“ With Robert Kennedy as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the antivaccine rhetoric has acquired
disabilities. I have often been asked by professional societies and US government agencies to engage with antivaccine activists or debunk their false assertions. After multiple discussions with these activists, including Robert F Kennedy Jr, I wrote a book entitled Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism . As a result of it and other public activities, I have become a frequent target, but it has also given me a unique perspective. I’ve watched American antivaccine activism grow into a political and financial enterprise. The political element arose in my state of Texas in the 2010s when political action committees began funding antivaccine activists. Invoking libertarian ideals and health freedom rhetoric, they encouraged parents to request exemptions for childhood immunisations required for school entry. Today at least 100,000 Texas schoolchildren do not receive their full complement of vaccines. Later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, health freedom expanded as politicians, in their zeal to push back against Covid vaccine mandates, began to falsely discredit the effectiveness and safety of vaccines. These attitudes were amplified on Fox News and conservative news podcasts and social media. My 2023 book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-science ,
– remain. In 2010 The Vaccine Confidence Project was launched to document the unique national flavours of vaccine resistance across the globe. Each country or subregion continues to have its own version of antivaccine sentiments, but a different, darker version of antivaccine activism has arisen in the United States. This US brand targets multiple aspects of biomedicine, including pharmaceuticals and pandemic denialism. It has also merged with climate denialism to create a formidable anti-science movement, which has begun to globalise across the Western Hemisphere and into Europe. It even threatens low- and middle-income countries in Africa and elsewhere. THREE PILLARS OF ANTIVACCINATION IN AMERICA: AUTISM, POLITICS AND PROFIT In England, what began in the late 1990s with claims that vaccines cause autism, quickly gained a foothold in the US. My involvement in countering antivaccine claims stems from the dual nature of my professional and personal life: I’m a laboratory-based paediatrician scientist who develops new vaccines for neglected diseases and a dad of four adult kids, including Rachel, who has autism and intellectual
an unprecedented platform, as he
attempts to resurrect vaccine-autism links and discredit the measles-mumps- rubella vaccine or mRNA vaccines for
Covid and future pandemic threats”
Peter J Hotez, professor of paediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology; co-director, texas children’s hospital center for vaccine development; and dean, national school of tropical medicine, baylor college of medicine
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Health: A Political Choice – The Future of Health in a Fractured World
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