How did vaccines, once hailed as essential tools for global peace, security and international cooperation, become something that some now fear could kill them? This is the focus of the latest Global Health Matters podcast, hosted by Garry Aslnyan. In an interview with author Peter Hotez, the discussion delves into how vaccines misinformation and politics, particularly in the United States, have led to a deadly distrust of vaccines.
Hotez and his colleague, Maria Elena Bottazzi, were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for “their work to develop and distribute a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine to people of the world without patent limitation.” Hotez is a vaccine scientist, biochemist and paediatrician from Texas. He also wrote several vaccine-related books, including “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science.”
“What happened was that under the banner of health freedom, medical freedom, elected leaders from a political party were telling people, we’re railing against vaccine mandates pushing against the idea of vaccine mandates, but they took it a step further,” Hotez said. “They not only tried to discredit vaccine mandates, but they tried to discredit the effectiveness and safety of the COVID vaccines themselves, and by crossing that line, they convinced hundreds of thousands of Americans, millions of Americans, predominantly in conservative parts of the United States, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas where I am, not to take a COVID vaccine during the Delta wave.
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“So, they were unvaccinated. The results were, again, predicted and predictable,” he continued. “My estimate is 40,000 people in my state of Texas needlessly died because they refused a COVID vaccine.”
How did vaccines, once hailed as essential tools for global peace, security and international cooperation, become something that some now fear could kill them?
This is the focus of the latest episode of the Global Health Matters podcast hosted by Garry Aslnyan. In an interview with author Peter Hotez, the discussion delves into how misinformation and politics, particularly in the United States, have led to a deadly distrust of vaccines.
Aslnyan said vaccines are “one of the most powerful biotechnologies ever invented. It has not only affected life expectancy, as we know but also, it’s a vital tool for peace, global security and international cooperation.” Yet — and this is the topic of the “Dialogues” podcast — when COVID-19 hit, the situation rapidly changed. By the summer of 2021, there were calls to be defiant against vaccines, Hotez told Aslnyan.
“So, they were unvaccinated. The results were, again, predicted and predictable,” he continued. “My estimate is 40,000 people in my state of Texas needlessly died because they refused a COVID vaccine.”
In his book, Hotez describes how he received “dark emails or tweets on a Sunday that ominously warn of patriots hunting me down.” He said, “I never imagined a segment of society turning against me or my scientific colleagues. It is still almost unbelievable how many Americans now view us as enemies.”
He noted that this phenomenon has spread beyond the United States, reaching Africa, Latin America, and Europe. The concern now is that it could also take root in low- and middle-income countries.
“This is a full-on negative global force. I worry now that it’s not stopping at COVID-19; it’s spilling over into childhood immunisations,” Hotez told Aslnyan.
Hotez said that he called out the far right for contributing to the unnecessary deaths of 200,000 Americans for political reasons, “it’s not misinformation or the infodemic as though it’s just some random junk on the internet; it’s organised, strategic, deliberate, well-financed, politically motivated and it’s killing people.”
This misinformation about vaccines has entered a new phase. Instead of acknowledging that people died because they didn’t get vaccinated, some now claim that the vaccine itself caused deaths. There is also the theory that scientists created the COVID-19 virus through gain-of-function research. Hotez emphasised that both of these ideas are baseless.
However, he said the public health community also had to take responsibility for where it failed, around communication about the vaccines.
“I could do a whole hour podcast with you on the ways in which we could have communicated better,” Hotez told Aslnyan, “but that, in my view, accounts for 10 to 20% of the problem at most because what was really going on were bad actors weaponising all of this.”
And, as he concludes with an excerpt from his book, “This will only get worse.”
