Immunizing Against Anti-Science with Peter Hotez

How do you stop the spread of anti-science rhetoric? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Paul Mecurio break down disease prevention and the rise of anti-science with physician and global health expert, Peter Hotez.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk Cosmic Queries, we feature my conversation with Dr. Peter Hotez. He's a virologist and a pediatrician, and we talk about the rise in the anti-science movement and what impact that has had on his work as a medical doctor. He's also an expert on the movement of tropical viruses into regions where they were not previously invited, all thanks to climate change. That and more, coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. My co-host for this episode, Paul McCarrio. Paul, how you doing, man?

• 0:56Paul Mecurio?

  I'm doing great. Great to see you again, buddy.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good to have you back. And, you know, every time I take another look at your resume, it's like you're an Emmy Award winner and Peabody Award-winning comedian.

• 1:08Paul Mecurio?

  Yes, I am.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, this is good stuff. And the Peabody, that's the one you really want there. Everybody's got an Emmy, but a Peabody.

• 1:15Paul Mecurio?

  That's the one where people go, oh, you read a book.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You still work and perform regularly with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show?

• 1:24Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, we go back to The Daily Show together. I was one of the original writers and performers on The Daily Show back in the day.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really good to hear that. And occasionally when I'm on Stephen Colbert, I bump into you, and it's always good to see you.

• 1:35Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, it's great. And you always, Stephen loves having you on. He knows I'm serious because in rehearsal, like, it'll be like, who's the guest? And sometimes I'll be like, uh, and then it's like, Neil, oh, great, because you never shut up, so he doesn't have to do anything.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it is. I make his job easier.

• 1:50Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, no, it's great to have you on, yeah.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So today is a very important topic, something that's centerpiece to so much of what I do and what I care about. It's anti-science.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the medical community and that is anti-science as expressed by the public about the medical community, but also forgotten diseases with Peter Hotez. Peter Hotez, welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Thank you, Neil. I'm a huge fan and of both of you and I'm thrilled to be here. It's very exciting for me.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  And it impressed the heck out of all my kids.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  That was the most important thing. They're the toughest crowd of all.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anything on the domestic front.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  And the kids are the toughest to impress.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we can boost the domestic front, we're all in on that. So you're a pediatrician and you're dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine. That's actually a thing. That's a place at Baylor College, a professor of pediatrics and molecular biology at Baylor, and you're a fellow in disease and poverty. Gosh, the James Baker Institute for Public Policy.

• 3:02Paul Mecurio?

  Peter, you need to work harder.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 3:06Paul Mecurio?

  I don't know what's going on with you.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I were religious, I'd have to say, God put you on this earth to do good. Okay? But I'm not religious, so I don't know how to say that then. You're author of several books, Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases, The Neglected Tropical Diseases and Their Impact on Global Health and Environment. That was back in 2008.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, my kids used to call it Dad's Forgotten Book on Forgotten People.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  But it's gone into the third edition, so I think I proved them somewhat wrong.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good, very good. And another one, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist Warning. Oof. What year did that come out?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I'd written this book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, in 2018, and this new one.

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rachel's your daughter. Rachel's your daughter.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then the new one is called The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science. It talks about how the anti-vaccine movement has transitioned over to more of a... Political enterprise, and so I want to describe that change.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. And so that's out already, is that correct?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  That's correct, yeah.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so, okay, we'll look for that then. Thank you. And you were interviewed persistently as COVID was on, COVID-19 was on the rise, and trying to educate and try to disassemble the misinformation that was sweeping the world, and especially misinformation not only regarding the virus, but the vaccines to prevent it. So could you just tell me, let's back up. Tell me about forgotten diseases and why that matters. If they're forgotten and no one thinks about them, or they're forgotten, they're still out there, we just forgot to think about them. Is that it?

• 4:51Speaker 02

  So, you know, most of my, you know, people know me for COVID, and we've made two COVID vaccine technologies, reached 100 million people in India and Indonesia, but our OG vaccines are vaccines for parasitic infections. And, and that's been my first passion, is making vaccines for tropical parasitic infections, affecting the world's poorest people on the African continent, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. So forgotten people, forgotten diseases describes that whole ecosystem of what I call the most important diseases you've never heard of. There are the diseases such as human hookworm infection and schistosomiasis and chagas disease, lymphatic filariasis and river blindness.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  They're incredibly common, it's just that they only occur among people who live in extreme poverty. So we've been, one of the things we do here in the Texas Medical Center is to find a way to make innovations for the world's poorest people that the pharma companies would not ordinarily be interested.

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if these diseases were hitting Europe and the United States, there'd be a trillion dollars invested in it?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's what I would often think, but one of the things that we're finding now, and one of the reasons we created our National School of Tropical Medicine here in the Texas Medical Center, was because of a lot of 21st century forces like global warming, climate change, urbanization, remaining poverty. We're actually now starting to see some of those same diseases pop up here in Texas and the Gulf Coast, and as well as in Southern Europe. And, and what's interesting, Neil, is that's one of the hardest advocacy jobs I've ever had, is getting people to understand. That these tropical diseases are now arising here on the Gulf Coast. And, and not because necessarily of immigration or, or across the southern border is a lot of

• 6:39Speaker 02

  people want to say, but in fact because of climate change and because of poverty and urbanization. And the way I illustrate that is we have 10% of the dogs here in Texas with Chagas disease. And, and it's not because the dogs are slipping across the border from El Salvador, right? That we've got transmission of these diseases here and we're finding Chagas disease transmission here in the United States as well as, of course, some of the others. But it's been a, it's get, it's very tough to get people to understand that, that we have a vulnerability here.

