PITTSBURGH (TNS) — When Peter Hotez set off to create low-cost vaccines, he never expected to open his phone to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calling him the “OG Villain.”
Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and a professor of pediatrics and molecular biology, has become an object of scrutiny by vaccine-opposing groups, with even Joe Rogan challenging him to talk about vaccines on his podcast. Hotex declined.
He’s not a Pittsburgh local, but with the University of Pittsburgh a hub of vaccine and public health research, he said coming to the city always feels like coming home.
Hotez is likely to remain in the public eye with his book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning,” out last September and with a forthcoming new edition in February. He traveled to Pittsburgh Tuesday as a guest speaker for a talk at the University Clubhouse in Oakland on challenges in vaccinating children across the globe.
Allegheny County meets immunity thresholds for childhood routine vaccinations, but that number has declined. It is currently hovering at the critical threshold of 95%, the point at which certain viruses like measles can reappear if not enough people are vaccinated against them.
This percentage — from Allegheny County Health Department’s 2022 — 2023 School Immunization Report — represents a decline from 96.7% in 2015.
“Any decline we’re seeing in vaccination rates is concerning,” said Theresa Chapple-McGruder, director of the Center for Health Equity at Pitt’s School of Public Health. “Because that means there are more people who are vulnerable. We need to identify where these pockets are and what their concerns are.”
The Immunization Report also showed that vaccine exemptions have been increasing in Allegheny County, particularly among parochial and religious schools.
Notably, 32 schools that reported data to the Health Department did not exceed an 85% vaccination rate among its children, leaving pockets of Allegheny County in danger of new outbreaks.
Part of this new trend across the county, the U.S., and now the globe, can be attributed to vaccine myths — and those myths are polarizing, which Hotez highlights in his book.
In late 2021, dozens attended a rally outside the Allegheny County Courthouse to protest a vaccine mandate instated by the county Health Department. Debra Bogen, who was then the department director, attributed these attitudes — and subsequent COVID-19 deaths — to misinformation and disinformation spreading online.
In Dr. Hotez’s eyes, over time, the issue has become about how vaccine-opposing groups have gained a global foothold and threaten to dismantle the entire vaccine ecosystem.
“In their zeal to push back against vaccine mandates, which you can kind of understand, they unfortunately went the next step, and they falsely discredited the effectiveness and safety of vaccines,” he said. “And then the pile-on came.”
Political affiliation is now one of the strongest predictors for being vaccinated, according to a 2021 poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
During a morning interview at the Oaklander Hotel on Tuesday, Hotez pulled up a U.S. map from a 2018 study he co-authored, published in the journal PLOS Medicine. The map illustrated counties with nonmedical exemptions for vaccines in 2016 and 2017. He found it later became a good predictor for measles outbreaks.
The issue, while it’s uncomfortable, is inherently political — and health departments should not shy away from that, argued Hotez.
“I think the health sector doesn’t really know what to do,” he said. “I’ve had to read the works of political scientists to put this together. It takes everyone outside their comfort zone to talk about Republicans and Democrats, but we need politics to fight it.”
During an afternoon panel at the University Clubhouse, leading vaccine experts at Pitt and Hotez outlined challenges in encouraging vaccination and how to address them.
One successful weapon? Bolstering trust in science.
Although vaccine hesitancy has been around for centuries, trust in science has declined.
Per a Nov. 2023 Pew Research Poll, while a majority of people still hold positive views about science, those views are lower following the pandemic.
Trust in scientists among Democrats dropped 4% from 2019 to 2023, but among Republicans, it plummeted by 20% — leaving 38% of Republicans saying they have no public trust in science.
That trust has to be built back up if people who are hesitant about vaccines — for multiple reasons — are going to get inoculated.
A recent transplant from Chicago, Chapple-McGruder worked during the pandemic on vaccine equity and understanding the hesitancies and access issues facing different communities.
What she found was that coupling credible information with empathy was the key.
“It took me nine months to convince my own sister to get vaccinated,” she said. “People don’t care about what you know until they know that you care.”
In the waiting space between information, misinformation and disinformation can thrive — and if vaccine equity is not prioritized, the door to anti-science attitudes are opened, said Chapple-McGruder.
That’s why it’s still important to educate both children and adults about how science is practiced. What do lab meetings look like? How are experiments run? Where does grant money go? School-age kids should be learning all this, said Hotez, to enhance science literacy — and protect against false information that aims to undermine the scientific process.
Other speakers at the panel included Paul Duprex, director of the Regional Biocontainment Lab at Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research and an expert in measles; Mari Webel, an associate professor in the Department of History at Pitt specializing in public health history; and Maureen Lichtveld, dean of the Pitt School of Public Health.
Former dean of the school and leading epidemiologist, Donald Burke, as well as Peter Salk were in the audience.
“We will likely be facing another coronavirus before the end of the next decade,” Hotez said.
What will matter is how prepared we are — and that will depend on our ability to face the questions that scare us. Or else, said Hotez, “this whole system could unravel pretty quickly.”
