Sunday, August 9, 2026
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
It's All For A Reason: Netanyahu hopes to 'taper' Israel off US military aid in next decade
By Reuters
JERUSALEM, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to "taper off" Israeli dependence on U.S. military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
"I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years," Netanyahu told the Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering "down to zero," he said: "Yes."
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel "very deeply" appreciates "the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we've come of age and we've developed incredible capacities."
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the U.S. and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defence systems.
Israeli defence exports rose 13% last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defence technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defence systems.
U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that "we need not wait ten years" to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
"The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the U.S. military," Graham said. "I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable." [SOURCE]
Sunday, August 2, 2026
REALITY CHECK: How Owned Are We?_The 2027 NDAA provision deepens Israel's access to our military-industrial complex
Published Jun 3, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT
https://www.military.com/topics/national-defense-authorization-act-ndaa
2027 NDAA Provision Seeks Sweeping US-Israel Defense Tech Integration
Critics warn that Section 224 could deepen both countries' military ties, which may be difficult to reverse.
A provision tucked into the House Armed Services Committee’s draft version of the Fiscal Year 2027 defense policy bill could move the U.S.-Israel military relationship beyond traditional aid and into a far deeper form of defense-industrial integration.
Section 224 of the drafted National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” would require the defense secretary to designate an executive agent to coordinate U.S.-Israel defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration and industrial cooperation. It specifically describes the provision as covering bilateral defense technology work, integration and industrial cooperation.
Supporters view the proposal as a way to strengthen cooperation between two longtime security partners while critics argue it would move the relationship beyond traditional military aid and into a far deeper system of defense-industrial integration that would be harder for Congress, taxpayers, and even future administrations, to monitor or unwind. The U.S. and Israel jointly struck Iran on Feb. 28, leading to the ongoing war in the Middle East that has enveloped multiple nations.
Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, warned in Responsible Statecraft that “Congress quietly moves to integrate US and Israeli militaries," adding that the measure could intertwine the two countries’ military sectors at a level not previously seen in any U.S. allyship.
Freeman told Military.com that the provision reaches across “seemingly every area of defense tech,” including artificial intelligence, quantum technology, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber and biotechnology. He said the most alarming terms were “network integration” and “data fusion,” since the bill does not clearly define them.
Ben Freeman is director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute.
The proposal also arrives as senior American and Israeli officials increasingly discuss moving beyond the traditional aid framework. On June 1, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee wrote on X that a future U.S.-Israel security agreement would move away from direct aid, stating, “New MOU w/ Israel ends aid & will be based on trade.”
The statement echoed previous comments from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials advocating a gradual transition away from direct military assistance and toward joint projects and defense cooperation.
Freeman argues that this shift is not simply a change in accounting. It represents a fundamental change in how the relationship operates.
'Sky is the Limit'
The United States and Israel currently operate under a 10-year memorandum of understanding that runs from fiscal 2019 through FY 2028 and provides $3.3 billion per year in foreign military financing, plus $500 million per year for missile defense cooperation.
That aid model has long been controversial, but it is at least visible. Congress can debate it, lawmakers can try to condition it, and the public can understand the top-line number.
Freeman argued that Section 224 points toward something different: Moving support out of the foreign-aid framework and into Pentagon procurement, licensing, co-production and research channels.
That shift matches a broader debate described by Steven Simon in a Quincy Institute brief, “The Disappearing Aid Check,” which argues ending traditional grant aid would not necessarily end U.S. support for Israel’s military. Instead, support could move into procurement contracts, joint development programs, sustainment pipelines and industrial-based investments.
Reserve and Guard leaders speak with 25 HASC staff members to outline readiness challenges and legislative priorities, aiming to inform work on the upcoming national defense bill at the Rayburn House Office Building. (DVIDS)
Freeman said that matters because the new model would be harder for ordinary Americans to see or influence. Aid is capped by a memorandum of understanding and publicly appropriated, but procurement and industrial cooperation can expand through numerous contracts, programs and partnerships spread across different parts of the Defense Department.
