Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine's National School of Tropical Medicine, who is also the co-director for vaccine development at the Texas Children's Hospital Center recently wrote a paper on the "troubling new expansion of antiscience aggression in the United States" caused by "far-right extremism."
The paper calls out "elected members of the US Congress and conservative news outlets that target prominent biological scientists fighting the COVID-19 pandemic."
The paper is titled "Mounting Antiscience Aggression In The United States" and in it, Dr. Hotez accuses "ultraconservative" members of the U.S. Congress, a well as other public leaders from the far-right of "waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists." Dr. Hotez also called out conservative news outlets for "repeatedly and purposefully [promoting] disinformation designed to portray key American scientists as enemies."
According to the National Pulse, Dr. Hotez argued that the Trump administration, under its "America First" banner, promoted "antiscience disinformation" that effectively "dismissed the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic." He claimed that the far right's commitment to "America First" caused the formation of a "modern day authoritarian regime" whose power was concentrated "among a select few" while limiting the voice of the opposition.
Interestingly, Dr. Hotez also compared the Trump administration to the leadership of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Marxists and Leninists. The scientist argued, "Historically, such regimes viewed scientists as enemies of the state."
WND reported that for Dr. Hotez, the solution is the addition of "federal hate-crime protections" to the scientific community. The doctor, who was funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1993, called upon President Joe Biden to fervently defend the scientific community in the July 28 paper.
Dr. Hotez went on to defend Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, who proudly revealed his ties to the Chinese virology lab from which the coronavirus is believed to have escaped under the Wuhan lab leak theory.
If and when the Biden administration or any of its Democratic leaders pass a bill adding Hotez's proposed protections for the scientific community, the act of calling out Dr. Fauci and other scientists for their mistakes amid the pandemic may become a punishable "hate crime."
In a recent interview with Click2Houston, Dr. Hotez attributed the increasing number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the U.S. was "due to the defiance against mass social distancing and contact tracing and now vaccines."
"It's death by anti-science, and I realized it became as important to talk about how to develop vaccines against COVID-19," Dr. Hotez said. "In equal measure, it's important to debunk the anti-science and counteract it."
The U.S. is seeing another major spike in new COVID-19 cases despite the Biden administration's rush to get everyone vaccinated. Currently, there are over 150,000 new cases to total 35.5 million COVID-19 cases and over 614,000 deaths. Only 50.2% of the entire population that are eligible to get the vaccine are fully vaccinated, amounting to 165 million Americans.
