Peter Hotez

Well, first of all, Eric, thank you.

Thanks for having me on.

And thank you for all your support over the years.

Many people don't realize this, but we've been doing a weekly Zoom together with good colleagues like Mike Osterholm and Peggy Hamburg and Penny Heaton and Bruce Gellin and

and Ruth Berkelman, and I've learned so much from you, from all of us, from all that group because of this.

And you've been a great help in explaining what the heck is going on right now because it is so extremely dark.

So first of all, I wanted to say again how grateful I am for all your support in what's been some dark times too often.

But, you know, I think the reason for writing the book is because it's taking lives.

And, you know, the big 30,000-foot overview for the book is humanity is facing two existential threats right now.

One of them is from pandemics like COVID, like H5N1, and we're going to have –

new ones coming down the pike, right?

We're going to have other zoonotic influenzas.

We're going to have other coronaviruses and vector-borne tropical diseases, where I am in Texas and the Gulf Coast, and maybe bioterrorism threats, and then the climate crisis, which is equally important.

But now there's a third leg to the tripod, Eric, and the third leg is the vast

disinformation machine that's blocking us from addressing either pandemics or the climate crisis.

And that means that anti-science itself is an existential threat.

And we wrote the book to really highlight that and to help people understand where it's coming from, because I think too often

You know, you see the language out there that it's all misinformation or infodemic like it's just some random junk out there on the Internet.

And it's not.

It's it's it's organized.