Under the aid model, he said, a voter who objects to Israeli military actions can call a member of Congress and demand a vote against aid. But under the procurement model, “You have no one to call."
"You basically have to call up the Department of Defense and say, ‘Hello, Pete Hegseth, please stop doing business with Israel,'" he said.
The transparency concern is sharpened by the Pentagon’s own accounting problems. The Defense Department completed its seventh consecutive department-wide financial statement audit in 2024 without receiving a clean opinion, while stating that it aims to achieve an unmodified audit opinion by the end of 2028.
Freeman said that if U.S. support for Israel is spread across contracts, data-sharing arrangements, licensing agreements and joint ventures, “There is no upper bound for the level of cooperation here."
“The sky is the limit," he said. "It would be all but impossible to come up with a full estimate of exactly how much U.S. money is going to Israel.”
Data Fusion and Intelligence Risks
Perhaps the most controversial language in Section 224 involves “network integration” and “data fusion.” The legislation does not clearly define either term. Freeman said that ambiguity is exactly what concerns him.
“I take it as meaning the U.S. military's data could soon be the Israeli military's data,” he said, adding that his concern is rooted in previous disputes over technology-sharing.
In 2020, the U.S. Army acquired two Israeli-made Iron Dome batteries. However, Army officials later concluded that the system could not be fully integrated into the Army's broader air and missile defense architecture.
After providing the equipment, Israel was unwilling to provide source code and technical information necessary for full integration. The Army ultimately decided not to pursue additional Iron Dome purchases.
To Freeman, that history raises an obvious question. If Israel previously resisted sharing critical technical information with the United States, what guarantees exist that future data-sharing arrangements would be fully reciprocal?
The Jobs Trap
Freeman believes the most politically significant aspect of Section 224 may have nothing to do with technology. Instead, he points to jobs.
Section 224 could encourage Israeli-linked defense firms to expand co-production facilities, joint ventures and manufacturing work inside the United States. Once those jobs exist, they become political assets.
Freeman called that possibility “the real Trojan horse” in the proposal. He argued that Israeli firms could replicate the familiar American defense-industry strategy of spreading production across congressional districts, making lawmakers reluctant to oppose programs that support local employment.
Former Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 2020 Conference, Monday, March 2, 2020 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The F-35 program offers the clearest example of how that works. Lockheed Martin spread suppliers and jobs across dozens of states, helping create political support that makes the program extraordinarily difficult to cancel.
Freeman compared that dynamic to what could happen if Israeli defense firms build deeper U.S. manufacturing footprints.
“They would put that on top of what is already, arguably, the most powerful special interest in all of U.S. politics,” he said. “It would put the Israel lobby on steroids.”
The issue is not hypothetical. Recent reporting has already identified Israeli-linked defense manufacturing and drone production inside the United States, including facilities connected to companies such as XTEND.
Hard to Unwind
Freeman points to Turkey's removal from the F-35 program as an example of how difficult defense-industrial disentanglement can be.
After Ankara was expelled from the program over its purchase of Russia's S-400 air defense system, the Pentagon spent years shifting production away from Turkish suppliers that had been manufacturing hundreds of F-35 components. The transition required finding and qualifying replacement suppliers, restructuring portions of the supply chain, and absorbing additional costs before Turkey could be fully removed from the program.
That was one program. Section 224 would potentially touch multiple domains at once.
Freeman argued that if Israel later took actions that caused Washington to reconsider the relationship, disentangling the two defense sectors could take years and create real national security costs.
A Dangerous Time to Integrate
Recent Middle East diplomacy shows why deeper integration is risky.
