Peter Hotez

"In 2011, together with a team of 15 scientists, I relocated to Houston, Texas, to launch a new school devoted to poverty-related diseases. The National School of Tropical Medicine at is a joint venture among three biomedical institutions—Baylor, , and the —with a mission devoted to research on and training in the treatment of neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs..."

"Theres still no road map for what you do to make a vaccine in the midst of a devastating public health outbreak."

"Today, the NTDs represent the most common afflictions of people who live in extreme poverty. These ailments include diseases such as hookworm, , , and —or... the most important diseases youve never heard of. Virtually every impoverished individual is infected with at least one NTD."

"[V]accines are safe and cannot possibly 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 ."

"There is an urgency to create vaccines for diseases which dont make money."

"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 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."

"[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 havent quite figured out yet, because were trying to make... vaccines for diseases no one else will make."

"[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."

"[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 biotechs 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 weve got to figure out what the ecosystem is going to be, to develop vaccines that are not going to make money."