I swear up and down about that, I still get
attacked And and one of it's interesting. One of the things major the ways they attacked me is they claim I'm, you know, in bed with the big pharma companies and I'm taking millions of dollars from pharma companies, in which my wife n says, if only but and and and the answers I don't. That's the opposite we've made, you know, we might have devoted my life to making being a pediatrician scientist that makes low cost vaccines for the world, proving we could bypass the.
Big pharma companies. And we did it.
And I did it because I'm in Texas and the resources being part of this amazing Texas Medical Center at Balor College of Medicine, Texas Children's Hospital. Our COVID vaccine
proved we could bypass big pharma companies. We administered we you know, made a low cost for combatant protein COVID vaccine that reached one hundred million people in India and Indonesia bypassing pharmac But you know, the assertion stills out there on Elon musk X that I'm a shill for the pharma companies no matter how, it just wear up and down, and then it takes on other dark turns.
It claims I'm secretly making the COVID virus. And you know, Alex Jones goes after me, says, I'm part of the what do they.
Call it plandemic?
They don't call it pandemic, to call it plandemic.
That it's all, you know, designed to disrupt society.
And and of course I'm doing this because I'm Jewish. I'm doing it with George Soros and one of the Rothschilds, and they've got me and and apparently the laboratories at Davos at the World Economic Forum, but I tell them, look, the labs are better in Texas. And you know, but and and the crazier the conspiracy, the more the more pileon there is.
That's it.
And that's and that's something very dark also, that that's something I never thought I'd see as a as a you know, I went into this because I thought it was the most noble thing you can do with science and the pursuit of humanitarian goals.
Making low cost vaccines.
For the world. Never occurred to me I'd be treated as a public enemy or a cartoon villain, and and that that's very tough.
Yeah.
I'm involved in my new position as editor in chief in the planning for the Texas Tribune Festival, and we were just having a conversation. I realized about a week ago. We were talking about security issues and one time you doctor spoke at the Tribune Festival and there was a report of someone kind of outside the panel looking to kind of stir up controversy and in anger about it. And that man is now our Secretary of Health and
Human Services are fk Junior. He had he had appeared kind of uninvited at the festival, and so.
That was that was, you know, like one of those dreams you have when you drink too much red wine the night before, you know, at dinner and correct and now, and I had I had this dream that Robert F. Kennedy Junior came to my cat discussion and the doctor told you that to drink so much of red wine, but but there was actually happened.
Yeah, yeah, that's really strange.
By the way, we have a notebook coming out in the fall in September and hope maybe.
You'll invite me back.
I'm doing this with Michael Mann, the climate scientists who gets beat up like I get beat up on the climate science side, and we're comparing notes and the book is called Science under Siege, and we look at the overlap between the attacks on climate science and biomedical science, and there's a surprising amount of commonality, which is quite interesting.
We will prepare our invitation.
That's on the day, fifteenth eleanor speaking of upcoming works, will be running kind of a series of stories on the fifth anniversary. Those will be launching, hopefully the day this is appearing in your podcast feeds on Tuesday till it's just quickly what to look for in that coverage.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we realized so much has changed in Texas in the last five years, and we thought this was a good opportunity to look back, not just on what happened during COVID, but lessons we've learned and the whole Health Team has contributed to this. So our first story is coming out today and looks at you know, how prepared Texas is for the next pandemic spoiler alert, not as prepared as we might hope in
certain ways. And we are also going to in the future look have stories looking at the death count, you know, really what the human toll of this all, was, looking at ARPA funding where that all went, and yeah, just an opportunity and really you know what the impact has been on Texas politics, So an opportunity to sort of take stock of five crazy years.
Absolutely, Okay, I mean the story, the story that I would really want to see get out more is the story of this extraordinary Texas Medical center where I work at Bala College of Medicine, Texas Children's Hospital. You know, you know, when I was going on the cable news channels, going on c in A, MSNBC, I was even going on Fox News for a while, un though I didn't go get I wouldn't go along with the hydroxy chloric
when nonsense, and then the invitation stopped there. But but you know, one of the frustrations that I always had going on the cable news channels is you know, the way in the Northeast. They want to portray us here in Texas, and all they want to do is talk about the wackadoodle, and I would try to explain, No, wait a minute, I came to Texas to up my game for science and medicine. I mean, I can do things in our Texas Medical Center in terms of life
saving interventions that I couldn't do anywhere else. It's been the most productive time of my scientific career. But that story doesn't get out enough.
And and and.
That's and I don't know how how we do that, but you know, we were. We tend to be very inward looking in terms of our public outreach. But there's something also very special going on here. I mean I didn't really come because of the climate. I mean, well I did, I guess because I work on tropical diseases. But the in terms of solving big problems in the world, you can do more in Texas, I think, than anywhere else.
And that's why that's why I stay. That's why I'm here interesting.
Thank you for that, Thank you for joining us on the show. Thank you Eleanor looking forward to reading those stories as well. And a big thank you to Robin Chris, our producers. That is it for the podcast. We will be back next week.