President Donald Trump said Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to reduce hostilities, but Netanyahu said Israel would continue “to operate as planned” in southern Lebanon unless Hezbollah stopped its attacks. Trump reportedly lashed out at Netanyahu, calling him "crazy," according to Axios.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a ceremony commemorating Israel's Remembrance Day for fallen soldiers, or Yom HaZikaron, at the Military Cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, Tuesday April 21, 2026. (Ilia Yefimovich/Pool Photo via AP)
Iran then halted communications with mediators, according to Iranian reports, while Trump said talks were continuing.
To Freeman, the episode proves that U.S. and Israeli interests are not always compatible.
“Netanyahu is proving right now that Israel’s interests are not always America’s interests,” he said. “Trump is trying to negotiate an end to this conflict, and Netanyahu—over and over again—is doing things that violate the ceasefires and make ending the conflict impossible.”
A Shift in Public Opinion
That concern comes as public opinion has shifted sharply on Israel.
Gallup reported in February 2026 that Israelis no longer lead Palestinians in Americans’ sympathies, with independent-leaning voters now sympathizing more with Palestinians than Israelis.
In May 2026, an Institute for Global Affairs poll found that only 16% of Americans want the United States to keep supplying Israel with weapons without new restrictions, while 38% want weapons transfers stopped entirely and 24% want them conditioned on how they are used. Among Republicans, 35% back unrestricted supply, 29% want conditions, and 18% want to halt supply entirely.
On the other hand, some lawmakers have pushed institutional links beyond procurement. In 2024, H.R. 8445 proposed extending certain protections under federal law to U.S. citizens serving in the Israel Defense Forces.
Freeman said he has seen bipartisan concern about Section 224, including interest from figures on the right and left.
His plea to Congress was direct: “The American people don’t want it. Listen to your constituents, not your lobbyists. Strip out Section 224 from the NDAA.” [SOURCE]
Thursday, July 30, 2026
ANN COULTER: The Princess Diaries of Anthony Fauci
The Princess Diaries of Anthony Fauci
I thought of various clever-seeming ways to organize this cornucopia of quotes from the diary of former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci. But that would mean cutting some of these gems. So here they are, in ascending order of embarrassing awfulness.
1. Anthony Fauci on Anthony Fauci:
— “Apparently, a lot of people at the Pentagon admire me very much …”
— “The nurses went absolutely wild to see me, they were squealing and laughing and clapping. It was something to behold.”
— “Did I mention he’s easy on the eyes?” — Fauci, quoting The Anthony Fauci Fan Club Twitter account (which he does at length).
2. If the Real Housewives had a baby with George Santos, it would be Anthony Fauci.
— “A Gala event was held tonight… It was the highest level of AAA list you could imagine in Washington DC.”
— “One person said that Tyra [Banks] was sexy, but I was even more
sexy than she was. She [said] ‘that is true and my mother is in love
with you.’ Zing 
”
— “I am such a valued spokesperson and a good communicator…”
— “Wonderful brunch… the typical Washington A list was there.”
3. His obvious humble brags. All this adoration is ridiculous!
— “The ridiculous attention to me continues; fan clubs, Swags, am constantly on TV; countless profiles of me.”
— “Many print profiles and features on me. Ridiculous—too numerous to count!” (Kind of like those myocarditis deaths.)
— “A photographer from across the landscape shot me and focused on my polkadot socks. It got tweeted around the country. ‘Birx has her scarfs and Fauci has his socks.’ Geeeez.” (It must be very exciting to be tweeted all around the country.)
— “The ‘swag’ around me is getting really ridiculous. You can buy Fauci T-shirts, mugs, donuts, sweat shirts, candles, pillows, etc. Geeeez!! I do not like this one bit.”
— “Continued crazy stuff: Petition to name me ‘Sexiest Man Alive’; video games named after me; Fauci Bobblehead; dishes in restaurants named after me, and on and on.”
(If you’re going for merch, how about autographed Anthony Fauci coffins?)
