Peter Hotez Pushes Back at Joe Rogan and Elon Musk’s Vaccine Debate: No Interest in ‘Turning It Into The Jerry Springer Show’
Dr. Peter Hotez pushed back on Joe Rogan’s controversial debate challenge in which he found himself to MSNBC’s Medhi Hasan Sunday evening interview.
A massive Twitter blow-up developed after Hotez called out a recent interview Rogan had with noted anti-vax activist and challenger to President Joe Biden to be the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate. The Dean of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College objected to Rogan’s platforming Kennedy by linking to a Vice article that decried the interview as proof that Spotify is no longer applying the publishing rules on Rogan they did when they decided to start putting advisory labels on podcasts that discussed the coronavirus pandemic.
Rogan took offense at Hotez’s comments and challenged him to debate Kennedy, offering a $100,000 charitable donation. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman offered an additional $150,000, which became a whole thing on Twitter, especially as Elon Musk got involved after Hotez declined to get involved. This inevitably led to Hotez getting harassed at his home by the @iFightForKids user on Twitter:
During Sunday’s appearance on MSNBC, Hotez noted that antivaccine conspiracies — which Kennedy often espoused — led to the needless deaths of 200,000 Americans who perished due to the Omicron variant of Covid-19. He then explained why he’s not interested in debating.
“In science, we don’t typically do debates,” he also explained. “What we do is we write scientific papers … one doesn’t typically debate science. Maybe the one-off discussion of evolution versus creationism & that sort of thing, but that’s not what we do in science.”
He then dismissed the nature of what a debate with RFK would look like:
And yet RFK Jr incessantly calls me a pharma shill when if anything, our vaccines maybe kept Pfizer and Moderna out of markets in India and in Indonesia. So I don’t understand that piece. And then the reason I got involved with RFK JR in the first place is I have an adult daughter, Rachel, who has autism and intellectual disabilities and wrote the book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism. That refuted all of his false claims. And and and that’s been you know, he’s been kind of after me ever since then and now he’s at it again. But this time, you know, Ellen, it’s just absolutely at this time, Eddie, it’s it’s caused something really terrible, and that is during the COVID pandemic.
I have a new book coming out that basically says 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they believed the anti-vaccine disinformation and refused to take a COVID vaccine during our Delta wave and be a one Omicron wave in 20 2122 after vaccines were widely available. So the point is anti-vaccine disinformation. It’s always done a lot of damage and harm, but now it’s a lethal force in the United States. And that’s why we that’s why we have to have that discussion. And I offered to come and talk to a guy on Joe Rogan. Again, I’ve been on a couple of times and have that discussion with it, but not to turn it into the Jerry Springer Show with having RFK Jr on.
Watch above via MSNBC.
