StarTalk Radio - Immunizing Against Anti-Science with Peter Hotez

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

How do you stop the spread of anti-science rhetoric? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Paul Mecurio break down disease prevention and the rise of anti-science with physician and global health expert, Peter Hotez.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/immunizing-against-anti-science-with-peter-hotez/Thanks to our Patrons Ivan Stanic, Jeff Collins, HD, Matthew Steinberger, Michael Tikalsky, Kin Chan, and Cynthia Cook for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Coming up on StarTalk Cosmic Queries, we feature my conversation with Dr. Peter Hotez. He's a virologist and a pediatrician, and we talk about the rise in the anti-science movement and what impact that has had on his work as a medical doctor. He's also an expert on the movement of tropical viruses into regions where they were not previously invited, all thanks to climate change. That and more, coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. My co-host for this episode, Paul Mercurio. Paul, how are you doing, man? I'm doing great. Great to see you again, buddy. Good to have you back.

And, you know, every time I take another look at your resume, it's like you're an Emmy Award winner and Peabody Award winning comedian. Yes, I am. I mean, this is good stuff. And the Peabody, that's the one you really want there. Everybody's got an Emmy, but a Peabody. That's the one where people go, oh, you read a book. You still work and perform regularly with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show? Yeah, we go back

to The Daily Show together. I was one of the original writers and performers on The Daily Show back in the day. Really good to hear that. And occasionally when I'm on Stephen Colbert,

I bump into you and it's always good to see you. Yeah, it's great. And you always, Stephen loves having you on. Oh, right. No, I'm serious because in rehearsal,

it'll be like, who's the guest? And sometimes I'll be like, and then it's like, Neil, oh, great. Because you never shut up, so he doesn't have to do anything. That's what it is. I make his job easier. Okay.

No, it's great to have you on. Yeah. So today is a very important topic, something that's centerpiece to so much of what I do and what I care about. and what I care about. It's anti-science in the medical community, and that is anti-science as expressed by the public about the medical community, but also forgotten diseases with Peter Hotez. Peter Hotez, welcome to StarTalk.

Thank you, Neil. I'm a huge fan of both of you, and I'm thrilled to be here. It's very exciting for me. Excellent. And it impressed the heck out of all my kids. Okay. That was the most important thing.

They're the toughest crowd of all. Anything on the domestic front. The kids are the toughest to impress. If we can boost the domestic front, we're all in on that. So you're a pediatrician, and you're dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine. That's actually a thing. That's a place. At Baylor College, a professor of pediatrics and molecular biology at Baylor.

And you're a fellow in disease and poverty. Gosh. The James Baker Institute for Public Policy. Peter, you need to work harder. I know. Right, right. I don't know what's going on with you. If I were religious, I'd have to say,

God put you on this earth to do good, okay? But I'm not religious, so I don't know how to say that then. The author of several books, Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases, The Neglected Tropical Diseases, and Their Impact on global health and environment. That was back in 2008. Yeah, my kids used to call it Dad's Forgotten Book on Forgotten People.

But it's gone into the third edition, so I think I've proved them somewhat wrong. Very good, very good. And another one, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, A Scientist Warning. Oof. What year did that come out? Well, you know, I'd written this book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, in 2018. And this new one. Rachel is your daughter.

Rachel is your daughter. Yeah. And then the new one is called The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science. It talks about how the anti-vaccine movement has transitioned over to more of a political enterprise. And so I want to describe that change. Excellent. And so that's out already, is that correct? That's correct, yeah. Okay, so okay, we'll look for that then. Thank you. And you were interviewed persistently as COVID-19 was on the rise and trying to educate and try to disassemble the misinformation that was sweeping the world

and especially misinformation, not only regarding the virus, but the vaccines to prevent it. So could you just tell me, let's back up. Tell me about forgotten diseases and why that matters. If they're forgotten and no one thinks about them,

or they're forgotten, they're still out there, we just forgot to think about them. Is that it? So, you know, most of my, you know, people know me for COVID and we've made two COVID vaccine technologies, reached 100 million people in India and Indonesia. But our OG vaccines are vaccines for parasitic infections. And that's been my first passion is making vaccines for tropical parasitic infections affecting the world's poorest people on the African continent, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

So Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases describes that whole ecosystem of what I call the most important diseases you've never heard of. They're the diseases such as human hookworm infection and schistosomiasis and Chagas disease, lymphatic filariasis and river blindness. They're incredibly common. It's just that they only occur among people who live in extreme poverty. So we've been, one of the things we do here in the Texas Medical Center is to find a way to make innovations for the world's poorest people that the pharma companies would not ordinarily be interested. So if these diseases were hitting Europe and the United States, there'd be a trillion dollars

invested in it. Well, that's what I would often think. But one of the things that we're finding now, and one of the reasons we created our National School of Tropical Medicine here in the Texas Medical Center was because of a lot of 21st century forces like global warming, climate change, urbanization, remaining poverty. We're actually now starting to see some of those same diseases pop up here in Texas and the Gulf Coast and as well as in Southern Europe. And what's interesting, Neil, is that's one of the hardest advocacy jobs I've ever had is getting people to understand that these tropical diseases are now arising here on the Gulf Coast.