4. He’s disturbingly impressed with celebrities.
— “[Julia Roberts] embarrassed me somewhat when… she put her hands in front of her mouth and said ‘Oh my God. It’s Dr. Fauci, he is here.’ Then she went on to say that I was her personal hero…”
— “Joan Baez texted me tonight asking me about what she should wear for the State Department dinner…”
— “There was a wonderful series of testimonials to me from an amazing group of people: Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Francis Ford Coppola … Maria Tomei…”
— “Noteworthy is the fact that I had an extraordinary podcast interview for one hour with famous actor Alec Baldwin.”
— “It was a star-studded evening and I had pleasant conversations with people some of whom I had met before such as Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, Matt Damon, Mike Ferrone, among many others.”
5. He was more interested in Fauci bobbleheads and Fauci donuts than the number of elderly people dying alone in hospitals.
— “Bobblehead raising money: Fauci bobblehead raises $100,000 for American Hospital Association.”
— “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China.”
— “Fauci Bobblehead Raises $200k for Healthcare Workers”
— “Spoke with Robyn Ross of the Washington Post Magazine. She is writing a piece on my Bobblehead” (And get this: they’re all made by pangolins!)
He writes about the Fauci donuts eight times in his diary—or eight times more than he mentioned Sweden. (From the beginning of the pandemic, Sweden imposed no lockdowns, advised citizens against wearing masks and had less excess mortality than the U.S.)
6. He’s obsessed with how famous he is, boasting about his fame dozens of times.
— “I was beset by a horde of at least 20 paparazzi who followed me … walking backwards surrounding me and flashing lights that blinded me.”
— “The problem is that now I am one of the most recognizable and well-known people in the world.”
— “The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world.”
— “Multiple TV cameras and hundreds of camera clicks followed me out of the Rayburn Building as I had a car waiting for me to take me to the Oval Office.”
7. Fauci’s amazing adventure! (While you were quarantining at home.)
— “Amazing night at NATS Stadium where I threw out the first pitch to open the 2020 Baseball season … Unfortunately, I threw a bouncer to the right of the plate. I felt really badly but the overwhelming public reaction to it was sympathetic and positive. … I signed a Nats Jersey that will hang on the wall in Nats stadium next to a similar shirt signed by President Obama.”
— “After the gala we were invited to another gala at the Cafe Milano …”
— “I went to a book party last night for Jonathan Karl’s new book about Trump. It took place at the Cafe Milano. …”
–”I was totally swamped all night by people wanting to say hello, shake my hands, and take pictures with me.”
— “Last night I received another humbling honor associated with the honorary doctorate in science that I received from Rockefeller University in New York City. … the audience at the celebratory dinner was giving me a standing ovation, … This will have been my 58th honorary doctorate.”
8. With all the time he spent being photographed for magazine covers, it’s no wonder that Fauci lacked basic knowledge of COVID, such as the fact that the survival rate for people under the age of 70 was 99.95%.
— “Did major photo shoot with People magazine.”
— “Nature magazine picked me as one of Nature’s 10—people who shaped science in 2020.”
— “[White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows] did not like the fact that I did an InStyle piece and did not want any more profiles of me.”
— “Over the past three weeks I have been on the cover of Time magazine X2, once as one of the 100 most influential people in the world again as the ‘guardian of the year.’ Also, on the cover of People magazine.”
9. He has remarkably thin skin.
— “It’s no secret that I have been clearly targeted by rather radical elements who just keep attacking me every day, all day—Fox News, Breitbart—all those other crazies.”
— “The onslaught against me by the radical right continues….Some of the valid press such as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and others are calling out the lies of the far right.”
— “General Mark Milley came up to me put his arms around my shoulder and said ‘the only person who was getting his balls kicked more than me in Washington is you.’ I responded by saying ‘no shit.’”
10. He is thrilled to be asked for selfies.
— “I got completely surrounded by ‘well-wishers’ who wanted selfies and/or to shake my hands.”
— “Every young intern as well as seasoned veteran in the WH coming over to me congratulating me and thanking me for my work and even asking for selfies.”
— “I was totally mobbed for selfies.”
— “Several women civilian employees as well as military officers came over to me wanting selfies… One of them actually broke into tears.”