• 7:11Paul Mecurio?

  We need some kind of a, we need some kind of a reality show, kind of like the voice for these obscure diseases here in America so that then people become aware of them through like watching television or something like that, you know?

• 7:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, tactical measures there. So at the risk of stating the obvious here, what you're saying is as climate warms, changes and includes warming trends at latitudes that previously did not experience such warming, the diseases that previously had been constrained to the tropics are now spilling into other latitudes on earth, presumably north and south. And so this is a spread that has been empowered by climate change.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  That's, well, climate change, but one of the things that I've found in my writings and, and is that it's not only, not only climate change, it's climate change is working in concert with other social determinants such as urbanization. That's a big one, right? Because 80s gypsy mosquitoes that transmit yellow fever or Zika virus infection or dengue live in the discarded tires that are in urban neighborhoods. So if you go into poor neighborhoods in and around Houston where you see all the tire dumping, that's actually a risk factor, um, together with, with-

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, I have to interject. It's not that the mosquitoes like rubber.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's a very fascinating fact. I'll explain.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, I don't know if you knew, the shape of a discarded tire is ideal to trap water inside of it, no matter how you orient the tire.

• 8:58Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if, so this water inside just sip pooling there. If you pick up the tire and roll it, the water just stays in there. If you tip it sideways, it curls around the edge and pulls at the bottom. So you actually have to like shake it and, and like dehydrate it. And so, so, so what's weird, Peter, is that this could be a major vector for mosquitoes, just discarded tires. That's a weird, crazy fact about our city.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  So that little vignette you just gave is exactly what I said to our mayor of Houston at the time, Mayor Sylvester Turner, extraordinary guy, Harvard, Harvard Law graduate. And I convinced him that we had to get rid of all the tire dumping in the low income neighborhoods in Houston. And, and so while South Texas had Zika virus transmission in 2016, we did not have that in Houston. Now whether it was in spite of what we did or because of it, we'll never know. I'll take credit for it anyways.

• 9:58Paul Mecurio?

  But aren't you just transferring the problem somewhere else to get rid of the tires? See, like when I steal cars and take the tires.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was wondering about, I was gonna ask you about that.

• 10:06Paul Mecurio?

  I always cut the tires with a chainsaw and open them up because I'm concerned about all of these viruses.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  That's, that's so 20th century. I thought catalytic converters were like the new thing.

• 10:16Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, they are. Thank you. Well, I actually have some in the trunk of my car. I could talk to you after the show about that.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  I don't even know what a catalytic converter looks like, but that's what I've heard.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me now about the rise of, I've known about anti-science outside of medicine because it's not so much anti-science, but pseudoscience that permeates. But if, if a person is susceptible to pseudoscience, it seems to me they'd be susceptible to anti-science. Because pseudoscience are ways of thinking that conflict with mainstream scientific thoughts and understandings of the world. So where did you first see your medical anti-science?

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Well, Neil, first of all, you've been a role model over the years for how you combat and debunk a lot of the pseudoscience. So I often follow your cues and, and, and you were actually an inspiration for me to get involved in this. I wish I have to pay you back somehow.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, just pay it forward.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Now I've become public enemy number one within.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's, it comes with the territory.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Well, what happened was, you know, I have, the original assertion against vaccines arose in the late 1990s with false claims of vaccines cause autism. And so I have four adult kids, including Rachel, has autism and intellectual disabilities and, and wrote the book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, which.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back in 2018.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Does a deep time, deep dive, explaining why there's no link between vaccines and autism, the science behind it, also what autism is, how it begins in early fetal brain development through the action of autism genes. We did whole exogenomic sequencing and Rachel, my fan and I, and laid it all out there. And it was a very powerful book, I think, and, and it helped a lot of people, but it also wound up making me public enemy number one or two with anti-vaccine groups. Robert F. Kennedy, our friend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. started publicly labeled me the OG villain and I'm so old and square, I had to look up what that means.

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What OG means, yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  The original gangster villain. So, so thanks for inviting the OG villain. And, but it was meaning, you know, I did find it meaningful. And now I realize if you're in the, in, in trying to make vaccines for hookworm vaccines and new COVID vaccines like we're doing, this is also part of it now, countering the anti-vaccine activists. And the problem was. It took another level. It actually started before the COVID pandemic, but it really accelerated, which became a political enterprise linked to political extremism on the far right. And, and you started to see, and this is where it gets really tough because as you know, Neil Oliver training as scientist says, we don't really like to talk about Republicans and Democrats and liberals or conservatives or red states or blue states. But what do