And not because necessarily of immigration or across the Southern border, as a lot of people want to say, but in fact, because of climate change and because of poverty and urbanization. And the way I illustrate that is we have 10% of the dogs here in Texas with Chagas disease. And it's not because the dogs are slipping across the border from El Salvador, right? That we've got transmission of these diseases here.

And we're finding Chagas disease transmission here in the United States, as well as according to some of the others. But it's very tough to get people to understand that we have a vulnerability here. We need some kind of a reality show, kind of like the voice for these obscure diseases here in America, so that then people become aware of them through watching television or something like that. Oh, yeah., tactical measures there. So at the risk of stating the obvious here, what you're saying is as a climate warms, changes and includes warming trends at latitudes that previously did not experience such warming, the diseases that previously had been constrained to the tropics are now spilling

into other latitudes on Earth, presumably North and South. And so this is a spread that has been empowered by climate change. Well, climate change, but one of the things that I've found in my writings is that it's not only climate change. It's climate change is working in concert with other social determinants, such as urbanization. That's a big one, right? Because Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmit yellow fever or Zika virus infection or dengue live in the discarded tires that are in urban neighborhoods. So if you go into poor neighborhoods in and around Houston

where you see all the tire dumping, that's actually a risk factor together with... Wait, wait, I have to interject. It's not that the mosquitoes like rubber. Okay. No, it's a fascinating fact. I'll explain. So, Paul, I don't know if you knew,

the shape of a discarded tire is ideal to trap water inside of it no matter how you orient the tire. Right. So this water inside just sit pooling there. If you pick up the tire and roll it, the water just stays in there. If you tip it sideways, it curls around the edge and pools at the bottom. So you actually have to like shake it and like dehydrate it.

And so what's weird, Peter, is that this could be a major vector for mosquitoes, just discarded tires. That's a weird, crazy fact. So that little vignette you just gave is exactly what I said to our mayor of Houston at the time, Mayor Sylvester Turner, extraordinary guy, Harvard law graduate. And I convinced him that we had to get rid of all the tire dumping in the low-income neighborhoods in Houston. And so while South Texas had Zika virus transmission in 2016, we did not have that in Houston. Now, whether it was in spite of what we did or because of it, we'll never know.

I'll take credit for it anyway. That's right. But aren't you just transferring the problem somewhere else to get rid of the tires? See, like when I steal cars and take the tires, I was going to ask you about that. I always cut the tires with a chainsaw and open them up because I'm concerned about all of these viruses and diseases. That's so 20th century. I thought catalytic converters were like the new thing.

Oh, they are. Thank you. Well, I actually have some in the trunk of my car. I can talk to you after the show about that. I don't even know what a catalytic converter looks like, but that's what i've heard i'm alikhan hemraj and i support star talk on patreon this is star talk with ne deGrasse Tyson. So tell me now about the rise of, I've known about anti-science outside of medicine because it's not so much anti-science but pseudoscience that permeates.

But if a person is susceptible to pseudoscience, it seems to me they'd be susceptible to anti-science. Because pseudoscience are ways of thinking that conflict with mainstream scientific thoughts and understandings of the world. So where did you first see your medical anti-science? Well, Neil, first of all, you've been a role model over the years for how you combat a lot and debunk a lot of the pseudoscience. So I often follow your cues and you were actually an inspiration for me to get involved in this, which I have to pay you back somehow. No, no, just pay it forward. I've become public enemy number one. It comes with the territory. Yeah, right. Well, what happened was, you know, I have the original assertion against vaccines

arose in the late 1990s with false claims that vaccines cause autism. And so I have four adult kids, including Rachel, as autism intellectual disabilities and wrote the book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, which was a deep dive explaining why there's

no link between vaccines and autism, the science behind it. Also what autism is, how it begins in early fetal brain development through the action of autism genes. We did all that genomic sequencing and Rachel, my fan and I, and laid it all out there. And it was a very powerful book, I think. And it helped a lot of people, but it also wound up making me public enemy number one or two with anti-vaccine groups. Our friend Robert F. Kennedy Jr. started publicly labeled me the OG villain, and I'm so old and square, I had to look up what that means. What OG means, yeah.

The original gangster villain. So thanks for inviting the OG villain. But it was meaningful. I did find it meaningful, and now I realize if you're trying to make vaccines for hookworm vaccines and new COVID vaccines like we're doing, this is also part of it now, countering the anti-vaccine activism.