— “I took the time to visit them and there was the usual selfies galore.”
— “The people at the Abyssinian church or extremely kind to me… And all of them wanting to take selfies with me.”
— “Went to do PSAs with the White House digital Comms team. They all wanted selfies with me.”
— “I was totally mobbed by my colleagues wanting selfies. I must have done at least 100 (no exaggerating!)”
— “As soon as people recognized me there was a wave of applause and squealing and screaming and clapping and thanking me with multiple people coming and asking for selfies.”
I’d end it there, but his next sentence was this: “It was a little bit embarrassing, but it was just a manifestation of how people need a symbol of integrity and truth.”[SOURCE]
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
COVID TALES: Never Forget_When they mocked the deaths of those who doubted
Scientists are paying a huge personal price in the lonely fight against anti-vaxxers
Anti-vaccine protesters at a Los Angeles rally (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
By Michael Hiltzik
Business Columnist
Follow
Oct. 20, 2023 3 AM PT
Business Columnist
Follow
Oct. 20, 2023 3 AM PT
In the preface of the new book by vaccine expert and pro-science crusader Peter Hotez, there are several acknowledgments of a kind that may never have appeared before in a book like it.
There, Hotez expresses gratitude to the Houston Police Department, the Texas Medical Center Police Department and the security force of the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.
These are all places where Hotez plies his profession. He thanks all those departments “for keeping my family and me safe during this time of aggression.”
The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party.
— Pediatrician and vaccine scientist Peter Hotez
These words tell a story all their own: how the anti-vaccine and anti-science movements have incorporated physical threats into their despicable arsenals. I wrote nearly two years ago that, unable to produce scientific support for their views, they had turned to stalking and intimidation to discourage critics.
Things have only gotten worse since then, as Hotez reports in his new book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.” A professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor and a courageously outspoken advocate for public health, Hotez documents how agitators on the extreme right have graduated from trying to sow mistrust in science to targeting individual scientists such as himself.
The heart of his book is a call for government agencies and professional organizations to wage an aggressive battle against anti-vaccination and anti-science propaganda. What’s needed, he says, is something akin to an interagency task force to address the problem, because the scientific community as it’s currently organized can’t do so on its own.
“The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party,” he told me. “What you see instead are responses that skirt around the edges. You’ll see public health agencies step up their pro-vaccine messages, and sure, that’s important, but it doesn’t get to what’s really driving this.”
Hotez identifies several reasons for scientific organizations’ ineffective response to the spread of scientific misinformation and disinformation. “They don’t have the skill set or the background to know how to deal with this,” he says.
Then there’s their traditional commitment to political neutrality. “They say, ‘We’re a scientific or health organization, we have to be politically neutral.’” He cites the observation by Elie Wiesel that “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
On Oct. 13, Hotez received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America for his long public campaign against anti-science propagandists. The battle came at a considerable personal cost.
Online trolls have compared Hotez to Hitler and Stalin. He has been “doxxed” through the publication of his email address and office phone number, and showered with email threats calling for his torture or public execution. Many threats were larded with antisemitism.
Hotez is not alone. “I get hate mail, I get physically harassed, I’ve gotten three legitimate death threats that have had to be investigated by the FBI,” Paul Offit, a prominent vaccine scientist in Philadelphia, recounts in “Shot in the Arm,” a new documentary by Scott Hamilton Kennedy about the damage done to public health by anti-vaccine propaganda. (The documentary will open at the Angelika Film Center in New York on Nov. 2 and the Laemmle Glendale in Southern California on Nov. 17.)
The film includes a clip of Del Bigtree, a leading anti-vaxxer, addressing an audience with the words: “Do you think it’s a good idea to let the government own your baby’s body? Anyone that believes in the right to bear arms to stand up against your government, I don’t know what you were saving that gun for then.”
