With all the craziness, I almost forgot: #HappyFarthersDay this is my dad, Eddie Hotez, born in Bronx NY attended CCNY. US Navy said they would send him to medical school. Instead they sent him to Okinawa, Saipan, Philippines serving as 19 yo Ensign on LST facing Japanese zeros
Came back from the war made sure all his 3 sons became physicians. My oldest brother Larry with the Tufts Medical clinical faculty, my brother Richard was an anesthesiologist in Connecticut passed too young. Eddie was buried with full military honors, Jewish cemetery in Avon CT
Looking forward to seeing my four adult children and their spouses
And my sister became an attorney and mental health counselor, so nice work Dad, thank you
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1/n Many thanks for all your support these last few days, after the Steve Bannon’s dog whistle accusation and the Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, RFK Jr pile on, the online aggression, and even a stalking just for bringing home a Father’s Day cake, I didn’t know what to think or say.
2/n but the support from people in the scientific community + the great actors, artists, journalists, historians, philosophers, healthcare professionals, teachers, essentially those whose take joy in learning new things and helping humanity really lifted my spirits + my family’s
So a simple thank you. I’m off to New York tomorrow for a meeting (more on that soon i hope), and then São Paulo for our vaccine program and to help Brasil find a path out of their awful antiscience aggression
1/n Many thanks @mehdirhasan @MehdiHasanShow for hosting me this evening I explained the problems of “debating” science on Joe Rogan with RFK Jr and there are several.
2/n first science is not something that is typically debated like say 18th enlightenment philosophy or political issues. That’s not typically what we do
3/n I said maybe there are exceptions but generally science is conducted through peer-review and manuscript submissions or presentations at scientific conferences and meetings in front of colleagues for suggestions or in some cases concerns.
1/n All the “pharma shill” accusations are absurd if you can appreciate how we developed two low-cost patent-free Covid vaccines, 100 million doses administered in low- middle-income countries. To read more about us, here’s a recent article in @NPR npr.org/sections/goats…
2/n also this in Washington @monthly which is so strange why the tres hombres Elon, Joe, RFK Jr target me when we actually achieved something that they say they want: Independence from BigPharma. Everyone talks about it, we actually did it washingtonmonthly.com/2023/03/06/how…
3/n Also we actually go a step beyond, total transparency on how our vaccines were developed and tested in the open access literature. Something BigPharma never does, or seldom to my knowledge peterhotez.org/bcm-texas-chil…
The last half of this coming week I will be giving two lectures in Sao Paulo, Brasil, one at the conference, the other at USP. This will be my first visit to Brazil since the pandemic, excited to see old friends and colleagues
2/n even though Covid numbers are going down now in Texas and nationally, at least as far as we can tell looking at wastewater and hospitalization numbers, we expect another winter surge as we head towards 2024
3/n the thinking is what will be circulating then will resemble one of the currently prevalent XBB variants and that would comprise the new booster. This would probably be monovalent rather than the current bivalent booster
My morning begins with Steve Bannon + CFO/COO of his War Room enterprise declaring me “a criminal”.
It’s unbelievable: Is it because I co-developed a low-cost patent-free Covid vaccine for poor nations, and provided proof-of-concept that we don’t have to rely on Big Pharma?
Or was it talking to the nation several times a day on cable news channels (with no pay) explaining why hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin has no benefits for Covid? And watch out for those who promote it?
Or was it explaining how Covid vaccines will save your life, especially during our nation’s horrible delta wave and BA.1 waves in 2021-22?