Kathy Ensor and Donna LaLonde

The Influencing Discovery Exploration and Action Forum took place November 17, 2023. The vision of a world that relies on data and analytics to drive discovery and inform decisions is what the American Statistical Association is working toward. The goal of the IDEA Forum is to provide a venue to foster and support important collaborations. Former ASA president Kathy Ensor interviewed Peter Hotez for the forum.

I would like to start by asking about your recent book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science. Could you give me a brief overview of the book and share why you were motivated to write it?

I’m an MD-PhD vaccine scientist. I’ve been doing this work for the last 40 years. Our group at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine—known as the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development—is developing new vaccines for parasitic infections, neglected tropical diseases now in clinical trials. Also, we have been developing coronavirus vaccines. We developed two COVID vaccine technologies that have now reached 100 million people in India and Indonesia.

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