The problem was it took another level. It actually started before the COVID pandemic, but it really accelerated, which became a political enterprise linked to political extremism on the far right. And you started to see, and this is where it gets really tough because, you know, Neil Oliver training as scientists says we don't really like to talk about Republicans and Democrats and liberals or conservatives or

red states or blue states. But what do you do when the people refusing vaccines overwhelmingly are in red states? And the study showed from Charles Gaba and others that the redder the county, the lower the immunization rate and higher the death rate, so much so that David Leonhardt of the New York Times just called it red COVID. And it's a killing force. So 40,000 Texans in my state of Texans died because they refused the COVID vaccine during the Delta and BA1 wave after vaccines were widely available in 200,000 Americans overall. And that's why we have to talk about it, because anti-science is no longer just kind of this theoretical thing. It's actually a killing force.

But we can separate the variables, as we say in mathematics. My understanding was, and we explore this in the film, Shot in the Arm. This is written and directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy. He's a documentarian. You were prominently interviewed in that film. I served as a script consultant because there's a lot of science getting communicated, and I advised on that. And then I got promoted to executive producer. Last time I agreed to that,

because that was the whole thing. But anyhow, in that, we explored the fact that there are two separate variables here. One of them is, are you anti-science because you hate big pharma or whatever? And another one is, you can't make me get a vaccine

because I'm American and I'm free and freedom. And so one came from the right, from the left. The other came from the right. And they met on the other side of the fence because they both had the same objective. So are you, I presume you've seen both of these camps, right? And they require different solutions. Yeah, you know, and it's changed over time. You know, we used to say the anti-vaccine movement was a product of the, as you rightly point out,

the extreme left and the extreme right. And the extreme right, it was health freedom, medical freedom. You can't tell me what to do. On the extreme left, it was, you know, a piece of love granola. We have to be careful what we're putting into our kids. And eat your herbs and that'll cure your... And the stuff on the left has somewhat dissipated. Not entirely because you still see a lot of people peddling nutritional supplements linked to the anti-vaccine movement. But it's mostly the killing force, the one that killed 200,000 Americans, overwhelmingly is a product

now of the far right. So,000 Americans, overwhelmingly is a product now of the far right. So you've got, and it's tough to talk about, you've got members of the House Freedom Caucus, you know, calling people like me medical brown shirts. That's the term they use. I'm using Nazi analogies, pretty horrible stuff. And you've got, you know, two U.S. Senators, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, holding vaccine injury roundtables and Senator Rand Paul targeting science and scientists. You had the CPAC Conference of Conservatives. First,

they're going to vaccinate you, then they're going to take away your guns and your Bibles. And it's ridiculous, that sounds to us. People accepted it in my state of Texas. And then the real tough one was Fox News amplifying it every night. And this was documented by two groups, Media Matters and a research group out of Switzerland. The nighttime Fox News anchors every night falsely discredited the effectiveness and safety of vaccines. They filled their broadcast with anti-vaccine content. And so what happened was if you were going down that rabbit hole, watching Fox News every night and everything else, you started to believe that the vaccines either didn't work or weren't safe and you didn't get vaccinated.

And so many Americans paid for that with their lives. And it's not, you know, Neil, it's not that we really care, right, about people's political views. That's your right as an American. I shouldn't speak for you, but I'm guessing you probably feel that way. No, of course. But how do you uncouple the anti-science from it? I mean, I don't care about your political views.

I mean, you know, whatever. That's your right. But how do you say, don't buy into this one because it's going to kill you? What about as we showed some footage in this film, a shot in the arm, in it, we had footage of anti-mask movements back in the 1918 pandemic, the flu pandemic.

So it seems like being anti-mask was not just a modern idea or modern concept. I think that's right. I think this, if you look back in US American history, this concept of health freedom goes back to the time of Benjamin Rush, the founder of so many medical societies in Philadelphia. And you mentioned in your book, doctor, that he actually, there's some evidence that he tried to have something written into the Constitution about this. That's right. And it goes back to the whole botanical movement. Paul is showing off that he read your

whole book. I just read the one page and I'm happy to get lucky. I got lucky. Well, I'm grateful as someone who's been accused of writing forgotten books by his own. Anyone who comes up to me and says, I read your book, they have my attention. Waiting for the cue to mention that one content

for the one page. Oh my God, I cannot believe that I work with you. So yes, I think that this goes back. So there is that thread throughout history. I think the difference is the amplifying effect of social media, the amplifying or X or whatever you want to call it, and the amplifying effects on Fox News, that really revved it up.

