Spare us the tripe, Hotez

Being a public figure means possibly receiving harassment. Stop trying to be a martyr "for the cause".

I’ve had several issues when seeing people argue that science has become it’s own sort of religion, and yet simultaneously I also can’t see this interpretation as being wrong.

Since the onset of the pandemic many scientists have gained a sense of idolatry, a sense of power over the public, and a more privileged position in society. Consider how many YouTube channels, Substacks, book deals, and appearances in mainstream media that scientists have accrued over the past three years.

And yet at the same time that scientists and medical professionals have garnered greater idolatry science seems to have taken a backseat, being weaponized and, quite frankly, bastardized in order to alter public perception on what science actually is.

In doing all of this, many scientists have placed themselves within the public eye, even more than has occurred in previous years. But all of this is a double-edged sword. As these scientists gain fame within specific circles they may also gain infamy in others. It’s part of how a social-media driven world operates now, unfortunately.

So while some people may bow and show reverence to scientists and “The Science”, others may raise criticisms.

This appears to be a big thorn in Dr. Peter Hotez’s side, possibly because he was pestered to debate RFK Jr. on vaccines and things related to the COVID response.

Hotez is a symbol of many people who have gained fame in recent years, garnering attention while also not wanting to be scrutinized for that attention.

This has apparently led to Hotez writing an op-ed for the LA Times, in which he laments the fact that scientists haven’t been properly protected and require help from leaders in protecting them.

From the LA Times

There’s plenty of irony in this title. Again, scientists have garnered celebrity status throughout the pandemic, and like with all celebrities you’ll have your lovers and haters. This is part of being a public figure, again with people such as Hotez believing they are not deserving of the hate while deserving of all of the admiration.

But this may be made easier due to the fact that many scientists see themselves as in the right, as being the voice of science for the otherwise illiterate, uneducated masses.

Why else would conservatives criticize scientists and spout “misinformation”?

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.

I’ve grown tired of seeing this form of rhetoric, which suggests that people are too stupid for their own good and need to be saved from their own stupidity. It relies on the notion that people such as Hotez and Fauci are the sole arbiters of truth and science, and therefore are the ones to dictate who are educated and who are the dregs of society.

This argument that Republicans were more likely to die from COVID due to lack of vaccination also seems to not take into account the possibility of obesity, age, and overall poorer health as possible factors, but nay it must be the vaccines that would have saved them!

One of the most frustrating things to see is how often mainstream pundits will politicize any information about COVID, only to backtrack and lament the fact that “the other side” are the ones bringing politics into the discourse.

I mean, who exactly was it that told people to hug Asians, or to clamp down on xenophobic rhetoric rather than considering what course of action the country should (or likely should not) have taken?

Or maybe all of this is just a game of whataboutism where the rules are constantly changing to suit whatever narrative so-called scientists and experts want.

The overall op-ed is short, and rather self-aggrandizing more than anything.

However, I’ll include this one last excerpt:

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.

I’ve been singled out regularly by political extremists and Fox News anchors. Such statements reverberate and result in online threats or actual stalking.

I should make it clear that I’m against any direct forms of assault or doxxing. At the same time, whenever harassment campaigns are invoked I always view these with some form of skepticism as to what the harassment entails.

The surveys Hotez provides would otherwise seem alarming, but considering that these surveys include online harassment one has to wonder if a lot of these death threats and criticisms may have been “mean tweets”.

In the Nature article which includes the survey of scientists note that most of these comments were done on these people’s social media accounts, and so it’s possible that a majority of these harassment campaigns could be due to trolling or just mean tweets, as emphasized by the last paragraph.

But in Nature’s survey, more than two-thirds of researchers reported negative experiences as a result of their media appearances or their social media comments, and 22% had received threats of physical or sexual violence. Some scientists said that their employer had received complaints about them, or that their home address had been revealed online. Six scientists said they were physically attacked (see Supplementary information for survey data tables).

Coordinated social-media campaigns and threatening e-mails or phone calls to scientists are not new: topics such as climate change, vaccination and the effects of gun violence have drawn similar attacks in the past. But even scientists who had a high profile before COVID-19 told Nature that the abuse was a new and unwelcome phenomenon tied to the pandemic. Many wanted the extent of the problem discussed more openly. “I believe national governments, funding agencies and scientific societies have not done enough to publicly defend scientists,” one researcher wrote in their survey response.

Some researchers say that they have learnt to cope with the harassment, accepting it as an unpleasant but expected side effect of getting information to the public. And 85% of survey respondents said that their experiences of engaging with the media were always or mostly positive, even if they were harassed afterwards (see ‘Media experiences’). “I think scientists need training for how to engage with the media and also about what to expect from trolls — it’s just a part of digital communication,” one wrote.

There’s more to the Nature article, with even more opinions suggesting that being a public figure may result in more harassment. That’s sort of how the online world works…

But it’s also rather revealing given the remarks that scientists thought that their minority status would make them larger targets, only to them find out that men received similar levels of harassment as women did:

Both the Australian SMC and Nature’s survey, however, found no clear difference between the proportions of violent threats received by men and women. “We were surprised,” Byford says. “We really felt women would be bearing more of a brunt in terms of the abuse that they got.”

So much for not politicizing science, huh?

You can’t have it both ways

At the end of the day, all of these remarks by Hotez just appear vacuous. Hotez was featured on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he’s featured prominently on many mainstream outlets. He’s, by all accounts, doing well for himself as a public figure.

But being a public figure means that not everything will be perfect. You are likely to get detractors as much as you are likely to get fealty. You can’t act as a public figure and only expect good vibes for doing so.

This isn’t even taking into account the fact that many dissenting voices, such as those from Bret and Eric Weinstein, Heather Heying, Joe Rogan, any member of the FLCCC, and really many people who strayed from the COVID narrative were likely to receive harassment and death threats all the same. Why exactly profile voices that you agree with, rather than all voices who have been harassed from both sides of the COVID debate?

The problem with Hotez and people like him isn’t that they want to enjoy a position as a public figure without any of the harassment, but that they also want to be the ones to act as gatekeepers for the dissemination of science.

Remember Fauci’s self-aggrandized, arrogant comment that any criticism of him is a criticism of science…

They want to be the ones to dictate what information gets out to the public while simultaneously wishing to clamp down on anything that dares stray from the consensus.

And in reality, if scientists really want to talk about disseminating proper science, then why not disseminate actual science? Why not spend time to actually engross the public in topics related to COVID, science, and medicine?

I’ve grown frustrated with the fact that any science that comes out in the press is just as empty or misinformed as the people who are all in on clamping down on misinformation.

Take some of these videos which I have highlighted, both of which came from The Today Show, one of the highest viewed morning shows in the US, and tell me if you actually learned anything from these videos:

There isn’t much to these two videos, and yet these outlets are the same ones to think that they should be the arbiters in how science is presented to the public.

This goes the same for any outlets who focus on fact-checking without really doing much research. I would argue it comes from the fact that there’s likely to be some savior complex displayed by these outlets. They think that they can save mankind from themselves, but that mankind is also too ignorant to manage complex ideas and concepts, so rather than educate all you do is just put on the most basic of information and operate under fanaticism for “following the science”.

People such as Hotez should spare us all the grandstanding. If you can’t stand the heat then get out of the public spotlight. We’d all likely be better off if that was the case anyways.

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