Fighting the Rise of Anti-Science

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People have always doubted science. In the 17th century, Galileo was sentenced to house arrest by the Catholic Church for reporting his observations that the sun is at the center of the solar system and that the other planets, including Earth, orbit it. In 1925, the U.S. state of Tennessee banned the teaching of evolution and when a high school teacher named John Scopes agreed to challenge the law, the Scopes “monkey” trial resulted. People did not like to think that they descended from monkeys – although that’s not quite what the science of evolution shows.

Now, the United States and much of the world seems to have regressed into another period when science is denied. This time, much of it centers around vaccines, although there is animosity toward many other public health measures. Climate science is likewise still under attack, decades after the scientific expert community settled the question of whether people’s activities are changing the planet’s climate.

One of the scientists fighting back is Dr. Peter Hotez. Long a champion of fighting neglected tropical diseases such as Chagas disease and leishmaniasis, Hotez has evolved into an advocate for vaccination in general and for inexpensive, freely available vaccines in particular.

He wrote a book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, that explains the disproven notion that vaccination might cause autism – using his own daughter’s case history as an illustration. His latest book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, looks at the history of attacks on science, the political and commercial motives of many of the attacks, and the often fatal results.

The attacks have gotten very personal for Hotez, and they’ve worsened under the new Trump Administration in the United States. Now Hotez, who is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has become one of the most recognizable public faces in the fight to defend science. In this episode of One World, One Health, Hotez describes how he never expected to be cast as a “cartoon villain” when what he mostly wanted to do was help underprivileged people escape disease.

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