CITY | STATE Internet trolls launch new attack on researcher Hotez
Internet trolls unleashed a new wave of hate speech Thursday directed at Houston vaccine researcher Peter Hotez, a longtime nemesis of the anti-vaxx movement.
“This is not the first time that the antivaccine lobby has waged a hate campaign against me or my family,” Hotez said via email. “The difference now is that antivaccine groups have coalesced around far-right extremism and QAnon and Nazi imagery.”
The attack began Thursday, after the widely discredited website Natural News, which promotes false conspiracy theories about 5G and Bill Gates, posted a story about Hotez at the top of its website. “Echoing the fascism of genocidal maniacs like Hitler and Stalin,” it said, “Peter Hotez displays his own brand of insanity by equating vaccine skeptics with cyber criminals and nuclear terrorism.”
The author, Mike Adams, called on his followers to “pray for this sad monster of a man” to “seek forgiveness for the crimes against humanity being committed by whatever twisted, dark soul currently occupies his oncehuman body.” The story listed Hotez’s contact information, including the main switchboard number for Baylor College of Medicine.
“We have been contacted by a few individuals who are opposed to vaccines,” Kaylee Dusang, a spokesperson for Baylor, said via email.
Thursday night, Hotez posted on Twitter, “Today was rough, more than most.”
Natural News’ followers, he wrote, had sent messages evoking Nazism, “comparing me to Mengele, sending image after image of Nuremberg.” Hotez posted a sample image sent to him: The 1946 photo shows a Nazi about to be hanged for the commission of war crimes.
Hotez is Jewish.
Hotez forwarded the Houston Chronicle samples of email that he’s received. Most were profane. Few showed respect for spelling or grammar.
Three themes emerged in those emails, he wrote on Twitter: white nationalism (“30 million armed white nationalists arent going to take it that death shot ”); Nazis and the Nuremberg trials; and religion (“Please sink your head in some holy water to cast out those Hitler demons u have.”)
In 2020, Facebook banned Natural News for publishing coronavirus disinformation created by content farms from North Macedonia and the Philippines. Facebook said it found that foreign trolls then posted Natural News’ content in an effort to artificially inflate their reach.
Since the publication of his 2018 book “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism” — partly a memoir about his daughter — Hotez has been a focus of anti-vaccine protests and death threats. In November 2019, during an infectious disease conference in New York, anti-vaxx protesters surrounded him, and hotel security had to whisk him out of the hotel.
Hotez’s long battle against antivaccine conspiracy theorists kicked into high gear during the COVID pandemic. In January, in the journal PLOS Biology, he warned scientists to beware “an anti-science confederacy” composed of U.S. “medical freedom” initiatives, Russian disinformation and far-right extremist groups in Western Europe.
It was time, he asserted in that essay, for scientists to take a stand. “Our messages too often are messages in bottles floating in an ocean of disinformation,” he wrote. “We need to address the ocean.”