Peter Hotez is the Embodiment of Everything Wrong with "The Science"
Book Review: 'Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism' by Peter J. Hotez
Dear Nevermorons,
If you don’t know who Peter Hotez is, you’re not missing much.
He’s supposedly a vaccine scientist, but that’s not the reason he’s famous. He’s famous for being an anti-anti-science crusader.
Given that he spends so much time appearing on TV to rail against anti-vaxxers, it’s hard to believe that he spends much time doing actual research. He seems like a full-time PR rep for the vaccine industry to me. Yet he always appears in his lab coat.
I guess he’s kind of like a second-rate Anthony Fauci. Personally, he reminded me of Milton from the movie Office Space.
If you’re ever seen the movie Office Space, you probably remember Milton, the perpetually-disrespected cubicle slave. Peter Hotez reminds me of Milton, except he’s being promoted as some kind of brilliant scientist, despite very clearly being a midwit.
Anyway, there’s a twist in the Peter Hotez story. His daughter is severely autistic. He wrote an entire book called Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism.
If you’re like me, you would rather staple your nut sack to your leg or drink nail polish remover than read this book. But fortunately, the Nevermore collective counts amongst its members the intrepid (and possibly masochistic) Rozali Telbis, who read this horrible book so that the rest of us don’t have to.
DID YOU KNOW THAT JOE ROGAN OFFERED PETER HOTEZ $100 000 TO DEBATE RFK?
It may interest some of you that Hotez was actually offered a spot on the Joe Rogan podcast (which gets well over 10 million streams per episode), but he declined.
In June 2023, [Hotez] tweeted his concerns about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sharing misinformation about vaccines on Joe Rogan's podcast. Rogan, Kennedy, and Twitter owner Elon Musk asked Hotez to participate in a debate on the podcast.
Joe Rogan even offered Hotez a sweet 100k to come on his show. Can you imagine? One hundred thousand dollars for three or four hours of a day.
Rogan’s exact words were:
“Peter, if you claim what RFKjr is saying is “misinformation” I am offering you $100,000.00 to the charity of your choice you’re willing to debate him on my show with no time limit.
If you want to hear Peter Hotez explaining why he declined the offer, you can watch the following video, where Hotez whines about anti-vaxxers “harassing” him.
Apparently, there is no prominent scientist in the world willing to debate RFK. Personally, I think that fact speaks for itself. There’s a reason why pro-vaxxers never debate anti-vaxxers. It’s because they’d lose.
It turns out that Hotez had already been on the Joe Rogan show 5 years ago. His response can be summed up with the following meme:
Actually, to be fair, he mentioned over-diagnosis and environmental factors such as chemicals as two possible contributing factors. Personally, I really don’t know what causes autism, and I suspect that there are multiple factors, possibly including glyphosate in food and water. But I don’t really know.
I am agnostic as to the causes of autism, and highly suspect that part of the problem exists in the way that we talk about mental illnesses, cognitive impairment, and the simple lack of social skills caused by not letting kids be kids. I think it’s misguided to expect kids to automatically develop normal social skills, which develop through play with playmates of different ages. Emotional intelligence depends on what Sarah Hrdy calls “intersubjectivity”: the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. This requires the active use of imagination, which normally occurs when children play. As I understand it, autism has to do with cognition, but it also has to do with the ability to relate to others. It probably does have a neurological root cause in many cases, but psychological and social aspects do need to be taken into consideration.
I’m definitely not discounting the possibility that autism is caused by vaccines, or by chemicals, but the entire way that we talk about “the spectrum” has gotten too muddled for my brain. If we want to get to the bottom of this issue, we need to clarify what we mean when we say “autism”. Currently, very different conditions are being described by the same label.
At the end of the day, though, I have one obvious question for Peter Hotez.
If vaccines didn’t cause Rachel’s autism, then what did?
for the wild,
Crow Qu’appelle
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