Peter Hotez seeks a public apology because I called him a “vaccine industry shill”.
Hotez portrays himself as a Franciscan stoic whose deep compassion for the poor caused him to trade the riches and prestige of a promising medical career for the cloistered life of an impoverished laboratory scientist. “I have no Pharma links”.
His selfless and single-minded preoccupation is a hookworm vaccine, which Pharma neglects due to the poverty of its African victims. Hotez’s ruefully chants “I’ll never make money on my vaccines”.
In fact, Hotez has accepted $13.8-- $70 million from Bill Gates for his many vaccine development projects and for replacing the scandal-scarred Paul Offit as Pharma’s leading pitchman.
Strategic philanthropy and massive investments in vaccine makers Merck, Pfizer, and GSK have given Gates control over global health policy, the speartip of corporate neo-imperialism.
Shilling for pharma allowed Hotez to leverage a $200K payoff from NIH’s grateful vaccine mafia to launch his own vaccine company, Biomedsyn, to monetize his taxpayer funded research.
Hotez sermonizes about poor Africans but his business partner, vaccine financier Frank Volvovitz admits their goal is making a killing marketing hookworm remedies to 200 million affluent Chinese who carry the parasite, and in the $1B veterinary market deworming livestock.
Off guard Hotez giddily muses that his nematode is a “self-contained pharmaceutical factory” Hotez is bullish about milking hookworms for profitable anti-cancer drugs and an anti-coagulant that will give him a foothold in the $500m blood thinner space.
His NIH cronies slipped Hotez $2.5M to jump start his Chinese enterprise. Hotez is courting vaccine companies for added investment.
Hotez’s claim that he takes no money from Pharma is a lie. Lies are his livelihood Hotez’s hero Jonas Salk triggered the worse polio outbreak in US history in 1955 with his untested vaccine then tried to hide that it contained a carcinogenic monkey-virus SV40 that is suspect in the soft tissue cancer explosion among baby boomers.
Salk told Hotez that he didn’t believe in God; “Vaccines are my religion” Hotez says dreamily, “I think about that every day.”