• 13:16Speaker 02

  you do when the people refusing vaccines overwhelmingly are in red states and the studies showed from Charles Gaba and others that the redder the county, the lower the immunization rate and higher the death rate, so much so that David Leonhardt of the New York Times just called it red COVID. And, and it was, and it's a killing force. So 40,000 Texans in my state of Texans died because they refused a COVID vaccine during the Delta and BA1 wave after vaccines were widely available and 200,000 Americans overall. And, and that's why we have to talk about it because anti-science is no longer just kind of this theoretical thing. It's actually a killing force.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we can separate the variables, as we say in mathematics. The, the, my understanding was, and we explored this in the film, Shot in the Arm. This is written and directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy as a documentarian. You were prominently interviewed in that film. I, I served as a, as script consultant because there's a lot of science getting communicated and I advised on that. And then I got like promoted to executive producer. Last time I agree to that, that was the whole thing. But anyhow, in that, we explored the fact that there are two separate variables here. One of them is, are you anti-science

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  because you hate Big Pharma or whatever? And another one is, you can't make me get a vaccine because I'm American and I'm free and freedom. And so one came from the right, from the left, the other came from the right, and they met on the other side of the fence because they both had the same objective. So are you, I presume you've seen both of these camps, right? And they, they require different solutions.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, and when it's changed over time, you know, we used to say the anti-vaccine movement was a product of the, as you rightly point out, the extreme left and the extreme right. On the extreme right, it was health freedom, medical freedom, you can't tell me what to do. On the extreme left, it was, you know, a peace, love granola, we have to be, you know, careful what we're putting into our kids.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and eat your herbs and that'll cure your...

• 15:26Speaker 02

  And the stuff on the left has somewhat dissipated, not entirely, because you still see a lot of people peddling nutritional supplements, you know, linked to the anti-vaccine movement. But it's mostly the, the killing force, the one that killed 200,000 Americans overwhelmingly is a product now of the far right. So you've got, and it's tough to talk about, you've got members of the House Freedom Caucus, you know, calling people like me medical brown shirts, that's the term they use, using Nazi analogies, pretty horrible stuff. And you've got, you know, two US senators, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, holding vaccine injury roundtables, and Senator Rand Paul targeting science and scientists.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  You had the CPAC Conference of Conservatives, first they're going to vaccinate you, then they're going to take away your guns and your bibles. And as ridiculous as that sounds to us, people accepted it in my state of, of Texas. And then the real tough one was Fox News amplifying it every night. And this was documented by two groups, Media Matters and, and a research group out of Switzerland. You know, the nighttime Fox News anchors, every night falsely discredited the effectiveness and safety of vaccines. They filled their broadcast with the anti-vaccine content. And so what happened was if you were going down that rabbit hole, watching Fox News every night and everything else, you started to believe that the vaccines either didn't work or weren't safe and you didn't get vaccinated.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  And, and so many Americans paid for that with their lives. And it's not, you know, Neil, it's not that we really care, right, about people's political views. That's, you're right, as an American, I shouldn't speak for you, but I'm guessing you probably feel...

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  But, but how do you uncouple? The anti-science from it. I mean, I don't care about your political views. I mean, you know, whatever. You're right. But but how do you say, don't buy into this one because it's going to kill you?

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what about what about as we showed some footage in this film, a shot in the arm? In it, we also we had footage of anti-mask movements back in the 1918 pandemic, the flu pandemic. So it seems like being anti-mask was not just a modern idea or a modern concept. So

• 17:41Speaker 02

  I think that's right. I think this, if you look back in US history, American history, this concept of health freedom goes back to the time of Benjamin Rush, you know, the founder of so many medical societies in Philadelphia. And

• 17:58Paul Mecurio?

  And you mentioned in your book, Doctor, that he actually, there's some evidence that he tried to have something written into the Constitution about this.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. And it goes back to the whole botanical movement.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul is showing off that he read your whole book.

• 18:12Paul Mecurio?

  I just read the one page and I'm happy to get lucky. I got lucky.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Well, I'm grateful as someone who's been accused of writing forgotten books by anyone who comes up to me and says, I read your book. They have my, they have my, they have my attention.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Waiting for the queue to mention that one content from the one page.

• 18:30Paul Mecurio?

  You're such a, oh, my God, I cannot believe that I work with you.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  So, yes, I think that that's, so this goes back. So there is that thread throughout history. I think the difference is the amplifying effect of social media, the amplifying or X or whatever you want to call it, and the amplifying effects on Fox News, that really revved it up. And so and people were monetizing disinformation. I think that that's what the game.

• 18:57Paul Mecurio?

  But isn't it, isn't it in a way a rigged game for you, for us who are trying to fight this anti-science cause? Because it's rigged in the sense that the only thing you can prove to make your point is science. And they go, well, we don't believe in science. So you can't use that one, right? Right? Think about it, right?

• 19:14Speaker 02

  I wish it were that simple because

• 19:15Paul Mecurio?

  It's a tautological argument and debating, right? It's like, there's no Santa Claus.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  But it's even more clever and sort of nefarious way than that. Because what they'll do is they will bring in their own experts.

• 19:27Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  These contrarian experts and And many of them are at are at serious medical schools, right?

• 19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Peter, Peter, these are your people.

