Peter Hotez

There are two separate circles

And there is a lot of overlap, although they're not completely overlapping.

And so we spent a lot of time talking about the overlap.

And as we were working on the book together, we found a lot more overlap than we would have expected.

And that was really interesting.

For instance, you might say, well, why would people attacking fossil fuels want to attack vaccines and COVID?

And

And there the answer is the whole Great Barrington Declaration, which, you know, was put out at the American – written at the American Institute for Economic Research, which is in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which is supported in part.

by Koch Philanthropies, and one of the officers there has a past connection.

By saying it's business as usual during a pandemic, even though the people are piling into ICUs and emergency rooms and overwhelming them and shooting up mortality, it keeps the

The oil and gas going.

It keeps everything moving forward, even though it makes absolutely no sense epidemiologically.

So that's an example where there is direct mutually reinforcing, ultimately self-defeating, but mutually reinforcing interest between the attacks on climate, on fossil fuels, and the attacks on COVID.

Sure.

So the reason we looked into this is, you know, when has a society or a government, in this case the United States government, ever attacked science,

and portrayed scientists with such ferocity and, and, you know, working to portray us as public enemies or even cartoon villains.

Has that happened before?

And, and pretty quickly you can move towards, um, Stalinism in, in the Soviet Union, in the USSR, in the 1930s.

And there, you know, what,

they attacked the Mendelian geneticist, Vavilov, and actually threw him into the Gulag, where he ultimately perished in the 1940s from starvation and exposure in a Gulag hospital in favor of the theories, the discredited theories of a man named Trofim Lysenko, who believed in these Lamarckian approaches where he would soak the Russian wheat in snow.