And people were monetizing disinformation. I think that's what the game is. But isn't it in a way a rigged game for you, for us who are trying to fight this anti-science cause? Because it's rigged in the sense that the only thing you can prove to make your point is science. And they go, well, we don't believe in science, so you can't use that one, right? I wish it were that simple because- It's a tautological argument and debating, right? It's like, there's no Santa Claus. I know there's

no Santa Claus. But it's even more clever in sort of a nefarious way than that, because what they'll do is they will bring in their own experts. Right. These contrarian experts. And many of them are at serious medical schools, right? Peter, Peter, these are your people. Yeah, exactly. These are your fellow MDs who've been to medical school. They have patients who call them doctor.

And so is it a matter of cleaning up your own house here? Just to put some blame back on you? It's a good question because, you know, they are professors and it's serious places like Stanford and UCSF and Hopkins. And, you know, I often ask my colleagues, why don't we do anything to rein this in? And they say, well, you have academic freedom. I said, that's true. But you also have something called professionalism and ethics, too. And if it's killing Americans, at what point do you say we shouldn't be doing this?

Well, you say that in your book, too. See, I read more than one page. say that in your book too see i read more than one that in history shows that when academics and scientists tried to stay objective in the face of fascism and so forth it was too late once they started to speak up right but to answer to to neil's point if these are your people i mean politics knows no bounds right and sometimes politics and and being with a clique that believes in everything you believe in is more important than anything that's logical. And you talk about in the book that you need a clearinghouse for people to defend or an organization to defend scientists in these times where you're under attack. And my suggestion would be to get all the ex-jocks in high school to defend the scientists going forward.

Okay. When the nerds got beat up in high school, the jocks would defend some of the jocks in high school to defend the scientists going forward. Okay. When the nerds got beat up in high school, the jocks would defend, some of the jocks would defend them, I think. This is, so this is what we're seeing now play out in the House COVID subcommittee hearings. You know, after I've come out and said, look, 200,000 Americans needlessly died because of this disinformation war that you waged. Now there's this revisionist history going on. They want to say, no, no, it was the vaccines that actually killed Americans. Absolute nonsense. Or they want

to say it was the scientists who invented the virus. And it's this rewriting of history and not only targeting the science, but targeting the scientists as well. And it's so damaging for the country. And I think it jeopardizes all of our future scientific infrastructure. So, Peter, before we go to our questions, and Paul, you got all the questions lined up? I do, yes. You do? Okay, thanks for being on the ready for that. Okay, thanks for being on the ready for that. My rebuttal to the pedigreed person on a YouTube saying that everybody else is wrong and they say, the establishment wants you to think this, but they're all wrong. I have the truth,

and I'm on your side. There is no greater foundation for suspicion than that, because that is irresistible clickbait, and it means someone is not, and then what people have been doing is giving, even the very concept of mainstream has been thrown into question by those who are anti-science, saying, well, the mainstream, they all have monothink, and they don't know the real, this is the real cure for that, not what mainstream thinks. Absolutely, in fact, my similar rule of thumb is when someone has to tell you they're a critical thinker, head for the hills. Exactly.

And what's interesting is what they'll do, again, very clever in a nefarious sort of way, is they'll say, well, we're just asking questions. Who is this Hotez guy who's being so dogmatic? That's not science. We're just asking questions.

So you have to really be on your game and be very, you know, really. Plus I tell them someone with a YouTube channel will be more charismatic than the statistical results of multiple peer-reviewed studies that has no face. Okay. And if they have no accountability, to be honest, then, you know, that's another handicap. If you can't condense a 50-page thoughtful analysis to 180 characters on Twitter, no one's going to read it. That's a problem, right? So it's like, but like...

Just to be clear, it used to be 140 characters. Now it's 280. 280, there you go. Just don't reveal how unplugged in you are, okay? In front of my audience. Exactly. Okay. It's called X, by the way, Paul. And I heard there's this thing

called Google that everybody's really excited about. So, Paul, let's get to the questions. Sure. Okay. These are from our fan base. Here we go. We love them because they're all like scientifically literate and they're thoughtful. So give them to me.

Good afternoon, gentlemen. My name is Frank Lewis from Daytona Beach, Florida. What is the strangest conspiracy theories you've come across? Boy, there's so many good ones to pick from. I'll give you a couple of my favorite my absolute favorite one is claims that I'm not a real person that I'm actually

Jack Black being paid by the CIA in a disguise Jack Black's a good looking guy. I'm okay with that. That's one of my favorites. And then, you know,

the best is when they say the vaccines are magnetizing them and, you know, you have one individual testify in front of the Ohio legislature sticking bobby pins and keys on her forehead and then claiming that they're sticking to her because she was magnetized by the vaccines and of course total theater of the absurd they fell right

off uh again so so um but uh you know the the what's interesting is the more outrageous the assertion the more viral it seems to go okay so so Peter, because I got to deal with people who think Earth is flat. That's a whole other thing. But at least they don't, well, I was going to say. They're not going to kill anyone. Except there was a guy who put himself in a rocket of his own design

to go up high enough to show that Earth was flat and the rocket misfired and he died. Okay. And by rocket, he means a washing machine with wings. That's what he means. So there's at least one fatality from that movement, but okay. So go on, Paul. Give me another.

