Dr. Peter Hotez and the $2.5M RFK Jr Debate Wager

A Twitter Thread of the Year

In recent days, a heated debate surrounding Dr. Peter Hotez has captivated Twitter users, shedding light on a contentious issue. For those unfamiliar with the situation, here is a brief overview.

Who is Dr. Peter Hotez?

Hotez is the co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development (CVD), and published author of The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning (2023), Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism (2018), Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-Science (2021), Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases (2021), and Blue Marble Health: An Innovative Plan to Fight Diseases of the Poor amid Wealth (2016). He is also currently employed at Baylor College of Medicine as the National School of Tropical Medicine Dean. He even has a Ph.D. from the Rockefeller University. One of his most recent projects was “development of coronavirus vaccines including vaccines administered to over 100 million people in India and Indonesia. Ongoing work includes research on multivalent pan-coronavirus vaccine to protect against multiple coronavirus variants.” He was even on the Joe Rogan Podcast which aired in April 2020 at the height of the pandemic. To say the least, he is a vaccine guru. Here is a compilation of his media appearances courtesy of Tucker Carlson on Twitter

The Tweet Read Round the World

On June 17th Dr. Hotez tweeted how Spotify hasn’t made any effort to silence Joe Rogan’s vaccine “misinformation” when he had 2024 Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert Kennedy Jr on his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

Dr. Hotez tags Anna Merlann of Vice in the tweet, I assume Vice’s senior reporter on misinformation, David Gilbert, was unavailable. Rogan then tweets back with a call for Dr. Hotez to debate Robert Kennedy Jr. And Twitter lost its collective mind.

Did Someone Call the Cavalry?

Predictably, the group run by the Public Good Project called Shots Heard Round the World, rallied to Dr. Hotez’s defense as is their fiduciary duty. Shots Heard Round the World is a “rapid-response network dedicated to combating anti-vaccine attacks on the social media pages, websites, and review sites of providers, practices, hotels, and health systems. If you stand up for vaccine science, we’ll stand up for you.” You can read my previous article about Shots Heard Round the World by clicking on this link.

It’s liked by all the usual players that are part of trouble maker team: Flora Teoh, Suffolk County Health Facebook page which is run by Grace Kelly-McGovern Public Relations Director at Suffolk County Department of Health Service, Tyler Kuhk (a nurse from Chinada Canada now practicing in Washinton State), Heather Keedy Bateman (a nurse from Alabama), and Daniel Pyron (a nurse from Georgia). We’re only missing Lori Boyle a nurse from New Jersey and Joanne Edelstein, a nursing instructor at California State University, Sacramento to complete the B Team.

In fact, this isn’t the only time they have tried to come to the aid of Dr. Hotez. Shots Heard Round the World has been defending Dr. Hotez since 2019, when the group first started:

The current pool for a Dr. Hotez to debate Robert Kennedy Jr is up to $2.62M, to be donated to a charity of Dr. Hotez’s choosing.

While this trends on Twitter, Hunter Biden’s felony tax evasion chargers are not. It’s hard to tell who Shots Heard worships more: Hotez, Fauci, Pan, or Weiner.