By Paul Thacker
Social media went a little bonkers last week when an interview of Texas Children’s Hospital’s Dr. Peter Hotez began circulating with the Big Pharma insider calling for the United Nations and NATO to deploy security forces against “anti-vaxxers” in the United States. Dr. Hotez’s statements first appeared on the YouTube channel of an international pediatric conference that took place in Colombia, but the interview then jumped onto X.
The Simposio Internacional de Actualización en Pediatría (International Symposium of Pediatric Updates) later removed the interview from YouTubealthough photos can still be found on Facebook.
In clips of Hotez’s interview that continue to circulate on X, he claims “anti-vaxxers” caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States. I uploaded one clip to my YouTube channel which you can watch here:
What I’ve said to the Biden administration is, the health sector can’t solve this on its own. We’re going to have to bring in Homeland Security, the Commerce Department, Justice Department to help us understand how to do this.
I’ve said the same with … I met with [WHO general director] Dr. Tedros last month … to say, I don’t know that the World Health Organization can solve this on our own. We need the other United Nations agencies—NATO. This is a security problem, because it’s no longer a theoretical construct or some arcane academic exercise. Two hundred thousand Americans died because of anti-vaccine aggression, anti-science aggression.
And so, this is now a lethal force … and now I feel as a pediatric vaccine scientist … it’s important, just as important for me to make new vaccines, to save lives. The other side of saving lives is countering this anti-vaccine aggression.
Hotez has long been noted for promoting controversial and sometimes false statement about the COVID pandemic and then accusing his critics of “anti-science.”
But this is not the first time Hotez has called for police to deploy against those who disagree with his views on science. Last October, Scientific American platformed Hotez as an expert on “anti-science” and didn’t bat an eyelid when he said support for scientists would require intervention by the Department of Homeland Security and the creation of a federal interagency task force.
Dr. Hotez again called for deploying federal police to support science during a grand rounds lecture he gave in August 2021. A whistleblower at Texas Children’s Hospital sent me the lecture where Hotez said the “disinformation empire” threatened America and would need to dealt with by the Department of Homeland Security:
The problem is the disinformation empire is so vast and pervasive that until we do something more definitive to get to the source of the disinformation and stop it, it’s not going to have that much of an impact. And that’s where everybody moves away from me.
And I tend to be out on a … out on my own here.
Earlier this year, Time Magazine named Hotez a “Science Warrior” and one of the 100 most influential people in global health.