Houston Chronicle
On a recent Sunday morning, dozens of Beyoncé fans pass through the lobby of the Hotel ZaZa wearing T-shirts from the Houston native’s Renaissance World Tour, while Dr. Peter Hotez, a virologist and Bayou City transplant, sits on a green sofa talking about an era when science was celebrated.

“The point is we are no longer living in the Dark Ages,” Hotez says. “We’ve benefited from the age of Enlightenment. The fact that scientists are targeted is what gets me so upset.”

Hotez is back in Houston, his adopted home, for the day between stops on his national tour for his new book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science.” These 160 pages track an anti-vaccine movement from a discredited study to a grassroots movement into something more threatening, which he labels “anti-science aggression.”

“These threats come down from an army of people who call themselves patriots. Look, this is a nation built on the strength of great research and research institutions,” he said. “They gave us the Manhattan Project, Silicon Valley, NASA, cures for diseases. Scientists are our patriots, not these chuckleheads who attack science.”

As dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, Hotez led efforts to create a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine for low-income nations.

He also became a reviled public face for his vaccine advocacy during the pandemic. Hotez has been called a criminal, a lunatic and worse by pundits and elected officials, including television personality Tucker Carlson and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Hotez’s book may not change hearts and minds that have feasted on misinformation. That’s not really the point, he explains. So, instead, the book feels perched on a fulcrum in our gray age where scientists are both vilified and revered. MORE