Vaccine-Obsessed Professor Warns of Multiple Viruses ‘Coming Down the Pike’ the Day After Trump’s Inauguration

Dec 05, 2024

Baylor professor Dr. Peter Hotez warned the MSNBC audience Wednesday that, “starting on January 21,” a host of viruses will be unleashed upon America due to “this sharp rise in anti-vaccine activism that’s so prominent right now.”

Following a clip of Michael Bloomberg criticizing Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Hotez, Baylor College of Medicine’s dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine and a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology, told Deadline:White House host Nicolle Wallace:

[W]e have some big picture stuff coming down the pike, starting on January 21. Mr. Bloomberg mentioned H5 N1 – that I'm really worried about. It's all over wild birds on the western part of the United States, and going up in the north, it's getting into the poultry. We're seeing sporadic human cases, no human to human transmission yet. But that could happen. It's in the cattle. It's in the milk, and that's just the beginning. We have another major coronavirus, likely brewing. In Asia, we've had SARS in 2002, SARS2 COVID-19 in 2019, and we know these viruses are jumping from bats to people thousands of times a year, but that's, there's still more there. We know that we have a big problem with mosquito-transmitted viruses all along the Gulf Coast, where I am, here in Texas, we’re expecting dengue, and possibly Zika virus coming back, or a buchavirus, maybe even yellow fever. And there's more. Then we have all this sharp rise in vaccine-preventable diseases going up because [inaudible] part the anti-vaccine activism that's so prominent right now. We have a five-fold rise in pertussis cases, whooping cough over the last year, 50 measles outbreaks this year. We've got polio that's been in the wastewater in New York State. All that's going to come crashing down on January 21 on the Trump administration. We need a really, really good team to be able to handle this.

Writing at Courageous Discourse, noted author John Leake summed up Hotez’s message Thursday with a subheadline that read, “Unhinged vaccine fetishist implies that microbiology is on a political timetable.”

Leake observed that Dr. Anthony Fauci also predicted a “surprise outbreak” of infectious disease just days before Trump was inaugurated in 2017.

“As Freud famously remarked, people often reveal their subconscious wishes and fantasies in their word choice,” Leake wrote. “I don’t think I’m speculating too much in drawing the conclusion that Dr. Hotez can’t wait for the U.S. to be afflicted by another plague.”

Others have taken note of the zealous political tone of Hotez’s remarks during the COVID-19 years.

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley, for example, observed in August 2021, that Hotez had called for hate-crime protections to be granted to Fauci and other scientists who, he claimed, were being “targeted by far-right extremism in the United States.”

“A band of ultraconservative members of the US Congress and other public officials with far-right leanings are waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists,” Hotez wrote in a July 2021 paper published in Plos Biology. “In parallel, conservative news outlets repeatedly and purposefully promote disinformation designed to portray key American scientists as enemies.”

Hotez concluded:

We must take steps to protect our scientists and take swift and positive action to counter the growing wave of far-right antiscience aggression. Not taking action is a tacit endorsement, and a guarantee that the integrity and productivity of science in the United States will be eroded or lose ground.

Turley observed a particular quality about Hotez’s piece:

What is most striking about the article of Hotez is its lack of analytical balance. He rages against the right without even acknowledging how social media companies have already enforced a massive censorship program that bars even reporting the results of public clinical trials or repeating CDC positions on vaccinations.

In December 2022, Hotez made headlines again when the World Health Organization reposted, to what is now the X platform, his political rant calling for the medical freedom movement to be labeled “anti-science aggression.”

He published his video message as House Republicans launched their investigation into the origins of COVID-19 in China and taxpayer funding for virus research in Wuhan.

Medical freedom, Hotez asserted, had grown to become a “major killing force … linked to far extremism on the far right,” and had led to the deaths of thousands of Americans “who needlessly lost their lives because they refused a COVID vaccine.”

“Remember these are the same House Freedom Caucus guys who discouraged Americans from taking Covid vaccines, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of 200,000 unvaccinated Americans,” he wrote. “They don’t care about you or your family, and they don’t care if there’s a 4^th pandemic.”