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Science Under Siege: What You Can Do About It
Peter Jay Hotez, MD, PhD
Dean National School of Tropical Medicine Baylor College of Medicine
Dear Members and guests of the As-Yet-Unnamed-But-I-Swear-We-Really-Really-Will Have-A-Name-Eventually Dinner Club (UDC),
Here is a post I recently found on the web:
“I just passed a mum with her little girl, no older than 7, who had skinned her knee and was crying about it.
Mum:I don’t think we need to cry over this anymore.
Little girl, still crying: “This is in NO WAY a WE situation.”
First comment in response:
"I once saw a Mum say to her daughter, ‘Stop it, people are staring’ and the kid replied: ‘Well they shouldn’t, you told me it’s rude to stare!' Epic."
As much as I am in total agreement with both of those badass little girls, I must take exception with any effort to transfer the moral of those stories to public health.
The peril we find ourselves in in public health these days is VERY MUCH a WE situation that we need to OPENLY stare at, so you hereby have my celestially ordained permission to throw a public hissy fit about it.
That said, because we have all seen the results of IED worthy hissy fits lately, I would like to suggest some better alternatives:
1. Support the Class of 2023 CDC EIS/LLC (Epidemic Intelligence Service / Laboratory Leadership Service) in their Kickstarter Campaign to promote, Middle of Everything, a public health TV show for kids that will bring science, compassion, and social accountability back into Children's programming.
2. Wear your opinion on your sleeve, or chest. • Here is one example.
3.
Buy some merch. The proceeds will benefit Fired/RIFed CDCers.
• CDC Mutual Aid Network merch
• Fired But Fighting merch 4. Adopt as your own some of these classic GRITS* comments from Emma Banes:
If that doesn’t do it ... might I suggest a nice Rage Room??
If the inaugural meeting of the UDC on October 1, 2025** was focused on the spiraling effect of anti-science, THIS month’s meeting of the UDC will focus on what people like you and me can do to beat back the darkness.
Starring Dr. Peter Hotez, international best-selling author of “Vaccines Did NotCause Rachel’s Autism;" "The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science;" and "ScienceUnder Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World."
Because IT CAN GET BETTER!
I have lately been in zoom and email conversations with VDC and UDC members who have reached out to me to talk about how distraught they are, as I am, as we all are, over the deliberate damage that is being done to Public Health in America right now.
This is a copy of what I wrote in an email to one of them.
I keep reminding myself that perhaps the only advantage to being as old as I am is that I have lived a long time. Including growing up in the Jim Crow South.
Which means that I have real-time memories of cross burnings, segregated schools, Whites Only everything, and the Tuskegee study.
Which also means that I KNOW, from lived experience, that we as a country are fully capable of righting great wrongs that are inflicted on us by our government because we have done so before. There is precedent for it in my own lifetime.
So I have to believe that we will get through this because we can get through this because we have gotten through even worse.
And successfully come out on the other side.
We can do this. Let’s all get started on it at the Monday, November 3 meeting of the UDC!
-Kimbi Hagen Your friendly, neighborhood dinner club director/goddess
*GRITS: Girl Raised In The South
**Which was held 9 days BEFORE 1,300 more CDCers were fired on October 10, 2025 for their seemingly intransigent commitment to science. This included—for a while at least—Epidemic Investigative Service (EIS) officers, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) editorial staff, and the Measles Response Team.
According to various web sources, still fired include everyone at the CDC office in Washington DC, all staff from the Office of the Director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, all policy and communication staff from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, some people from the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology, some people from the Office of Human Resources, some people from the Office of Science, and everyone at the CDC's library.