• 19:35Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are your fellow M Ds who've been to medical school. They have patients who call them doctor. And so is it a matter of cleaning up your own house here? Just to put some blame back on you?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  It's a good question because, you know, they are professors and it's serious places like Stanford and UCSF and Hopkins and and, you know, I often ask my colleagues, why, why don't we do anything to rein this in? And they say, well, you have academic freedom. I said, that's true, but you also have something called professionalism and ethics, too. And if it's killing Americans, at what point do you say we shouldn't be doing this? And

• 20:19Paul Mecurio?

  Well, you say that in your book, too. See, I read more than one page. That in history shows that when academics and scientists tried to stay objective in the face of fascism and so forth, it was too late once they started to speak up. Right? But to answer to Neil's point, these are your people. I mean, politics knows no bounds, right? And sometimes politics and and being with a clique that believes in everything you believe in is more important than anything that's logical. And you talk about in the book that you need a clearinghouse for people to defend or an organization to defend scientists in these times where you're under attack. And my suggestion would be to get all the ex jocks in high school to defend the scientists going forward.

• 21:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 21:04Paul Mecurio?

  When the nerds got beat up in high school, the jocks would defend them.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  This is so this is what we're seeing now play out in the House COVID Subcommittee hearings. You know, after I've come out and said, look, 200,000 Americans needlessly died because of this disinformation war that you waged. Now there's this revisionist history going on. They want to say, no, no, it was the vaccines that actually killed Americans. Absolute nonsense. Or they want to say it was the scientists who invented the virus. It's and it's this rewriting of of history and and not only targeting the science, but um, but but targeting the the scientists as well. And and it's so damaging for the for the country. And I think it jeopardizes all of our future scientific infrastructure.

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Peter, before we go to our questions, and Paul, you got all the questions lined up?

• 21:59Paul Mecurio?

  I do, yes.

• 21:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do? Okay, thanks for being on the ready for that. My rebuttal to the pedigree person on a YouTube saying that everybody else is wrong is to say, rebuttal is not the right word. My response is if a person opens up a YouTube channel, no matter what their pedigree is, and they say, "The establishment wants you to think this, but they're all wrong. I have the truth, and I'm on your side." There is no greater foundation for suspicion than that, because that is irresistible clickbait,

• 22:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and it means someone is not... And then, what people have been doing is giving mainstream... Even the very concept of mainstream has been thrown into question by those who are anti-science, saying, "Well, the mainstream, they all have monothink, and they don't know the real..." This is the real cure for that, not what mainstream thinks.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. In fact, my similar rule of thumb is when someone has to tell you they're a critical thinker, head for the hills.

• 23:08Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  They're anything but.

• 23:10Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  And what's interesting is, you know, what they'll do, again, very clever in a nefarious sort of way, is they'll say, "Well, we're just asking questions. Who is this Hotz guy who's being so dogmatic?" You know, "That's not science. We're just asking questions." So you have to really be on your game and be very, you know, really...

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, I tell them, someone with a YouTube channel will be more charismatic than the statistical results of multiple peer-reviewed studies that has no face, okay?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if they have no accountability, to be honest, then, you know, that's another handicap.

• 23:48Paul Mecurio?

  If you can't condense a 50-page thoughtful analysis to 180 characters on Twitter, no one's going to read it. That's a problem, right? So it's like, but like...

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, it used to be 140 characters, now it's 280.

• 24:02Paul Mecurio?

  280, there you go.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So don't reveal how unplugged in you are, okay? In front of my audience.

• 24:08Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly, okay. It's called X, by the way, Paul, not Twitter.

• 24:13Paul Mecurio?

  And I heard there's this thing called Google that everybody's really excited about.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, let's get to the questions.

• 24:19Paul Mecurio?

  Sure, okay.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jump right in, these are from our fanbase and.

• 24:24Paul Mecurio?

  This is, here we go.

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We love them because they're all scientifically literate and they're thoughtful, so give them to me.

• 24:33Paul Mecurio?

  Good afternoon, gentlemen. My name is Frank Lewis from Daytona Beach, Florida. What is the strangest conspiracy theories you've come across?

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Boy, there's so many good ones to pick from.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  I'll give you a couple of my favorite. My absolute favorite one is claims that I'm not a real person. That I'm actually Jack Black being paid by the CIA.

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a disguise?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Anyway, so, yeah, Jack Black's a good-looking guy. I'm okay with that.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  That's one of my favorite. And then, you know, the best is when, you know, they say the vaccines are magnetizing them. And, you know, we had one individual, you know, testify in front of the high legislature sticking bobby pins and keys on her forehead. And then claiming that they're sticking to her because she was magnetized by the vaccines. And of course, total theater of the absurd, they fell right off again. So, but, you know, what's interesting is the more outrageous the assertion, the more viral it seems to go.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Peter, because I got to deal with people who think Earth is flat. That's a whole other thing. And, but at least they don't, well, I was gonna say.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  They're not gonna kill anyone, saying.

• 25:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except, there was a guy who put himself in his own, a rocket of his own design to go up high enough to show that Earth was flat. And the rocket misfired and he died. Okay.

• 26:04Paul Mecurio?

  And by rocket, he means a washing machine with wings. That's what he means.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there's at least one fatality from that movement, but okay. So go on, Paul, give me another.

• 26:15Paul Mecurio?

  Matt from LA, greetings all. Of course, it's super important to fight anti-science efforts, but there must also be some room within science for ideas that come from non-scientists. Currently, any non-credited theorist is treated as a crank, no matter how good the idea. Is there some way to create a peer-reviewed pipeline for ideas to come in from other disciplines?