Hotez’s book and the film both trace the evolution of vaccine science, starting with the discovery by Edward Jenner in the 1790s that people exposed to cowpox via inoculation would be rendered immune from the much more dangerous smallpox (“vaccination” derives from the Latin for “cow,” vacca), and the evolution of the anti-vaccine movement.
“As both a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines and a parent of an adult daughter with autism,” Hotez writes, “I have had a front-row seat on the modern anti-vaccine movement in America.”
Anti-vaccine activism had existed almost for as long as there were vaccines, but the movement got an enormous shot in the arm, so to speak, from a notorious article in the Lancet, a respected British medical journal, in 1998. The paper by a team headed by British physician Andrew Wakefield purported to identify a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010. After an investigation, British medical authorities effectively revoked his medical license. Countless subsequent scientific studies have established that there is no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Nevertheless, Wakefield’s paper promoted an almost immediate plummet in MMR childhood vaccinations in Britain and its claim remains central to the anti-vax movement to this day — a movement that continues to lionize Wakefield, who now lives in the U.S., as a truth-teller.
The historical roots of the anti-science movement date back more than 100 years, Hotez writes, to when authoritarian regimes such as Stalin’s recognized that discrediting scientific experts assisted their path to personal power. Its appeal to the modern Republican Party has much to do with economics — challenging the scientific consensus on global warming, for example, allows the GOP to serve the anti-regulation interests of its Big Business patrons.
The anti-vaccine movement was in many respects a natural fit. Its invocation of shibboleths such as “medical freedom” and “health freedom” — coded justifications for opposition to vaccine mandates — led to its getting “picked up by the Republican Tea Party in Texas,” Hotez says.
There, Hotez expresses gratitude to the Houston Police Department, the Texas Medical Center Police Department and the security force of the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.
These are all places where Hotez plies his profession. He thanks all those departments “for keeping my family and me safe during this time of aggression.”
The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party.
— Pediatrician and vaccine scientist Peter Hotez
These words tell a story all their own: how the anti-vaccine and anti-science movements have incorporated physical threats into their despicable arsenals. I wrote nearly two years ago that, unable to produce scientific support for their views, they had turned to stalking and intimidation to discourage critics.
Things have only gotten worse since then, as Hotez reports in his new book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.” A professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor and a courageously outspoken advocate for public health, Hotez documents how agitators on the extreme right have graduated from trying to sow mistrust in science to targeting individual scientists such as himself.
The heart of his book is a call for government agencies and professional organizations to wage an aggressive battle against anti-vaccination and anti-science propaganda. What’s needed, he says, is something akin to an interagency task force to address the problem, because the scientific community as it’s currently organized can’t do so on its own.
“The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party,” he told me. “What you see instead are responses that skirt around the edges. You’ll see public health agencies step up their pro-vaccine messages, and sure, that’s important, but it doesn’t get to what’s really driving this.”
Hotez identifies several reasons for scientific organizations’ ineffective response to the spread of scientific misinformation and disinformation. “They don’t have the skill set or the background to know how to deal with this,” he says.
Then there’s their traditional commitment to political neutrality. “They say, ‘We’re a scientific or health organization, we have to be politically neutral.’” He cites the observation by Elie Wiesel that “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
On Oct. 13, Hotez received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America for his long public campaign against anti-science propagandists. The battle came at a considerable personal cost.
Online trolls have compared Hotez to Hitler and Stalin. He has been “doxxed” through the publication of his email address and office phone number, and showered with email threats calling for his torture or public execution. Many threats were larded with antisemitism.
Hotez is not alone. “I get hate mail, I get physically harassed, I’ve gotten three legitimate death threats that have had to be investigated by the FBI,” Paul Offit, a prominent vaccine scientist in Philadelphia, recounts in “Shot in the Arm,” a new documentary by Scott Hamilton Kennedy about the damage done to public health by anti-vaccine propaganda. (The documentary will open at the Angelika Film Center in New York on Nov. 2 and the Laemmle Glendale in Southern California on Nov. 17.)
