“Seeking exceptional candidates: NIH posts job ad to replace Fauci,” headlined a November 23 Helio report, which asked “experts” what qualities they would like to see in the person who replaces Dr. Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984.
One of the experts was Dr. Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine. Hotez earned a degree in molecular biophysics from Yale, a doctorate in biochemistry from Rockefeller University, and an MD from Weill Cornell Medical College.
Cornell is where Anthony Fauci got his MD, and the professor is a huge fan.
“Replacing Dr. Fauci after so many decades will be daunting,” Dr. Hotez explained, “not only because Tony was a superb administrator and scientist, but also because he helped the U.S. Congress and executive branch understand the importance of infectious disease research to national and global security. Dr. Fauci’s replacement must not only be an important American scientist but also an adept science explainer, convener, and advocate.”
Dr. Fauci is also “a punching bag for the far right since the earliest days of the outbreak,” contended Dr. Hotez in “The Unique Terror of Being a Covid Scientist After January 6.” That June 21, 2021, Daily Beast commentary was subtitled “It’s no coincidence that one of the first guilty pleas in connection with the Capitol riot was of an anti-vaxxer.”
Hotez charges that in 2020 “the Trump White House embarked on a deliberate antiscience disinformation campaign.” The “far-right fringe” mounted “attacks” on Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak who heads the EcoHealth Alliance.
“I agree with Dr. Fauci when he says that these personal attacks represent an assault on American science,” Hotez argued, but there was more to it. “Ultimately, the far-right hunt for biomedical scientists represents an essential element for totalitarian control that goes back almost 100 years. In this context courage and standing up for democratic values demands that the American people throw their full support behind scientists and scientific institutions. To do otherwise is to capitulate to the forces of insurrection.”
That piece is the primary reference for Hotez’s July 28, 2021 paper, “Mounting Anti-science Aggression in the United States,” which leads with: “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.” Dr. Hotez perceives a drive toward totalitarianism and cites Hitler, Mussolini, and even Joseph Stalin.
Countries holding “similar views” include Hungary under Viktor Orban and Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, Hotez explained. No word about the repressions of China’s Communist dictatorship, and their vast biological warfare apparat. Like Fauci, Hotez is uncritical of China’s totalitarian state, and criticizes Republicans for “pointing fingers at virologists both in the US and China.”
In America, “we should look at expanded protection mechanisms for scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States.” Hotez likes the Scientific Integrity Act of 2021 but “still another possibility is to extend federal hate-crime protections.” (emphasis added). That caught the attention of attorney Jonathan Turley.
Hotez, Turley noted, is “calling for federal hate-crime protections to be extended to cover criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists.” Criminalization of dissent is the hallmark of totalitarian states, and Hotez wants to “criminalize” criticism of Fauci. That invites a look at the longtime NIAID boss, in government for more than 50 years.
Like Hotez, Fauci is a medical doctor, earning his MD in 1966 and taking a job with the NIH two years later in 1968. So if Fauci ever practiced medicine, it was only for a short time. Unlike Hotez, Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry, but the NIH made him NIAID boss in 1984. Nobel laureate Kary Mullis Ph.D., inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was on record that Fauci “doesn’t understand electronic microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” But he was.
Dr. Fauci is on record that “I represent science” and that his critics are therefore attacking science itself. Dr. Hotez agrees with Fauci that “these personal attacks represent an assault on American science.” On the other hand, Hotez shows no interest in probing the facts and realities of Fauci’s policies.
For example, Dr. Fauci told people not to bother with masks, then urged everybody to wear a mask or even two masks. Dr. Hotez doesn’t say which view represents science. As a treatment for AIDS, Fauci promoted azidothymidine, also known as AZT and Zidovudine, a highly toxic DNA chain terminator that neither prevented nor cured AIDS.
Hotez does not pronounce on the science of Fauci’s drug experiments, with multiple casualties among black and Hispanic foster children in New York. In similar style, Fauci recommended COVID vaccines that failed to prevent infection or transmission, but proved quite profitable for pharmaceutical companies. That marks a departure from the Salk vaccine, 90 percent effective against polio, and which creator Jonas Salk gave away for free. Albert Sabin also declined to patent his very effective polio vaccine.
In June, Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci if anybody on the vaccine committee “ever received money from the people who make vaccines?” Fauci failed to answer and claimed that his own royalties averaged less than $200 per year. As Americans might recall, the jury is still out on the long-term effects of the vaccines Fauci wants administered to everyone, including children, the group least vulnerable to COVID. If Hotez has conducted research on vaccine injuries it does not emerge in his paper.
Hotez is aware of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) but his paper fails to mention that Fauci funded that dangerous research then lied about it to Congress. Hotez seems unaware of the supply chain of deadly pathogens to the WIV from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada.
Fauci maintains that the COVID virus arose naturally in the wild. This is speculation, not science, which requires observation, testing, and replication. Dr. Hotez replicates Fauci’s view and ignores mounting evidence of a laboratory origin. When former CDC director Robert Redfield found evidence of a laboratory origin he got death threats.
That threat seems to have escaped Hotez’s notice, who also ignores Fauci’s attacks on the medical scientists of the Great Barrington Declaration. They include Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford, and Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
They took issue with Fauci’s draconian lockdown policy, but rather than engage them in debate on the facts, Fauci and NIH boss Francis Collins called for “a quick and devastating published takedown,” of the Barrington scientists. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff told the story in “The Collins and Fauci Attack on Traditional Public Health.”
Hotez would have these scientists charged with a hate crime for daring to criticize Dr. Anthony Fauci. And remember, Hotez agrees with Fauci’s claim that Fauci represents science. He doesn’t, and it’s not even close.