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, or from non-experts?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Well, we do have, Neil, you've been a good promoter of this. We do have citizen science, right? We do have, I think scientists are all in in terms of the public engagement. I don't think that that's necessarily true. I think we do solicit input. But when you have people that are weaponizing the science communication, you see that they have an agenda, that's something very different.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I would add that when people, it's one thing for people to say, "I saw something in this map of the Martian surface that's on a NASA website that no one has talked about." You know, this is crowdsourcing the analysis of information, and that can have value. But when someone says, "I think Einstein is wrong, that E equals actually equals mc cubed instead of mc squared."

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I spent seven years in graduate school studying all the work that has come before me to know what works and what doesn't, and why. And so to spend a couple hours on YouTube and come up with an idea without the homework behind that, it becomes frustrating to we in the professional community because you didn't do your homework, all right? And you end up in that valley, what's it called, where you, the Dunning-Kruger effect, knowing enough to think you're right, but knowing not enough. To know that you're wrong.

• 28:16Paul Mecurio?

  Okay. Oh, then I really, I really have that. I have that in space.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you, and you see this a lot with the, some of the lead anti-vaccine activists who really don't understand the science. And you even see it, I see it a lot now with some of the contrarian intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals even have medical degrees. If you notice, they're not, they don't have any expertise in infectious diseases, virology or vaccine. They usually come from other fields such as-

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other fields within the medical world.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're surgeons, or they're radiologists, or they're, you know, something else. And then they, they overreach.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but then their argument will be, you all have group think, and I'm coming from the outsides, I have a fresh view. That's very tempting as clickbait for someone. So, so, yeah, I mean, these are, these are persistent challenges here that, yeah, we're still at it.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then when you start sounding too dogmatic, they've even come up with a new term, Neil, maybe you've heard this as well. They call, they say, I'm practicing scientism.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scientism.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  It's kind of like a fusion of religion and science. And it's all BS, but, but again, it's superficially, it's science.

• 29:30Paul Mecurio?

  But it's hard to push back on the religion front, right? I mean, like, because then when people start pulling their religious beliefs in, that's a kind of a sacred sort of place to be. And it puts the people on the right side of this argument in a tougher position. I mean, Jehovah's Witnesses, right, Christian Scientist, Jehovah Witnesses don't believe very much in modern medicine, which is ironic, because they're constantly getting broken noses by having doors slammed in their face.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Right, but on the other hand-

• 29:57Paul Mecurio?

  If anybody needs modern medicine, they do.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Those who are, the ones though, that are causing the damage are those that are, you know, if you look, they're selling their Substack, they're selling their nutritional supplements.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  They have, they have a pretty lucrative business going, or it's all about political control.

• 30:15Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, and that was all helped by Senator, by Ron Paul's sort of passing of that legislation, as you point out in the book, that opened up that whole idea of supplements. And Neil, if you read the book, you would know that. But anyway. Cicero Artifon, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, from Toronto, Canada. How can society establish rules informed by scientific evidence while respecting freedom of speech and avoiding endorsing scientifically debunked ideas?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's probably the single most important question. And I spent a lot of time in the book giving one of the longest, I don't know the answer to your question, answers in modern histories. How do you do that balance, I think, is really one of the challenges. I mean, you know, how do you regulate Fox News not to weaponize health and science communication? How do you control Elon Musk not inviting all of the terrible people who are causing health disinformation damage?

• 31:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Peter, you and I might be approximately the same age, so we would remember the evening news, go back many, many decades, the 60s and 70s, the evening local news, at the end, would have a special carve-out where the editors or the producers would give an opinion on some topic of the day. And it would be specially carved out, "Coming up, we will have an opinion." Okay? And then there'd be a commercial break, "We now offer an opinion." And for two minutes, they would endorse a candidate, or they would give an opinion on something. Now, of course, you don't see that firewall between the delivery of news and the delivery of opinion.

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I thought to myself, one way to shore that up in Fox News or other platforms that similarly blend their opinion with reported news, MSNBC does that as well.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is if they just had a flashing thing at the top, news and then opinion. So at any given instant, you would know whether they were just giving opinion.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Well, I would actually try to do that when I was on back when I was in the cable news channels a lot during the pandemic, I would say, okay, here's what we know and here's my opinion. And I and people like that. I mean, people, you know, really appreciated that, I thought. But

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so more of that on all fronts would work.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  That's the exception. But on the other hand, doing it that way apparently is not good for TV ratings or for followers on Twitter. So

• 33:03Paul Mecurio?

  You're right. And you would think you would know that, Jack Black. You would think you would know that, given that you're in the entertainment business that Jack Black would

• 33:11Speaker 02

  I should have gotten best supporting actor on for Orange County. I'm just, no, no, he should have gotten best supporting actor.

• 33:18Paul Mecurio?

  I thought you were brilliant. When I, when I found out that I was going to call this a show, the first thing I said to my wife is, I'm going to be on with the guy from Jumanji. That's what I said. And turns out I was right.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep going.

• 33:46Paul Mecurio?

