Anti-Vaxxers Getting More Aggressively Violent

For over a month, internet trolls have unleashed a new wave of hate speech toward Houston vaccine researcher Peter Hotez, a longtime nemesis of the anti-vaxx movement.

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.

“We have been contacted by a few individuals who are opposed to vaccines,” Kaylee Dusang, a spokesperson for Baylor university, said.  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.

Last year, 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.