Thank you Sara Garcia, Andrew O'Malley BSc PhD, Sam Hester, Julie, Stephen B. Thomas, PhD, and so many others for tuning into my live video with Peter Hotez! Join me for my next live video in the app.Peter Hotez and I discuss his new book, co-authored with Michael Mann, SCIENCE UNDER SEIGE, on the anti-science superstorm culminating from the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, and a vast interconnected network that has waged a direct assault on scientific truth.During our conversation we trace history of priors in civilization, such as Lysenko and Stalinism in the last century. And acknowledge the future role of A.I. for promoting infinite disinformation. Beyond human suffering and direct health outcome consequences (such as Red Covid), the toll this is taking on the career of young scientists, universities, public health agencies, and loss of public trust are reviewed. The interdependent role of the media and the wellness industry is touched on.The book and our conversation puts forth a call to arms, potential solutions, including the need to move away from invisible scientists and political activism.Thanks for listening to Ground Truths podcasts and reading the analytic posts.In case you missed any, these are a few recent and related ones:Podcasts with Michael Osterholm and Sanjay Gupta on their new books—The Big One and It Doesn’t Have to Hurt, respectively.Next up is Charlotte Blease and her new book Dr. Bot on where we are headed with medical A.I.If you found this interesting PLEASE share it!That makes the work involved in putting these together especially worthwhile.All content on Ground Truths—its newsletters, analyses, and podcasts, are free, open-access.Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don't hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Let me know topics that you would like to see covered.Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe
Full Episode
So I am just absolutely thrilled to have my friend and colleague, Dr. Peter Hotez with me today. He has a book with Michael Mann, which is extraordinary, Science Under Siege. The timing is beyond belief. And we're going to get into that book. I think it's exceptionally important given where we are right now.
I'm going to just talk a little bit while we get people joining because lots of people are joining this. It's such an important discussion. Peter and Michael described an anti-science superstorm.
with the three things coming together, the climate crisis, the pandemic, and the anti-science, which is just getting stronger and stronger, and it isn't being helped at all by the world of AI, leading to, as what they say, a potential for infinite disinformation. So now that we're getting some folks on board, Peter,
Why don't you tell us a bit about your sense of the anti-science superstorm and what motivated you and Michael to put this book together, which is obviously a prescient piece of work.
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.
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