  Another one. Here we go. This is Paula Patsova from Slovakia. My family embraces conspiracy theories, including concerns about 5G and microchips and vaccines. My mom even got anxious during my recent COVID vaccine. As an aspiring scientist, it saddens and frustrates me. How can I discuss vaccines or any scientific topic with them without causing immediate argument?

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Peter, what do you do at Thanksgiving dinner when relatives come over?

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Well, it's gotten harder.

• 34:21Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, the bottle of wine. Bottle of wine.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  I mean, it's gotten more difficult. You know, in the past, you know, you could talk to a parent, you know, who was reluctant about vaccinating their kid and say, look, here's what measles does, here's what pertussis does, this is why it's a leading killer of children globally, and here's how the vaccines work. And nine times out of 10, they would agree to vaccinate their child. Now it's far more difficult because they've tied their political allegiance or their identity to not getting a vaccine. And so how do you, it's not enough simply to provide accurate information. You have to do that, of course, but it's not sufficient.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  So it means trying to really get them to communicate values to them, try to, and first of all, the first thing I also say is remember, these individuals are victims. They are victims of a predatory, well-organized, well-financed disinformation campaign that's politically and financially motivated. And that helps too, because otherwise you can get so frustrated and angry and remember. So you have to look upon them oftentimes with sympathy. You know, one of the analogies that I use, not long ago, I gave medical grand rounds at University of Texas Tyler, which is a very conservative area, East Texas, where

• 35:47Speaker 02

  a lot of, really a lot of anti-vaccine sentiments. And, you know, everyone you talked to when I was there has lost a loved one because they refused the COVID vaccine. These were, you know, these are extraordinary people. Although, two weeks later, I gave grand rounds at Stanford Medical School, and I said, look, if my heart broke and I had a flat tire, you gave me the choice of... My car breaking out of Palo Alto, California, or Tyler, Texas, I'd pick Tyler every time because in Tyler, everybody be fighting over who's gonna help you change your tire, right? And you see, these are extraordinary people who are are being victimized or targeted by these predators.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't there a subspecies of rose called the Tyler rose? Am I remembering this correctly? Somewhere in Texas, there's a tight, a small version of a rose, I think it was in Tyler.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Well, you've spent time in Texas, Neil.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did, yeah. I had my wife in Texas, yeah.

• 36:39Paul Mecurio?

  Isn't there something deeper that has to be addressed, which is, it just feels to me like whether it's the issue of guns, or abortion, or vaccines, or whatever, something happened that maybe was always there in our society where people just needed to find something to band together with other like minds regardless of the logic of what they believe, or why they believe it.

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are tribal forces.

• 37:02Paul Mecurio?

  And if you don't address that, none of this will ever really go away. It'll be, okay, today, today we're talking about science, but then, you know, in, in, in 10, in 10 months, we'll be talking about some other sort of manipulation of facts and so forth, just to continue to satiate those feelings.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so the way, the way I do it, and maybe this is not right, but rather than do that, which is far more daunting, I would basically, I say, look, you know, if you wanna believe your QAnon theories and all this other kind of craziness, again, your business, but here's, but don't adopt this one. Somehow, we've got to uncouple.

• 37:40Paul Mecurio?

  Chisel away.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Anti-science because of the immediate health impact and the urgency for this.

• 37:45Paul Mecurio?

  You say it's too daunting.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  I'm not sure that's necessarily the right approach. Maybe yours makes, makes more sense, but it's much more challenging.

• 37:52Paul Mecurio?

  It sounds like you're taking the lazy man's approach, but good for you, you know, that's what you want to do, and let society destroy itself.

• 37:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let society figure it out.

• 37:59Paul Mecurio?

  You know, well, you're Jack Black, what do you care? You have another movie coming out. Uh, all right, we want to move on to another one? Okay, here we go. Jared writes, hello, brainiacs, you attribute the internet to a rise in anti-scientific beliefs? Or do you think it has just exposed a percentage of people that have always felt this way? Ooh.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  I think it's, first of all, I don't blame only the internet, right? Fox News is not a product of the internet. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling people like me medical brown shirts is not an internet. Jim Jordan weaponizing health and science communication. And so people quickly want to jump on Twitter or X and blame Elon Musk. And sure, he's not helping, but that's only one piece of this. The ecosystem is much broader than simply the social media and the internet.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  And that's what makes it so daunting, is that it is pervasive now and it affects every aspect of society. Anti-science is its own empire, its own ecosystem. And even though it started in the United States, and I make the case that it started in Texas, it's now, we're seeing it move up into Canada with the Freedom Convoy, it's in Central Europe, and now you're starting to see it contaminate low and middle income countries and places that we haven't seen it.

• 39:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I would say while the internet didn't create it, the internet can magnify what's out there. But also, there was a day where you'd have a crazy idea and you were pretty sure you were correct, but you were alone. And now you'd search on that crazy idea, and every other person in the world with that crazy idea shows up, and you get on their chat group, and this validates your ideas when you have the...

• 39:57Speaker 02

  It changes the way our communities have changed. Neil, my dad's from the Bronx also, went to DeWitt Clinton High School and...

• 40:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's across the park from the Bronx High School of Science.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'd always beat up our people for their lunch money.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so you know. Not me, but others got their lunch money taken.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  And City College, the whole New York thing. But you know, back then, you went to service clubs at night. You went to Kiwanis Club, or Rotary, or you went to...

