Peter Hotez: On Covid, or Climate – Right Wing Targeting Science

Dr Peter Hotez, noted physician and advocate for public health, has been prominent in promoting vaccines in the era of Covid.
His warnings are familiar to climate scientists.

Peter Hotez in the LA Times:

Nearly a century ago, when global dominance in scientific research began shifting to the United States from Europe, our nation built an empire firmly grounded in the natural sciences. America’s research universities and institutes flourished and provided the discoveries leading to the Manhattan Project, Silicon Valley’s tech industry, NASA and space exploration, vaccines to fight polio and other global infections, and new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and depression.

As a science envoy for the State Department, I saw first-hand how global leaders and technocrats admired the U.S. for its higher education system of scientific training and support. They spoke to me with pride about their time spent at U.S. universities or their hopes and aspirations that one day their sons and daughters might study here.

I have devoted my life to vaccine science. During the pandemic, our team at the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine developed a low-cost COVID vaccine that was scaled for production in India and Indonesia, where almost 100 million doses were administered.

But here in the United States, thousands of Americans needlessly perished because they refused a COVID-19 immunization during our awful Delta wave in the summer and fall of 2021 and the BA.1 Omicron wave in the winter of 2022. Analyses by myself and colleagues have found that 200,000 unvaccinated Americans died during this period. Overwhelmingly, those deaths occurred in Republican strongholds, including 40,000 in my state of Texas. A closer examination reveals that the redder the county, the lower the immunization rates and the higher the death rates.

The dead were victims of what we too often label as “misinformation,” as though these victims succumbed to random junk on the internet. This was not always the case. The unvaccinated were targeted by a well-financed and newly politicized anti-vaccine movement.

It accelerated at the CPAC conference of conservatives in Dallas in the summer of 2021, when prominent anti-vaccine activists were featured speakers and one Republican lawmaker from the House Freedom Caucus announced that vaccinations would lead to government confiscations of Bibles and guns.

Just before CPAC, another prominent Freedom Caucus member had disparaged vaccinators as “medical brown shirts,” meaning Nazis, and she later attacked me and other scientists by name on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Other caucus members regularly made unsupported and spectacular claims about the benefits of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin as COVID treatments, while disparaging COVID-19 vaccinations.

Fox News piled on, misleading a huge swath of Americans. The partisan divide driving low COVID vaccinations and high deaths in 2021-22 was so profound that Liz Hamel of the Kaiser Family Foundation pronounced: “If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is.”

Now in 2023 the GOP Senate and House have intensified their efforts to promote conspiracies or denigrate science. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) went on Fox News in August claiming the pandemic “was all pre-planned by an elite group of people.”

Partisan politics is not the only factor driving vaccine disinformation, but this aspect has become the most intractable and lethal. It is also uncomfortable to discuss. I was taught that science and politics do not mix, and that we scientists need to be neutral. But what happens when the data overwhelmingly demonstrate that thousands of Americans died from political targeting?

During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s rise to authoritarian control relied on exiling or imprisoning prominent scientists. This had catastrophic consequences for Soviet productivity, especially in agricultural science.

Now American biomedical scientists have become targets. A 2021 survey found that 15% of scientists who engage with the news media about COVID-19 have received death threats. Another in 2022 found that almost 40% of COVID-19 scientists report experiencing at least one confrontation either online or in person, including death threats.