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Hotez: Ignoring anti-vaxxers isn’t working.
Johnson & Johnson vaccines arriving at Yale New Haven.
Don’t ignore the conspiracy theorists. Take them on.
Peter Hotez, a Baylor College of Medicine professor and pediatrician, issued that call Wednesday at a virtual lecture hosted by the Yale School of Public Health.
The school invited Hotez to discuss his book Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-science , as part of the school’s annual Frank Black Memorial Lecture. The lecture is named after a late Yale epidemiologist who was a key player in development of effective measles vaccines.
Hotez charted the rise of the anti-vaccine movement in Wednesday’s lecture. He argued that the trend is a significant public health threat that the U.S. government should take seriously.
“The position of the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] has been for 20 years: ‘Peter, stop talking about this. You’re just giving it oxygen,’” Hotez said.
“My response is that it’s got all the oxygen it needs. It’s a dominant force now.”
The approach of the CDC is to amplify correct information. For example, the Covid-19 vaccine section of the CDC website provides information for doctors so they can provide a strong recommendation to their patients to get the vaccine.
The approach in New Haven has been similar. Yale New Haven Health doctors have attended neighborhood-level community management team meetings to field any and all vaccine questions. Neighbors have gone door to door to provide information and help elderly neighbors get vaccination appointments.
Hotez would like to see a federal, interdepartmental task force focused on the roots of vaccine skepticism.
“What would actually work? Should we de-platform the major organizations? I bet I could sit with the heads of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and deal them [the anti-vaccine groups] a pretty devastating blow. That gets into a lot of ethical issues. Some people don’t agree that it will be effective,” Hotez said.
Peter Hotez
International efforts to improve global vaccine access since 2000 have dramatically reduced measles cases.
Hotez is a professor of molecular virology and co-directs the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. He went to Yale for his undergraduate degree and now lives in Houston, where he leads the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Researchers like Hotez have been working on a coronavirus vaccine targeting spike protein for 10 years, so a vaccine for this coronavirus did not come out of the blue and was not rushed. Hotz is working on vaccine that is easy to handle. He said that a general coronavirus vaccine is in the works; in the meantime, people should expect to need to take a third shot in coming months to address Covid-19 mutations.
Hotez started writing Preventing the Next Pandemic a year before the Covid-19 pandemic began. In that time, the dangers of anti-science campaigns became increasingly clear. Hotez linked the spike in Covid-19 cases in southern states over the summer to those campaigns.
The modern anti-vaccine movement started in 1998 with Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher who published a now-retracted paper linking the vaccine used to prevent measles, mumps and rubella to autism. An investigative journalist discovered in 2004 that those hoping to sue vaccine companies had funded Wakefield’s research. The journalist, Brian Deer, eventually found that Wakefield had deliberately falsified data. Wakefield was barred from practicing medicine in the UK.
Texas Department of State Health Services
Despite this, the anti-vaccine movement continued to grow in Europe and hopped over to the U.S. Around 2015, the movement started intertwining with far-right politics. Hotez spoke about the efficacy of the Tea Party and its fundraising efforts in bolstering anti-vaxxers in Texas.
Now half of Republican men say they will not get the Covid-19 vaccine, compared to 6 percent of Democratic men.
Hotez has spent enough time on the issue that vocal vaccine opponent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. called Hotez the “OG [Original Gangster] villain,” Hotez reported gleefully.
Along with his concerns about anti-science movements, Hotez is worried about global access to Covid-19 vaccines. An early emphasis on innovation in Covid-19 vaccine development has delayed that access, he said.
Hotez and Baylor College of Medicine colleagues have tweaked the yeast-based vaccines that have a 40-year track record of success in low- and middle-income countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia. The resulting Covid-19 vaccine costs $1.50 a dose and does not require the kind of freezer storage as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Hyderabad-based company Biological E. Limited is producing the vaccine and has started clinical trials in India.
Dr. Hotez evidently is not familiar with the 1st amendment of the Constitution. Rather than make his points regarding vaccines cogent enough to have all Americans believe they should be vaccinated, he would prefer to silence the voices in opposition to his position. He would do this by deplatforming them. He and others would do well to re-think the move by the left to silence opposing positions by "canceling".