Matt from LA. Greetings, all. Of course, it's super important to fight anti-science efforts, but there must also be some room within science for ideas that come from non-scientists. Currently, any non-credited theorist is treated as a crank, no matter how good the idea. Is there some way to create a peer-reviewed pipeline for ideas to come in from other disciplines? Or from non-experts? Well, we do have, and Neil, you've been a good promoter of this. We do have citizen science, right? We do have, there are, I think, you know, scientists are all in, in terms

of the public engagement. I don't think that that's necessarily true. I think we do solicit input. But, you know, when you have people that are weaponizing the science communication, you see that they have an agenda. That's something very different. Yeah, I would add that when people, it's one thing for people to say, I saw something in this map of the Martian surface that's on a NASA website that no one has talked about. This is crowdsourcing the analysis of information, and that can have value. But when someone says, I think Einstein is wrong, that E equals actually, actually equals MC cubed instead of MC squared. You know, I spent seven years in graduate school studying all the work that has come before me to know what works and what doesn't and why.

And so to spend a couple hours on YouTube and come up with an idea without the homework behind that, it becomes frustrating to we in the professional community because you didn't do your homework. All right. And you end up in that valley. It's what's it called where you, you, the Dunning-Kruger effect. Knowing enough to think you're right, but knowing not enough to know that you're wrong. Okay. Oh, then I really have that. I have that in space.

Yeah. And you see this a lot with some of the lead anti-vaccine activists who really don't understand the science. And you even see it, I see it a lot now with some of the contrarian intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals who even have medical degrees. If you notice, they don't have any expertise in infectious diseases, virology, or vaccine. They usually come from other fields. Other fields within the medical world. Yeah, they're surgeons or they're radiologists or they're, you know, something else.

And then they overreach. Right, but then their argument will be, you all have groupthink and I'm coming from the outside so I have a fresh view. That's very tempting as clickbait for someone. So, yeah, I these are these are persistent challenges here that uh yeah we're still at it yeah and then when you start sounding too dogmatic they've even come up with a new term neil maybe you've heard this as well they call

they say i'm practicing scientism scientism it's kind of like a fusion of religion and science. It's all BS, but again, superficially, it sounds flawed. But it's hard to push back on the religion front, right? I mean, because when people start pulling their religious beliefs in, that's kind of a sacred sort of place to be, and it puts the people on the right side of this argument in a tougher position. I mean, Jehovah's Witnesses, right? Christian scientists, Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe very much in modern medicine,

which is ironic because they're constantly getting broken noses by having doors slammed in their face. No, stop. Right, but on the other hand. If anybody needs modern medicine, they do. Those who are, the ones though that are causing the damage are those that are, you know, if you look, they're selling their sub stack. They're selling their nutritional supplements. They have a pretty lucrative business going.

Or it's all about political control. Yeah. And that was all held by Senator, by Ron Paul's sort of passing of that legislation, as you point out in the book, that opened up that whole idea of supplements. And Neil, if you read the book, you would know that. But anyway, Cicero Artifon, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, from Toronto, Canada. How can society establish rules informed by scientific evidence while respecting freedom of speech and avoiding endorsing scientifically debunked ideas? Yeah, I think and avoiding endorsing scientifically debunked ideas.

Yeah, I think that's probably the single most important question. And I spend a lot of time in the book giving one of the longest, I don't know the answer to your question answers in modern histories. How do you do that balance? I think is really one of the challenges. I mean, how do you regulate Fox News not to weaponize health and science communication? How do you control Elon Musk not inviting all of the terrible people who are causing health disinformation damage. Peter, you and I might be approximately the same age,

so we would remember the evening news, go back many, many decades, the 60s and 70s, the evening local news at the end would have a special carve-out where the editors or the producers would give an opinion on some topic of the day. And it would be specially carved out, coming up, we will have an opinion, okay? And then there'll be a commercial break. We now offer an opinion. And for two minutes, they would endorse a candidate or they would give an opinion on something. Now, of course, you don't see that firewall between the delivery of news and the delivery of opinion.

What I thought to myself, one way to shore that up in Fox News or other platforms that similarly blend their opinion with reported news, MSNBC does that as well, is if they just had a flashing thing at the top, news and then opinion. So at any given instant, you would know whether they were just giving opinion. Well, I would actually try to do that. When I was on, back when I was in the cable news channels a lot during the pandemic, I would say, okay, here's what we know and here's my opinion. And people

like that. People really appreciated that, I thought. Okay, so more of that on all fronts would work. That's the exception. But on the other hand, doing it that way apparently is not good for TV ratings or for followers on Twitter. And you would think you would know that, Jack Black. You would think you would know given that you're in the entertainment business that Jack Black would know.

