Online trolls take anti-vaxx hate speech to a new level, attacking Houston’s Dr. Peter Hotez
The website Natural News, which promotes false conspiracy theories about 5G and Bill Gates, posted a story about Hotez at the top of its website. “Echoing the fascism of genocidal maniacs like Hitler and Stalin,” it said, “Peter Hotez displays his own brand of insanity by equating vaccine skeptics with cyber criminals and nuclear terrorism.”
The author, Mike Adams, called on his followers to “pray for this sad monster of a man” to “seek forgiveness for the crimes against humanity being committed by whatever twisted, dark soul currently occupies his once-human body.” The story included Hotez’s contact information.
On Twitter Thursday night, Hotez posted, “Today was rough, more than most.”
Natural News’ followers, he wrote, had sent messages evoking Nazism, “comparing me to Mengele, sending image after image of Nuremberg.” Hotez posted a sample image sent to him: The 1946 photo shows a Nazi about to be hanged for the commission of war crimes.
Hotez is Jewish.
In 2020, Facebook banned Natural News for publishing coronavirus disinformation created by content farms from North Macedonia and the Philippines. Facebook said it found that foreign trolls then posted Natural News’ content in an effort to artificially inflate their reach.
Since the publication of his 2018 book “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism” — partly a memoir about his daughter — Hotez has been a focus of anti-vaccine protests and death threats. In November 2019, during an infectious disease conference in New York, anti-vaxx protesters surrounded him, and hotel security had to whisk him out of the hotel.
Hotez’s long battle against anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists kicked into high gear during the COVID pandemic. In January, in the journal PLOS Biology, he warned scientists to beware “an anti-science confederacy” composed of U.S. “medical freedom” initiatives, Russian disinformation and far-right extremist groups in Western Europe.
It was time, he asserted in that essay, for scientists to take a stand. “Our messages too often are messages in bottles floating in an ocean of disinformation,” he wrote. “We need to address the ocean.”
lisa.gray@chron.com
More coronavirus news
