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Dr. Peter Hotez is a veritable force. He has been the tip of the spear among physicians and scientists for taking on anti-science and has put himself and his family at serious risk.Along with Dr. Maria Bottazzi, he developed the Corbevax Covid vaccine —without a patent— that has already been given to over 10 million people, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Here an uninhibited, casual and extended conversation about his career, tangling with the likes of RFK Jr, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and an organized, funded, anti-science mob, along with related topics.Today is publication day for his new book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science.Transcript (AI generated)Eric Topol (00:00):Hello, this is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I'm with my friend and colleague who's an extraordinary fellow, Dr. Peter Hotez. He's the founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and University professor at Baylor, also at Texas Children's founding editor of the Public Library Science and Neglected Tropical Disease Journal. and I think this is Peter, your fifth book.Peter Hotez (00:28):That's my fifth single author book. That's right, that's right.Eric Topol (00:32):Fifth book. So that's pretty amazing. Peter's welcome and it's great to have a chance to have this conversation with you.Peter Hotez (00:39):Oh, it's great to be here and great to be with you, Eric, and you know, I've learned so much from you during this pandemic, and my only regret is not getting to know you before the pandemic. My life would've been far richer. AndPeter Hotez (00:53):I think, I think I first got to really know about you. You were are my medical school, Baylor College of Medicine, awarded you an honorary doctorate, and that's when I began reading about it. Oh. I said, holy cow. Why didn't, why haven't I been with this guy before? SoEric Topol (01:08):It's, oh my gosh. So you must have been there that year. And I came to the graduation.Peter Hotez (01:12):No, I actually was speaking at another graduation. That's why I couldn't be there, . Ah,Eric Topol (01:18):Right. As you typically do. Right. Well, you know, it's kind of amazing to track your career besides, you know, your baccalaureate at Yale and PhD at Rockefeller and MD at Cornell. But you started off, I, I think deep into hookworm. Is that where you kind of got your start?Peter Hotez (01:36):Yeah, and I'm still, and I'm still there actually, the hookworm vaccine that I started working on as an MD-PhD student at Rockefeller and Cornell is now in phase 2 clinical trials. Wow. So, which is, I tell people, is about the average timeframe --about 40 years-- is about a, not an unusual timeframe. These parasites are obviously very tough targets. oh man. And then we have AOIs vaccine and clinical trials and a Chagas disease vaccine. That's always been my lifelong passion is making vaccines for these neglected parasitic infections. And the story with Covid was I had a collaboration with Dr. Sarah Lustig at the New York Blood Center, who, when we were working on a river blindness vaccine, and she said, Hey, I want you to meet these two scientists, New York Blood Center. They're working on something called coronaviruses vaccines.(02:27):They were making vaccines for severe acute respiratory syndrome and SARS and ultimately MERS. And so we, we plugged their, their, some of their discoveries into our vaccine development machine. And they had found that if you were using the receptor binding domain of the, of the spike protein of SARS and ultimately MERS it produced an equivalent protective immune response neutralizing antibodies without the immune enhancement. And that's what we wrote to the NIT to do. And they supported us with a $6 million grant back in 2012 to make SARS and MERS vaccines. And, and then when Covid 19 hit, when the sequence came online and BioXriv in like early 2020, we just pivoted our program to Covid and, and we were able to hit the ground running and it worked. Everything just clicked and worked really well. And stars aligned and we were then transferred that technology.(03:26):We did it with no patent minimizing strings attached to India, Indonesia, Bangladesh. any place that we felt had the ability to scale up and produce it, India went the furthest. They developed it into Corbevax, which has reached 75 million kids in India. And another 10 million as their, for their primary immunization. Another 10 million is adult booster. And then Indonesia developed their own version of our, of our technology called IndoVac. And, and that's also reaching millions of, of people. And now they're using it as a, also as a booster for Pfizer, because I think it may be a superior booster. So it was really exciting to s you know, after working in parasitic disease vaccines, which are tough targets and decades to get it through the clinical trials because the pressure was on to move quickly goes to show you when people prioritize it. And also the fact that I think viruses are more straightforward targets than complex parasites. And well, so that in all about a hundred million