Houston doctor writes scientifically and personally about vaccines and autism
To Dr. Peter Hotez’s credit, he braided together three books into “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism” without creating a tome too weighty to be engaging. Hotez — a vaccine scientist and pediatrician — could easily have written a book focused on the folly of the anti-vaccination movement. And he also could have written a book about the history of science behind vaccinations. He also could have further developed a parenthood narrative from his and his wife’s point of view about raising their daughter Rachel, who is autistic.
Because Hotez deftly overlaps these three stories, each is compressed in a way that feels both relatable and comprehensible. The breadth of research and the personal aspect of the book provide a delicate balance.
“I don’t know if it’s a new genre in science books,” Hotez says, “but I don’t think there’s anything else quite like it. It’s a science book, right? That also explains why vaccines don’t cause autism. While also telling a personal story. I can’t say, but my hope is that will make it meaningful to others.”
Hotez and his family moved to Houston about eight years ago from Washington, D.C. He admits he wasn’t sure what to expect. At that point, Hotez was in his early 50s, and Rachel was still a teen. He’d spent almost all his life in the East and Northeast.
And though he’s found Houston’s freeways daunting — Hotez refers to them as “the killing fields” — he’s found Montrose to be nurturing and accommodating with Rachel, “who receives so much kindness from people there.” And professionally, Hotez has been able to study the effects of virulent distrust of science and medicine here.
“There is this unusual confluence of poverty and also people vulnerable to anti-science movements,” he says. “So I could be at Yale or Harvard and preaching to the converted. Or I could try to effect some change.”
Hotez serves as Texas Children’s Hospital’s endowed chair in Tropical Pediatrics and is the director of Texas Children’s vaccine development at Baylor College of Medicine. He also serves as a fellow at the Baker Institute, where he studies disease and poverty.
Baker Institute director Edward Djerejian recently referred to him as “this hotshot.”
“He’s constantly coming out with new research and new writings,” Djerejian said. “He deals with huge ethical issues, and he produces so much work.”
Much of Hotez’s work focuses on connections between disease and poverty, which draws his attention to places far from Houston, though his previous book, “Blue Marble Health,” found that much neglected tropical disease could be found in poorer communities in affluent nations.
“One of the things I wanted to do with that book was really highlight how poverty is the driver of disease,” he says.
But his new book — which he’ll discuss Monday night at Brazos Bookstore — landed as close to home as work. Hotez quickly gets into familial detail, pulling in his wife, Ann, as a character, and her fine-tuned perception that their daughter at an early age differed from her two older siblings in her aversion to close physical contact.
Hotez has for years pushed back against a movement that he identifies as beginning about 20 years ago, though he writes “anti-vaccine movements have been around in one form or another since the founding of the American colonies.”
A 1998 column in the medical journal The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist in the U.K., suggested a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The column was discredited and retracted. Wakefield was removed by the British General Medical Council’s medical register. He has since relocated to Texas.
“His paper really ignited a movement,” Hotez says.
The retraction of the column did nothing to put the fervor back into the bottle, though.
“This movement is well funded and well organized,” Hotez says. “And it’s clever what they’ve done. They’ve tied their star to a political movement with lazy terms like ‘medical freedom.’ It’s all made-up stuff, but it has been effective at raising money and impacting legislation.”
Hotez sees its work as “just part of a larger erosion of children’s rights that has been going on for years. Politics has gained ascendency over the sanctity of childhood.”
He lays out in the book the prenatal path autism takes.
And though Hotez would love to place the entirety of the issue on the anti-vaccine movement, he says some fault rests at the feet of the scientific and medical communities.
“As professional scientists, we’re very inward looking,” he says. “We only consider what’s important that which we are writing and speaking to and for each other. We’ve dropped entirely the idea of public engagement. If you read about science in 1800s England, the public lectures were front and center. We’ve lost that. We don’t talk enough to the public, it’s seen as self-promotion. Instead of telling people, ‘No, no, this is why we’re in the mess we’re in.’ Whether it’s the anti-vaccine movement, climate-change denial or flat-Earthers or those who deny the moon landing. We’ve helped create those things by being too silent.”