• 40:25Paul Mecurio?

  Nights at Columbus, yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  You know, um, and, and, and if somebody had a nutty idea, he had three friends sitting around drinking coffee or having a beer and saying, this guy, you're, what are you talking about? That makes no, but you don't have that immediate feedback anymore. So we're not, we don't go bowling together.

• 40:44Paul Mecurio?

  We had a guy like that in our neighborhood. We called him Crazy Jack and he had these theories and it was the only guy and he just walked around the neighborhood and he would like pontificate and it was, oh, that's just Crazy Jack.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  And now Crazy Jack's on the internet.

• 40:54Paul Mecurio?

  And, and, yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  He's found 23,000 friends.

• 40:58Paul Mecurio?

  Right. Crazy Jack is now a social media influencer with a deal, with a six-figure deal with Armani.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I have the official website for Shot in the Arm, it's shotinthearmovie.com and you can learn all about it. And like I said, our esteemed guest today is, is importantly featured in that film with regard to his lifetime work on vaccines as well as, um, opening up his own family situation with regard to your daughter, Rachel. And you said something very important there, Peter, that I don't think can be overemphasized. Could you comment for us, the way you did in Shot in the Arm, the movie, um, how your

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  concern where people have demonized autism, where autism is sort of, has, is a natural part of people's existence and they become pariahs because of what others have said and done about it. Could you encapsulate that way better than I just did for me?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the way the anti-vaccine groups frame people, um, uh, with autism, um, as though, you're exactly right, as though there are lepers in the community that, you know, we need to be extricated. And, and, you know, it's extremely offensive, particularly those who are... Helping to educate people on this concept of neurodiversity. And, you know, people who have, you know, very productive and interesting lives. And even though they don't always think and speak the same way that we do. And so that's extremely hurtful as well.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  And this kind of gets back to some very twisted ideas that come out of the health and wellness industry.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  About what health and wellness is all about. It's a very restricted paradigm that unfortunately doesn't help anybody.

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Thanks for mentioning that. Paul, we have time for one or two more questions.

• 43:14Paul Mecurio?

  Sure. Here we go. Jason Dorkson, are you ever tempted to just give up explaining science to people who just don't want to hear it?

• 43:26Paul Mecurio?

  Well, it's kind of become...

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We asked that. Peter, what would it take to have you give up?

• 43:34Paul Mecurio?

  What would it take for you to open a lemonade stand and just say you're done with all of it?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Well, they tried to create this fund for me to so-called debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which I refused to do. So they, you know, I don't know what the final dollar amount got to be.

• 43:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are you hiding? What are you afraid of? You're afraid of him.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Right. It's just, you know, we can have a whole discussion about that. But the point is, even though it gets scary at times, especially when you have to have the Houston Police Department parked out in front of your house, you know, guarding the house. And you have to have the FBI called in because of threats. It's not fun. But on the other hand, I do find it meaningful. And I think the threat to our system of vaccines and vaccinations, both in the US and globally, is so profound.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  That now, calling myself a vaccine scientist, yes, it's great, I'm making vaccines for the world, COVID and hook or vaccines, etc. But now, part of the deal is you have to defend vaccines. And even though it's unpleasant at times, I do find it meaningful. And during the day, you know, talking to amazing people like you, it's, you know, you're in the mix, you're feeling great. Although at night, you start waking up in the middle of the night, it does get pretty scary, you know, with all of the online and in-person stalking, online threats and in-person stalking.

• 45:02Paul Mecurio?

  There's always having a tire business where you just clean up tires in different lots, and you just do that.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  And I promise you, it'll do a lot of good.

• 45:10Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  I have a paper that just came out in the England Journal of Medicine about yellow fever returning to Texas and the Gulf Coast.

• 45:18Paul Mecurio?

  So it's a feel-good story. Okay, good.

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One more question.

• 45:23Paul Mecurio?

  Tassos suris, a Greek here, he says, can each of you tell which anti-science movement is most shocking to you regarding how far from the truth and atrocious it is? A great candidate for me is the Flat Earth movement.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, Flat Earth's a good one. I would say the anti-vaccine conspiracies are perhaps the most damaging, because there it's depriving people of essential public health interventions. And so when the weaponization actually affects human life, that to me is when it becomes more than just a curiosity and actually dangerous. And again, it's not only targeting the science, it's targeting the scientists portraying us as public enemies or enemies of the state. I mean, this is what Stalin did in 1930s, right? To, you know, he replaced the Mendelian

• 46:22Speaker 02

  geneticists of Avril off with Lysenko and destroyed the Russian wheat crop, and billions died. And this is what's happening again. And for it to happen in the United States...

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To be clear, so Lysenko, for those who missed that chapter in their world history, Lysenko had a discredited...

• 46:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Understanding of genetics, but that that discredited understanding matched the political philosophies of the leaders. And so it was cherry picked for that reason, not for whether or not it was true. And it had disastrous consequences on the on the on the crops and the populations that it could support at the time. A million, I think millions died. Is that right?