The film includes a clip of Del Bigtree, a leading anti-vaxxer, addressing an audience with the words: “Do you think it’s a good idea to let the government own your baby’s body? Anyone that believes in the right to bear arms to stand up against your government, I don’t know what you were saving that gun for then.”
Hotez’s book and the film both trace the evolution of vaccine science, starting with the discovery by Edward Jenner in the 1790s that people exposed to cowpox via inoculation would be rendered immune from the much more dangerous smallpox (“vaccination” derives from the Latin for “cow,” vacca), and the evolution of the anti-vaccine movement.
“As both a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines and a parent of an adult daughter with autism,” Hotez writes, “I have had a front-row seat on the modern anti-vaccine movement in America.”
Anti-vaccine activism had existed almost for as long as there were vaccines, but the movement got an enormous shot in the arm, so to speak, from a notorious article in the Lancet, a respected British medical journal, in 1998. The paper by a team headed by British physician Andrew Wakefield purported to identify a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010. After an investigation, British medical authorities effectively revoked his medical license. Countless subsequent scientific studies have established that there is no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Nevertheless, Wakefield’s paper promoted an almost immediate plummet in MMR childhood vaccinations in Britain and its claim remains central to the anti-vax movement to this day — a movement that continues to lionize Wakefield, who now lives in the U.S., as a truth-teller.
The historical roots of the anti-science movement date back more than 100 years, Hotez writes, to when authoritarian regimes such as Stalin’s recognized that discrediting scientific experts assisted their path to personal power. Its appeal to the modern Republican Party has much to do with economics — challenging the scientific consensus on global warming, for example, allows the GOP to serve the anti-regulation interests of its Big Business patrons.
The anti-vaccine movement was in many respects a natural fit. Its invocation of shibboleths such as “medical freedom” and “health freedom” — coded justifications for opposition to vaccine mandates — led to its getting “picked up by the Republican Tea Party in Texas,” Hotez says.
U.S. vaccination rates against COVID show a partisan slant, with counties that voted for Trump in 2020 falling well behind those that voted for Biden. COVID death rates show the same pattern, with red counties showing higher rates than blue.
“It was mutually reinforcing,” he told me. “The anti-vaccine groups were getting attention and PAC money that they never had before, and the far right got a new set of adherents and a new faux outrage to rally the base. It just became part of the canon.”
The anti-vaccine and anti-science movements exploit and amplify the lay public’s ignorance about the scientific method and the technical aspects of how vaccines work.
“Vaccines were compelling because vaccine-preventable diseases were compelling,” Offit explains in the documentary. Smallpox, polio and measles were recognized nemeses when they ranged the world untreated. Smallpox alone took the lives of an estimated 500 million people over the centuries, but thanks to vaccination it was judged eradicated from the world by the late 1970s.
The introduction of the polio vaccine in 1955 and the measles vaccine in 1963, accompanied by public mass vaccination campaigns, dropped the number of U.S. deaths from those diseases to zero by the early 1980s. Since then, those diseases have recurred only in discrete communities where vaccine resistance reigns, and among the unvaccinated.
Yet “vaccines are a victim of their own success,” Offit observes. “When vaccines work, nothing happens. I think that’s what makes them a little less compelling. People don’t really see what they’re doing.”
When once-common photographs of children hobbling on crutches, confined in an iron lung, or consumed with the bright red measles rash, much less perishing from the diseases, disappear from news reports, people forget how devastating the diseases once were.
“I understand how easy it was to appeal to the notion that vaccines are doing more harm than good” — a common feature of anti-vaccine hysteria — “because we weren’t seeing the vaccine-preventable diseases and their harm,” Offit says.
When the affiliated anti-vaccine and far-right movements turned their firepower on the COVID-19 vaccines introduced in 2021, the consequences were dire. Hotez estimates the unnecessary toll at 200,000 American lives lost because of vaccine refusal and anti-vaccine propaganda.