doses have been administered andEric Topol (04:33):Yeah, no, it's just a spectacular story, Corbevax and these other named of the vaccine that, that you and Maria Bottazzi put together and without a patent at incredibly low cost and not in the us, which is so remarkable because as we exchanged recently, the us the companies, and that's three Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax are going to charge well over $110 per booster of the, the new booster updated XBB.1.5. And you've got one that could be $2 or $4 that's,Peter Hotez (05:11):And it's getting, so we're making, we're making the XBB recombinant protein booster of ours. And part of it's the technology, you can, you know, it's done through microbial fermentation in yeast, and it's been in a big bioreactor. And it's an older technology that's been around a couple of decades, and there's no limit to the amount you could scale. The yields are really high. So we can do this for two to $3 a dose, and it'd even be less, it wasn't for the cost of the adjuvant. The C P G, the nucleotide is probably the most expensive component, but the antigen is, you know, probably pennies to, to, you know, when you're doing it at that scale. And, and so that, that's really meaningful. I'd like to get our XBB booster into the us It's,Eric Topol (05:55):Yeah, it's just no respect from,Peter Hotez (05:58):We're not a pharma company, so we don't, we didn't get support from Operation Warp Speed, and so we didn't get any US subsidies for that. And it's just very hard to get on the radar screen of BARDA and those agencies and, 'cause that's, they're all set up to work with pharma companies.Eric Topol (06:16):Yeah, I know. It's, it's just not right. And who pays for this is the people, the public, because they, you know, the affordability is going to have a big influence on who gets boosters and is drivingPeter Hotez (06:27):. Yeah. So, so what I say is we, we provide, you know, the anti-vaccine guys, like the call me a Shill for pharma, not knowing what they're talking about. We've done the opposite, right? We've provided a path that shows you don't need to go to big pharma all the time. And, and so they should be embracing what we're doing. So we, we've, you know, have this new model for how you can get low cost vaccines out there. Not, not to demonize the pharma companies either. They, they do what they do and they do a lot of important innovation. But, but there are other pathways, especially for resource coordination. So we'd love to get this vaccine in, in the us I think it's looking a little work just, just as well, it's, you know, butEric Topol (07:12):You, yeah, I mean, it's not, I don't want ot demonize the vaccine companies either, but to raise the price fivefold just because it's not getting governed subsidy and the billions that have been provided by the government through taxpayer monies. Yeah.Peter Hotez (07:28):Well, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that they did an analysis that, that pharma, I think it was Pfizer and Moderna got 25 to 30 billion Yeah. Dollars in US subsidies, either for development costs for Moderna. I think Pfizer didn't accept development costs, but they both took advanced purchase money, so $30 billion. And you know, that's not how you show gratitude to the American people byEric Topol (07:55):JackingPeter Hotez (07:56):Up the price times for, I think I said, guys, you know, have some situational awareness. I mean, do you want people to hate you? Yeah.Eric Topol (08:04):That's what it looks like. Well, speaking of before I get to kind of the anti-science, the, THE DEADLY RISE OF ANTI-SCIENCE, your new book, I do want to set it up that, you know, you spent a lot of your career besides working on these tropical diseases, challenging diseases, you know, Leischmania, and you know, Chagas, and the ones you've mentioned. You've also stood up quite a bit for the low middle income countries with books that you've written previously about forgotten people, Blue Marble Health. And so, I, I, before I, I don't want to dismiss that 'cause it's really important and it ties in with what the work you've done with the, the Covax or Covid vaccine. Now, what I really want to get into is the book that you wrote that kind of ushered in your very deep personal in anti-science and anti-vax, which I'm going in a minute ask you to differentiate. But your daughter, Rachel, you wrote a book about her and about vaccines not causing autism. So can you tell us about that?Peter Hotez (09:11):Yeah. So as you point out, my first two books were about these, what I would call forgotten diseases of Forgotten people. In fact, that's what the first book was called, forgotten People, forgotten Diseases, which my kids used to call Dad's Forgotten book on Forgotten people, Forgotten Diseases, all the, all the, now it's in his third edition. So, but it talks about, you know, the, how important these conditions are. It's just that they're widely prevalent. It's just that they're occurring among people who live in extreme poverty, including people in poverty in the United States. That's why we set up our School of Tropical Medicine on the US Gulf Coast. I didn't do it for the summer weather which is these days in this heat dome. It's like, well, living on planet Mercury right now, in here, here in Texas.