• 47:13Speaker 02

  That's right. So and it's happening again. And and I worry that it's affecting our whole scientific infrastructure. As I sometimes say, you know, we're a nation of great research universities and institutions. Neil, you you studied at Harvard and Columbia. I started studying at Yale and Cornell and Rockefeller. And and this is this built our nation. We're a nation of research institutions and universities. It gave us the Manhattan Project, and it gave us Silicon Valley and NASA. And and by trying to tear it down, I think it makes us much weaker as a country. And so I do worry at the long term consequences.

• 47:52Paul Mecurio?

  You have a really great term for this from your podcast. It's called the upside down world of authoritarianism. But those trying to save our those trying to save our lives become the ones you're supposed to eliminate. And it goes back in history, as you point out, you do a great job in the book of sort of tracing it back.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 48:11Paul Mecurio?

  There's a lot of that I did not realize, but you see it, which scared me because it's 300 years. It doesn't I don't think it ever goes away, right? This just this through line continues. And it's always a fight. It's always going to be this fight.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Well, and this is why, you know, Paul and Neil, what you're doing is so important, right? I mean, anything that gets people interested in science and helps people understand science. This is there's there's never been a more important time for what you're doing.

• 48:41Paul Mecurio?

  I think it's more of what I'm doing, not so much what he does.

• 48:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul is by far way.

• 48:49Paul Mecurio?

  Right, exactly. I had to look up so many words because of this interview. I got a headache. Thanks a lot, Doc.

• 48:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me try to leave this on a positive note rather than the helpless note that that has drenched us throughout this conversation.

• 49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We spoke just a moment ago about how exasperating it can be. When I hit that wall, I think to myself, the lines from this, the musical, the Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, there's a song in there that we all know and we've heard it, but I don't know how much you've carefully listened to the words. The title of the song is "To Dream the Impossible Dream", and we all know the song. Well, where does it come from? Well, Don Quixote, Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote is from La Mancha, and he's tilting at windmills, right? He wants to have this jousting contest with a windmill, which doesn't make any sense. Like, why would you do that?

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you did do it, why do you think you would win? Right? So it's the weird quest to accomplish something that's not only not realistic, but probably impossible. To dream the impossible dream, if you look at the lines of that, there, I reference those lines when I wake up in the morning, when I otherwise would feel hopeless. And my favorite one is "To march into hell with a heavenly cause",

• 50:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and I say, "That's what we got to do."

• 50:22Paul Mecurio?

  And I just want to say for everybody watching, I think we're all concerned that he was actually gonna start singing and that was gonna be, wow, that would have been a terrible way to end this.

• 50:34Paul Mecurio?

  When I feel hopeless, by the way, I think of the lyrics from SpongeBob SquarePants song. That just gets me focused and ready to go.

• 50:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, no, his one is "On a beautiful day", right? He's got a really good one.

• 50:45Paul Mecurio?

  He does, actually, yeah.

• 50:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's it called?

• 50:48Paul Mecurio?

  I can't remember.

• 50:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "It's a beautiful day",

• 50:50Speaker 02

  No, but Neil, I think, you know, and Paul, you bring up good points in the sense that not so much SpongeBob, which, as much as I like SpongeBob,

• 51:00Speaker 02

  but the idea is that one of the reasons that we became scientists, right, is we wanted to do big things, right? We wanted to make the world a better place. And even though most scientists don't speak about...

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Humanity and humanitarian goals. I think that's true for most scientists, even though they don't articulate that. And we have to get people to remember this. And the other reason why what you do is so important is being able to see a face to the scientists. And I think, you know, part of that has been the problem of our profession. We're so inward looking, we're so focused, you know, in my case, on our grants and papers and lab meetings, that we don't think about public engagement as being important. And so we've become invisible to the American people. And, and that's created a vacuum. And in this vacuum, you have all these anti-science movements that are, that want to tell the American people what we're all about, which is nothing even close to reality.

• 51:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa. There it is, right there. Peter, your books, we're gonna be looking for them. Apparently, Paul has already read them all. But it's

• 52:12Paul Mecurio?

  I'll, I'll explain them to you, Neil, later.

• 52:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases, The Neglected Tropical Diseases and Their Impact on Global Health and Development. You've got Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, Your Daughter, and more recently, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist's Warning. Peter Hotez, it's been a delight to host you for this. I'd seen you for so many clips on Shot in the Arm Movie. A delight to actually speak to you in person. So thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Thanks, Neil. I've admired your work for years. It's a thrill for me to be able to be on this podcast.

• 52:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Paul, always good to have you, man.

• 52:52Paul Mecurio?

  Always fun and great to meet you.

• 52:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the name of your podcast, Paul, is I'm Not Paul, or something?

• 52:57Paul Mecurio?

  I'm Not Neil. Oh, no. It's Inside Out with Paul Mecurio. You're on it. Paul McCartney, Kevin Costner, a whole bunch of really fun interviews. And, yeah, yeah, I like to talk to people about their process. And maybe someday I'll get you on, doctor. It would be great to talk to you. But, um, and also, I'm gonna be on tour with my Broadway show, Permission to Speak, and my stand-up as well. So people can go to paulmccurio.com and check out where I'm gonna be. And come out and buy a ticket. My son needs shoes.

• 53:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition, all about basically public health with our featured guest, Dr. Peter Hotez. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.