I should have gotten Best Supporting Actor for Orange County. No, no, he should have gotten Best Supporting Actor. I thought you were brilliant. When I found out that I was going to co-host the show, the first thing I said to my wife is, I'm going to be on with the guy from Jumanji. That's what I said.

And it turns out I was right. Keep going. Another one. Here we go. This is Paula Patsova from Slovakia. My family embraces conspiracy theories, including concerns about 5G and microchips and vaccines. My mom even got anxious during my recent COVID vaccine. anxious during my recent COVID vaccine. As an aspiring scientist, it saddens and frustrates me. How can I discuss vaccines or any scientific topic with them without causing immediate argument? Yeah, Peter, what do you do at Thanksgiving dinner when relatives come over?

What's your tactic? Well, it's gotten harder. It's called a bottle of wine. Bottle of wine? Whatever. It's gotten more difficult. In the past, you could talk to a parent who was reluctant about vaccinating their kid and say, look, here's what measles does. Here's what pertussis does. This is why it's a leading killer of children globally. And here's how the vaccines work. And nine times out of 10, they would agree to vaccinate

their child. Now it's far more difficult because they've tied their political allegiance or their identity to not getting a vaccine. And so how do you, it's not enough simply to provide accurate information. You have to do that, of course, but it's not sufficient. So it means trying to really get them to communicate values to them, trying to, and first of all, the first thing I also say is, remember, these individuals are victims. They are victims of a predatory, well-organized, well-financed disinformation campaign that's politically and financially motivated.

And that helps too, because otherwise you can get so frustrated and angry. So you have to look upon them oftentimes with sympathy. One of the analogies that I use, not long ago I gave medical grand rounds at University of Texas Tyler, which is a very conservative area, East Texas, where a lot of anti-vaccine sentiments. And, you know, everyone you talk to when I was there has lost a loved one because they refused the COVID vaccine. These are, you know, these are extraordinary people. Two weeks later, I gave grand rounds at Stanford Medical School and I said, look, if I had a car that broke and knucks out of a flat tire and you gave me the choice of my car breaking down in Palo Alto, California or Tyler, Texas, I'd pick Tyler every time because

in Tyler, everybody be fighting over who's going to help you change your tire, right? And you see, these are extraordinary people who are being victimized or targeted by these predators. Isn't there a subspecies of rose called the Tyler rose? Am I remembering this correctly? Somewhere in Texas, there's a small version of a rose. I think it was in Tyler, Texas. Well, you've spent time in Texas, Neil. I did, yeah.

My wife in Texas, yeah. Isn't there something deeper that has to be addressed, which is it just feels to me like whether it's the issue of guns or abortion or vaccines or whatever, something happened that maybe was always there in our society where people just needed to find something to band together with other like minds, regardless of the logic of what they believe or why they believe it. These are tribal forces. And if you don't address that, none of this will ever really go away. It'll be, okay, today we're talking about science, but then, you know, in 10 months we'll be talking about some other sort of manipulation of facts and so forth just to continue to satiate those feelings.

So how do you get to that? Yeah, and so the way I do it, and maybe this is not right, but rather than do that, which is far more daunting, basically I say, look, if you want to believe your QAnon theories and all this other kind of craziness, again, your business adheres, but don't adopt this one. Somehow we've got to uncouple the anti-science because of the immediate health impact and the urgency for they say i'm not sure that's necessarily the right approach maybe yours makes makes more sense sounds like you're taking the lazy man's approach but good for you you know that's

that's what you want to do and let society destroy itself society figure it out you know well you're jack black what do you care you have another movie coming out uh all right we're going to move on to the other one? Okay. Here we go. Jarrett writes, hello, Brainiacs. Do you attribute the internet to a rise in anti-scientific beliefs, or do you think it has just exposed a percentage of people that have always felt

this way? I think it's... First of all, I don't blame only the internet, right? Fox News is not a product of the internet. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling people like me medical brown shirts is not an internet. Jim Jordan weaponizing health and science communication. And so people quickly want to jump on Twitter on on twitter or x and blame elon musk and and sure he's not

helping but that's only one piece of this the ecosystem is uh much broader than than simply the social media and the internet and that's what makes it so daunting is that it is pervasive now and it affects every aspect of society. Anti-science is its own empire, its own ecosystem. And even though it started in the United States, and I make the case that it started in Texas, it's now we're seeing it move up into Canada with the freedom convoys. It's in Central Europe. And now you're starting to see it contaminate

well in middle-income countries and places that we haven't seen it. Yeah, so I would say while the internet didn't create it, the internet can magnify what's out there. But also, there was a day where you'd have a crazy idea and you were pretty sure you were correct, but you were alone. And now you'd search on that crazy idea. Every other person in the world with that crazy idea shows up and you get on their chat group and this validates your ideas when you have the-

It changes the way our communities have changed. Neil, my dad's from the Bronx also. Went to DeWitt Clinton High School. That's across the park from the Bronx High School of Science. Yeah, yeah. They'd always beat up our people for their lunch money, just so you know. Not me, but others got their lunch money taken. And City College, the whole New York thing. But, you know, back then, you know, you went to service clubs at night. You went to Kiwanis Club or Rotary or you went to Elks Club.

you know, and if somebody had a nutty idea, he had three friends sitting around drinking coffee or having a beer saying, this guy, what are you talking about? But you don't have that immediate feedback anymore. So we don't go bowling together.

