The Richard E. Behrman, MD, Endowed Lectureship in Pediatrics

May 28, 2024 | 8-9am | Stanford Campus – Stanford only

Global Vaccinations and the “Antipoverty Vaccines”: The Science vs The Antiscience

SPEAKER
Peter Hotez, MD, PhD
Dean, National School of Tropical Medicine
Baylor College of Medicine

SESSION DESCRIPTION
This session will discuss how we both address vaccine equity and a rising an aggressive globalizing antiscience empire. Globally, our Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development is accelerating a low-cost recombinant protein vaccines for global health including COVID vaccines released in India and Indonesia, where almost 100 million doses have been administered, and now a new human hookworm vaccine is showing promise to become the second parasitic disease vaccine after the malaria was licensed for the African Continent. In the US substantial progress has been made in vaccinating the population versus COVID19, with the important exception of an estimated 200,000 unvaccinated Americans who lost their lives because refused COVID19 vaccinations.  This antivaccine defiance has evolved over the last 20 years beginning around disinformation claiming vaccines cause autism, but now increasingly around a framework of health freedom or medical freedom.  The health freedom movement is now a political one espoused by far-right elected officials, news outlets, contrarian intellectuals or pseudointellectuals, and even extremist groups.  It is a complex ecosystem that targets both biomedical science and scientists with dangerous consequences for the nation not only around vaccinations but also other health and science interventions.  It has begun to globalize to Canada, Western Europe, and increasingly low- and middle-income countries. 

LOCATION (in-person)
Center for Academic Medicine
Grand Rounds Room
453 Quarry Road, 
Palo Alto, CA 94304

ZOOM INFORMATION
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