Top 15 Peter J. Hotez Quotes

The big pharma companies are still not going in. Some of the biotechs are starting to, because they're trying to really accelerate their technology... and hopefully to flip it around for something else that will make money. We need a new system in place.

So we've got to figure out what the ecosystem is going to be, to develop vaccines that are not going to make money.

[H]ad we had those investments early on, to carry this all the way through clinical trials years ago, we could have had a vaccine ready to go.

When the Chinese started putting up the data on Bioarchive in January-February, we saw a very close homology between the two, and realized that we may be sitting on a very attractive Coronavirus vaccine. Now, we're working... again with NIH, and we're working with BARDA and others to get the funding, but now we'll have that lag. ...[T]hese clinical trials are not going to go that quickly because of that immune enhancement. It's going to take time. ...[U]nfortunsately, some of my colleagues in the biotech industry are making these inflated claims. ...[Y]ou've seen this... in the newspapers, "We're going to have this vaccine in weeks..." What they're really seeing is that they can move a vaccine into clinical trials, but this will not go quickly because as we start vaccinating human volunteers, especially in areas where we have community transmission, we're going to have to proceed very slowly, very cautiously. The FDA is on top of that. They have a great team in place at the . They're aware of the problem, but it's not going to go quickly. We are going to have to follow this very slowly, cautiously, to make certain that we're not seeing that immune enhancement. So now we're hearing projections, a year, 18 months, who knows...

But we collaborated with a unique group that figured out how to solve the problem. That if you narrow it down to the smallest subunit, the piece that... [is] called the receptor binding domain, that docs with the receptor, you get protection, and you don't get that immune enhancement phenomenon. ...We proposed this to the . They funded it and we wound up actually making and manufacturing, in collaboration with , a first generation SARS vaccine. So SARS was the one that emerged in 2003... and then this new one... we call the SARS 2 Coronavirus. We had it manufactured, but then we could never get the investment to take it beyond that. ...We had the vaccine ready to go, but we couldn't move it into the clinic, because of lack of funding, because by then nobody was interested in Coronavirus vaccines.

[O]ne of the things that we're not hearing a lot about is the unique potential safety problem of Coronavirus vaccines. ...This was first found in the early 1960s with the respiratory syncytial virus [RSV] vaccines, and it was done here in Washington with the NIH and Children's National Medical Center... [S]ome of those kids that got the vaccine actually did worse, and I believe that there were two deaths in the consequence of that study. ...[W]hat happens with certain types of respiratory virus vaccines, you get immunized, and then when you get actually exposed to the virus you get this kind of paradoxical immune enhancement phenomenon. ...[I]t's a real problem for certain respiratory virus vaccines. That killed the RSV program for decades. Now the Gates Foundation is taking it up again, but when we started developing Coronavirus vaccines (and our colleagues) we noticed in laboratory animals, that they started to show some of the same immune pathology that resembled what had happened 50 years earlier.

[W]e also took on, a decade ago, the interesting problem of making Coronavirus vaccines because we recognized these as enormous public health threats, and yet we have not seen the big pharma guys and the biotech's rushing into this space. So we... partnered with a group at the and the to take on the big scientific challenge of Coronavirus vaccines...

So we have a vaccine now in clinical trials, a vaccine that we hope will advance to the clinic soon, a Hookworm vaccine in clinical trials, a new vaccine that's moving into the clinic. I like to say that these are the most important diseases that you've never heard of. These are some of the most common afflictions of the world's population, but they mostly occur among people who live in extreme poverty... [S]o there is no model to figure out who's going to pay for them. So as a consequence, neither the biotechs nor the big pharmaceutical companies make those vaccines.

[W]e took this on... with the idea of pioneering not only interest in science, but also a new business model, and the business model part, we haven't quite figured out yet, because we're trying to make... vaccines for diseases no one else will make.

There is an urgency to create vaccines for diseases which don't make money.

I perceive... a dearth of voices speaking out against the modern anti-vaccination movement. Their false claims and public statements more often than not go unchallenged. I hope that this book might serve as a clarion call for other scientists and physicians to speak out on behalf of science.

[V]accines are safe and cannot possibly cause autism...

Today, measles ranks among the most deadly of childhood infections, yet parents and guardians are walking away from protecting their children against this and other deadly diseases in unprecedented numbers. They are abandoning the option of protecting their children because of phony propaganda released by an anti-vaccine movement that began in 1968. Since then, the movement has become scary, powerful, and well organized. One aspiration of this book is to counter [those] claims... that MMR (measles, mumps-rubella) and other childhood vaccines are either unsafe or cause autism.

[I]n Houston (and elsewhere in Texas) is an area known as the Fifth Ward... Driving... deep into this neighborhood reminded me of the terrible poverty I had seen... in destitute areas of Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and China. I saw... images... just like the standard global disease movie typically shown to first-year public health or medical students. ...It was even more astonishing when we turned our global health lens inward to study diseases that were infecting impoverished areas... [W]e found widespread NTDs... in Texas and elsewhere in the southern United States. ...NTDs are first and foremost diseases of acute poverty. ...[W]e determined that 12 million Americans who live at such poverty levels suffer from at least one NTD. The diseases include neglected parasitic infections such as , , , and .

One reason... to move our scientists to Houston was to take advantage of being located within the [TMC]... comprising more than 50 biomedical institutions and 100,000 employees, occupying a building space that exceeds that of downtown Los Angeles. A second reason... generous support from Texas Children's Hospital (the world's largest...) which also housed the Sabin Vaccine Institute PDP... Our goal for moving and becoming linked to the TMC was to increase the number of new vaccines we are creating for the poorest people in less developed countries, [and] to accelerate the pace at which they are produced. ...[T]oday we have two vaccines in clinical trials—with others in various stages of development.