We had a guy like that in our neighborhood. We called him Crazy Jack and he had these theories and it was the only guy and he just walked around the neighborhood and he would pontificate and it was, oh, that's just Crazy Jack. And now Crazy Jack's on the internet. He's found 23,000 friends.

Crazy Jack is now a social media influencer with a six-figure deal with Armani. Yeah, exactly. So I have the official website for Shot in the Arm. It's shotinthearmmovie.com and you can learn all about it. And like I said,

our esteemed guest today is importantly featured in that film with regard to his lifetime work on vaccines, as well as opening up his own family situation with regard to your daughter, Rachel. And you said something very important there, Peter, that I don't think can be overemphasized. Could you comment for us,

the way you did in Shaun of the Arm, the movie, how your concern where people have demonized autism, where autism is a natural part of people's existence and they become pariahs because of what others have said and done about it. Could you encapsulate that way better than I just did for me? Yeah, I mean, it's the way the anti-vaccine groups frame people with autism as though you're exactly right, as though there are lepers in the community that, you know, we need to be extricated. And, you know, it's extremely offensive, particularly those who are helping to educate people on this concept of neurodiversity and, you know, people who have, you know, very productive and interesting lives,

and even though they don't always think and speak the same way that we do. And so that's extremely hurtful as well. And this kind of gets back to some very twisted ideas that come out of the health and wellness industry about what health and wellness is all about. It's a very restricted paradigm that, unfortunately, doesn't help anybody. All right. Thanks for mentioning that.

Paul, we have time for one or two more questions. What do you have? Sure. Here we go. Jason Dorkson, are you ever tempted to just give up explaining science to people who just don't want to hear it? Well, it's kind of become...

Once we ask that, Peter, what would it take to have you give up? What would it take for you to open a lemonade stand and just say you're done with all of this? Well, they tried to create this fund for me to so-called debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which I refused to do. So they, you know, I don't know what the final dollar amount got to be. What are you hiding? What are you afraid of? You're afraid of him. Right. It's just, you know, we can have a whole discussion about that. But the point is, even though it gets scary at times, especially when you have to have the Houston Police Department parked out in front of your house, you know, guarding the house and you have to have the FBI called in because of threats. It's not fun.

And I think the threat to our system of vaccines and vaccinations, both in the U.S. and globally, is so profound that now calling myself a vaccine scientist, yes, it's great. I'm making vaccines for the world, COVID and hook or vaccines, et cetera. But now part of the deal is you have to defend vaccines. And even though it's unpleasant at times, I do find it meaningful. And during the day, talking to amazing people like you, you're in the mix, you're feeling great. Although at night, you start waking up in the middle of the night, it does get pretty scary with all of the online threats and in-person stalkings. Hey, there's always having a tire business where you just clean up tires in different lots and you just do that. And I promise you it'll do a lot of good. Exactly.

I have a paper, it just came out in the England Journal of Medicine about yellow fever returning to Texas and the Gulf Coast. So it's a feel-good story. Okay, good. One more question. Tasos Souris, a Greek here, he says, can each of you tell which anti-science movement is most shocking to you regarding how far from the truth and atrocious it is? A great candidate for me is the Flat Earth movement.

Yeah, Flat Earth's a good one um i i would say the um the anti-vaccine conspiracies are perhaps the most damaging because there it's depriving people of essential public health interventions and so that's so when the weaponization actually affects human life that to me is when it becomes more than just a curiosity and actually dangerous. And again, it's not only targeting the science, it's targeting the scientists portraying us as public enemies or enemies of the state. I mean, this is what Stalin did in 1930s, right? He replaced the Mendelian geneticists of Avilov with Lysenko and destroyed the Russian wheat crop and billions died. And this is what's happening again.