(09:58):But then, so that, that's what, that's how I started learning how to advocate, you know, for people and for diseases through neglected diseases. But, you know, when we came to Texas, we saw this very aggressive anti-vaccine movement, and they were making false claims that vaccines cause autism. And, and I said, look, I'm, you know, I'm a vaccine scientist here in Texas. I have a daughter with autism, Rachel, with an, an intellectual disabilities. And so if I don't say something who does, and, and then wrote the book, vaccines did not cause Rachel's Autism, which unfortunately made me public enemy number one or two with anti-vaccine groups. but you know, it, it, it does a deep dive explaining the science, showing there's absolutely no link between vaccines and autism, but also an absence of plausibility because what we know about autism, how it begins in early fetal brain development through the action of autism genes.(10:54):And we actually did whole exome genomic sequencing on, on Rachel and my wife Ann and I, and we found Rachel's autism gene, which is like many of them in, involved in early neuronal communication and connections. It was actually a neuronal cytoskeleton gene, as are many, in this case, a neuronal spectrum. And that one hadn't been reported before, but other neuronal cytoskeleton genes had been reported by the Broad Institute at Harvard, m i t and others. And, and that was important to have that alternative narrative because the refrain from always was, okay, doc, if vaccines don't do it, what does cause autism? And, and being able to have that other side of the story, I think is very compelling.Eric Topol (11:37):What was it, the, the fabricated paper by Andrew Wakefield and the Lancet that, that got all this started? Or did it really annotate the ? There wasPeter Hotez (11:47):Something before in the eighties about the DPT, the diptheria, pertussis tetanus vaccine claiming it caused, you know, seizures and then could lead to neurodevelopmental difficulties. But it really took off with the Wakefield paper in 1998, published in The Lancet. And that claimed that the MMR vaccine, a live virus vaccine, had the ability to replicate in the colon of kids. And somehow that led to pervasive developmental disorder. That was the term used back then. And I was Rachel's diagnosis. And it never made sense to me how something, 'cause the reason it's pervasive is it's, it's global in, in the central nervous system in, in the brain. And how, how could something postnatally do something like that? I mean, there is, there are epigenetic underpinnings of autism as well, and that's fun. Eric, you ever talk to, ever try to talk to lay audience about epigenetics? That's a tough one. That's, that's a tough one. You start talking about microRNAs and DNA methylation, histone modification. The, the lights go out pretty quickly, butEric Topol (12:46):Chromatin and histone modification. Right? Bye-bye. Yeah, you got that one.Peter Hotez (12:51):That, so that's,Eric Topol (12:52):But that, that was your really, you knowPeter Hotez (12:55):But that's when, you know, I started going up against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And, and, and all that was, that was pre-pandemic.Eric Topol (13:03):That was in 2018, right?Peter Hotez (13:05):2017 Trump came out and said, you know, it was about to be inaugurated and, and RFK Jr said he was going be appointed to run a vaccine commission by the Trump administration. And, and I actually was sitting, you know, in my office and my assistant said Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci are on the phone. Do you have time to talk with us ? And I said, yeah, I think so. And they arranged, they had arranged for me to, because I have a daughter with autism could articulate why vaccines don't cause out arranged for me to speak with RFK Jr threw it through a mediator and, and, and it didn't go well. He was just really dug in and, and soEric Topol (13:49):He, he was just as bad then as now.Peter Hotez (13:52):Yeah. I mean, it was just, you know, kept on, you know, as I say, moving the goalposts, you couldn't pin him down. Was he talking about MMR? Was he talking about the am Marisol, was he talking about spacing vaccines too close together? He just, that always kept on moving around and, and then it was not even autism at times. You were talking about it was something called chronic illness, you know, you know, what do you do with that? Mm-hmm. . So I, and that's one when I was challenged by, you know, Joe Rogan and Elon to debate RFK Jr, one of the reasons I didn't want to do it, because I, I knew, you know, doing it in public would be no different from doing this in, in, in private, that it would not be a productive conversation.Eric Topol (14:39):Yeah, no, that I can, I do want to get into that, because that was the latest chapter of kind of vicious anti-science, which was taking on covid and vaccines and the whole ball of wax whereby you were challenged by Joe Rogan on his very bi…
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