The partisan character of this outcome is manifested in a distinct divide in COVID vaccination rates between blue and red counties, with the latter having notably lower vaccination rates and higher per-capital COVID death rates. The partisanship is curious, given that Donald Trump has boasted that the development of the COVID vaccines was spurred by his own Operation Warp Speed. But COVID vaccine resistance has also been spurred by his persistent efforts to minimize the severity of the pandemic.
Despite his own efforts and those of other science advocates, Hotez sees only minor glimmers of hope that the trend toward science skepticism can be beaten back. Medical boards have fallen woefully short in enforcing their own regulations against physicians spreading misinformation and disinformation.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a repeal of one of the very few state-level regulatory initiatives — a law passed only a year ago that empowered the state medical board to treat COVID misinformation as an element of professional misconduct. The original law’s critics argued that the board already had the power to discipline doctors for spreading misinformation about COVID — and the law had been temporarily blocked by a federal judge on grounds that it infringed on doctors’ free-speech rights.
On the federal level, debate over science policy has been ceded to the Republican right wing, which has held hearings to try to humiliate scientists who have done unrefuted studies identifying the origin of COVID as a natural outbreak from wildlife to humans, debunking the factually unsupported partisan myth that it was produced in a Chinese government lab.
“They’re not even pretending at anything other than political theater,” Hotez says. Even moderate Republicans shy away from questioning the GOP right’s position.
“I don’t see mainstream Republicans coming to the defense of science,” he says. “But we’re not really hearing from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Health and Human Services agencies are pretty quiet.” He says he’s had conversations with like-minded scientists “about how we get organized better to respond to this. But it’s slow going.”
The real danger, as Hotez sees it, is that anti-science politics will become globalized. “It’s not going to stay in the U.S. We export movies, we export music, we’re going to export this stuff.”
In the past, he says, a sort of social auto-correction counteracted anti-vaccine activism. In the past, if vaccine resistance led to an outbreak of measles or pertussis, word would spread across the community, creating pressure on resistant parents to vaccinate their children.
“I don’t see that, even after 200,000 lives lost. These were victims of a predatory disinformation campaign,” Hotez says. Instead, the vaccine opponents “are doubling down, just telling a bigger lie, blaming the vaccine and the scientists. I don’t see that getting any better, at least until the 2024 election. And what happens after the election is anybody’s guess.” [SOURCE]
THE FAUCI DIARIES: How Bad Was It Really?_The 'Science' explains it in his diary
🚨 Anthony Fauci literally wrote in his diary Covid was only a 0.2% fatality rate
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) July 30, 2026
Anthony Fauci is confronted over writing in his diary that Covid 19 was essentially just the flu but then and locked down for a global pandemic and mandated vaccines
“Dr. Fauci, you admitted in… pic.twitter.com/mmYs4UPHxY
REALITY CHECK: The Tide Has Turned_Sitting US Senator explains it best
Q: "Senator Moreno, Why do you suspect Fauci is pleading the fifth after testifying 200+ times before?"
— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) July 30, 2026
Moreno: "Because he's a piece of a sh*t.” pic.twitter.com/8ejSkwOAvV
THE FAUCI DIARIES: RFK Remarks_Fauci's most damning entry
RFK Jr. reveals the single most disturbing thing he discovered in Anthony Fauci’s diaries.
— Overton (@overton_news) July 30, 2026
This is peak hypocrisy. No other way to put it.
KENNEDY: “One of the things that was new to me in his diary was his admission that he got a pulmonary infarction in July of 2021 after… pic.twitter.com/bQDlB2pB6i
DR FAUCI: What We Know Now
Dr Fauci will go down in history as evil, mentally-deranged, MASS MURDERER who committed Hitler/Goebbels-like crimes against humanity. But everyone is missing the REAL crime right in front of your eyes- he conspired with Dem Party, CCP and Deep State to steal 2020 election from…
— Sir Wayne Allyn Root - TV & Radio Host (@RealWayneRoot) July 29, 2026
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