And for it to happen in the United States… Just to be clear, so Lysenko, for those who missed that chapter in their world history, Lysenko had a discredited understanding of genetics, but that discredited understanding matched the political philosophies of the leaders. And so it was cherry-picked for that reason, not for whether or not it was true. And it had disastrous consequences on the crops and the populations that it could support at the time. I think millions died. Is that right? That's right. And it's happening again. And I worry that it's affecting our whole scientific infrastructure. As I sometimes say, we're a nation of great research universities

and institutions. You know, you studied at Harvard and Columbia. I started studying at Yale and Cornell and Rockefeller. And this built our nation. We're a nation of research institutions and universities. It gave us the Manhattan Project and it gave us Silicon Valley and NASA. And by trying to tear it down,

I think it makes us much weaker as a country. And so I do worry at the long-term consequences. You have a really great term for this from your podcast. It's called the upside-down world of authoritarianism. But those trying to save our lives become the ones you're supposed to eliminate. And it goes back in history, as you pointed out. You do a great job in the book of sort of tracing it back.

Thank you. There's a lot of that I did not realize, but you see it, which scared me because it's 300 years. I don't think it ever goes away, right? This through line continues. It's always a fight. It's always going to be this fight. Well, and this is why, you know, Paul and Neil, what you're doing is so important, right? This through line continues and it's always a fight. It's always going to be this fight. Well, and this is why, you know, Paul and Neil, what you're

doing is so important, right? I mean, anything that gets people interested in science and helps people understand science, there's never been a more important time for what you're doing. I think it's more of what I'm doing, not so much what he does. Paul is by far way more.

Right, exactly. I had to look up so many words because of this interview. I got a headache. Thanks a lot, Doc. Well, let me try to leave this on a positive note rather than the helpless note that has drenched us throughout this conversation.

We spoke just a moment ago about how exasperating it can be. When I hit that wall, I think to myself, the lines from the musical, the Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, there's a song in there that we all know, and we've heard it, but I don't know how much you've carefully listened to the words. The title of the song is To Dream the Impossible Dream. And we all know the song. Well, where does it come from? Well, Don Quixote, Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote is from La Mancha, and he's tilting at windmills, right? He wants to have this jousting contest with a

windmill, which doesn't make any sense. Like, why would you do that? And if you did do it, why do you think you would win, right? So it's the weird quest to accomplish something that's not only not realistic, but probably impossible. To dream the impossible dream. If you look at the lines of that, I reference those lines when I wake up in the morning, when I otherwise would feel hopeless. And my favorite one is to march into hell with a heavenly cause. And I say, that's what we got to do.

And I just want to say for everybody watching, I think we're all concerned that he was actually going to start singing. And that was going to be, wow. That would have been a terrible way to end this. When I feel hopeless, by the way, I think of the lyrics from SpongeBob SquarePants song. That just gets me focused and ready to go. His one is on a beautiful day, right?

He's got a really good one. He does, actually, yeah. What's it called? I can't remember. It's a beautiful day. But, Neil, I think, you know, and Paul, you bring up good points in the sense that not so much Spongebob,

which is what I like Spongebob. But the idea is that one of the reasons that we became scientists, right, is we wanted to do big things, right? We wanted to make the world a better place. And even though most scientists don't speak about humanity and humanitarian goals, I think that's true for most scientists, even though they don't articulate that. And we have to get people to remember this. And the other reason why what you do is so important is being able to see a face to the scientists. And I think, you know, part of that

has been the problem of our profession. We're so inward looking. We're so focused, you know, in my case on our grants and papers and lab meetings that we don't think about public engagement as being important. And so we've become invisible to the American people. And that's created a vacuum. And in this vacuum, you have all these anti-science movements that want to tell the American people what we're all about, which is nothing even close to reality. Whoa, there it is right there.

Peter, your books, we're going to be looking for them. Apparently, Paul has already read them all. But it's... I'll explain them to you, Neil, later. Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases, The Neglected Tropical Diseases and Their Impact on Global Health and Development. You've Got Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, Your Daughter,

and more recently, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, A Scientist's Warning. Peter Hotez, it's been a delight to host you for this. I'd seen you for so many clips on Shot in the Arm movie. A delight to actually speak to you in person. So thanks for being on StarTalk. Thanks, Neil. I've admired your work for years. It's a thrill for me to be able to you in person. So thanks for being on StarTalk. Thanks, Neil. I've admired your work for years. It's a thrill for me to be able to be on this podcast.

Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Paul, always good to have you, man. Always fun and great to meet you. And the name of your podcast, Paul, is I'm Not Paul or something? I'm Not Neil. Oh, no.

It's Inside Out with Paul Mercurio. You're on it. Paul McCartney, Kevin Costner, a whole bunch of really fun interviews. And yeah, yeah. I like to talk to people about their process and maybe someday

I'll get you on, Doctor. It would be great to talk to you. And also, I'm going to be on tour with my Broadway show Permission to Speak and my stand-up as well. So people can go to

paulmercurio.com and check out where I'm going to be and come out and buy a ticket. My son needs shoes. Okay. Okay. Alright, this has been StarTalk

Cosmic Queries Edition, all about basically public health with our featured guest, Dr. Peter Potas. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.