Science Under Siege: A Talk With Peter Hotez and Michael Mann

Lysenko comes to America

Peter Hotez, who has done yeoman work defending vaccines, and Michael Mann, a hero of the climate change wars, have a new book about the assault on science. I spoke with them and emerged both enlightened and frightened. Transcript follows:

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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Hotez and Mann

(recorded 9/03/25)

Paul Krugman: Hi, folks. Paul Krugman again. This time I'm going to actually talk to two people, Peter Hotez and Michael Mann, who are both distinguished scientists and public policy figures. They have a new book which will be coming out a couple of days after this goes up called Science Under Siege. Peter is a pediatrician and research scientist and has been very involved in the vaccine debates.

Michael E. Mann whom I've known, at least digitally for a long time, is a climatologist. And both have been subject to a lot of personal attacks. And who knew that science was going to be quite so thrilling and dangerous? Hi guys, welcome to this interview format.

Peter Hotez: Great to be here Paul. I've followed your work for a long, long time, and I'm a great admirer. We first got connected when you educated me on why there was a connection between bitcoin people espousing, advocating for Bitcoin and going up against vaccines. You kind of helped me connect the dots on that which we wound up talking about in the book.

Krugman: That's one of the things I want to talk about because there are some connections, although there's obviously some deep structural aspects to what's going on here.

Michael E. Mann: Same thing here, Paul. I feel like I know we've interacted now for a number of years, but it's great to finally have an opportunity to talk, face to face.

Krugman: I actually have an odd question. When did you decide to write this book?

Mann: Yeah. So, it's ironic, right? Because we had no idea when we decided to write the book that it would be quite as relevant and prescient as it now feels, given everything that's happened over the last year now. This was probably a couple of years ago, and it was initiated by the fact that Peter was experiencing the very same sorts of attacks that I had experienced as a climate scientist decades ago. And so I think we naturally gravitated toward each other. I felt like maybe we climate scientists had something to offer in terms of experience and insight, into how to deal with a sort of coordinated, orchestrated anti-science of the sort that Peter and Tony Fauci and others in the vaccine world were dealing with.

Like I said, we climate scientists were being vilified and attacked decades ago, before it became fashionable

Hotez: I think it was also when there was that big pile on in 2023 from Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk, pressuring me to debate Kennedy to kind of elevate his stature. And they dangled $100,000 or something like that and I was saying, “what the heck is going on here?”

As a pediatric vaccine scientist, that's not the kind of thing you expect. It was Michael who really helped me connect the dots and say, “hey, this is what you're going through, Peter. And welcome to the club.” You’ve been attacked now for a number of years. “This is what, as climate scientists, we've been dealing with now for at least a decade prior to that, and here's some of the places where it's coming from.” And in time, we compared notes and noticed that if you think of the attacks on climate science and the attacks on vaccines and biomedical science as two circles of the Venn diagram, they don't completely overlap. But there's a lot of overlap. And the more we talked, the more we realized in many cases, they were coming from the same sources. And that's when we decided to do this.

Mann: Yeah, I mean, same tactic and some of the same players. And we can get into that. We were involved in both sorts of the anti-science movements.

Krugman: Yeah. I guess an uncharitable thought for someone who's been doing social science, economics, was kind of when Michael started, was saying “welcome to my world.” We've been going through this for decades earlier, but it's all the same kind of thing.

Mann: And I want to thank you, Paul, because you came out and defended me during the height of those attacks, and that was appreciated. It meant a lot.

Krugman: Yeah, it's been quite something. Although I suspect neither of you had any idea that RFK was going to be dismantling America's health system.

Hotez: Well I knew he wanted to, that's how I got involved in getting into this in the first place. I'm a vaccine scientist and I've developed new vaccines for parasitic and neglected diseases. But I also have four adult kids, including Rachel who has autism and intellectual disabilities. And years ago, the NIH asked me to have long discussions with Mr. Kennedy and explain to him why vaccines don't cause autism.

And so I had a year of discussions with him by phone and then online and mediated by a third individual. And I saw how deeply conspiratorial and dug in he was and equally how uninterested he was in the actual science. He couldn't care less about the science of autism. And so I saw how dangerous he could become if he were ever put in a position of power, which unfortunately, he is right now.

Mann: Yeah and more than a decade ago, I would do interviews with him. He was a host of a radio program. And he was a fierce advocate for climate action and the environment. He was an environmental lawyer for NRDC for a number of years. And so the sort of bond villain arc here is pretty remarkable.

And, it sort of came full circle. I think it was about a week ago when he was promoting this sort of climate denial rhetoric. The anti-wind rhetoric, this ridiculous idea that wind mills—sorry, they call them “windmills”—They mean wind turbines—out in the ocean are supposedly killing whales. It's ridiculous.

But it sort of shows that he's now come full circle. He's promoting sort of equal opportunity anti-science now, obviously on Covid-19 and vaccines, but he's even promoting anti-science on clean energy and climate, an area where he was actually a champion no more than a decade ago.

Hotez: Which is actually a recurring pattern. Someone will target a specific area of climate science or biomedicine and gain a reputation, get their foot in the door on that. Then they quickly pivot to targeting everything climate science and mainstream biomedical science because they get reinforcement from the libertarians, from the far right, from the health and wellness industry, and so it becomes a thing. So, once they sign up for one aspect of promoting anti-science, then they buy the whole farm. And that's been a recurring story.

Mann: It's the same funders behind these things. The Koch brothers funded the early sort of anti-lockdown rhetoric that ultimately became the anti-vax movement as well with Covid-19. And obviously, they have funded and promoted much of this sort of climate denial infrastructure for decades.

Krugman: So let's talk about that. I was going to try and talk a little bit about the nature of the attack on science, but I think everybody knows what's going on. But the driving forces, the motivation. I mean there's some stuff that you in the book go through as some of the major players.

Maybe talk about what it is and then we’ll try to figure out how this makes sense as a movement. So you actually have five categories of anti-science people…

Mann: Let’s have Peter take the first stab at this.

Hotez: Before we go to the five categories, I'll say at least from the vaccine side, and I think a lot of it is the climate side, as there are both political and financial drivers. The political driver initially began around vaccines with assertions that vaccines cause autism. That's how I got involved to counter that. But then it pivoted to this concept of health freedom, medical freedom: “You can't tell us what to do about our kids.” And you started to see the steep rise in the number of parents, opting their kids out of getting vaccinated in public schools in Texas, where I'm based, using a lot of propaganda terms. And that's when it started becoming a political movement to start getting PAC money.

As a scientist, we don't like to talk about politics. We want to be politically neutral. But the reality was, the anti-vaccine activist groups were getting PAC money from the Texas Tea Party, as it was called at that time, to lobby for candidates to run on anti-vaccine platforms and to file anti-vaccine legislation. They came off the rails during Covid when 40,000 to 50,000 Texans needlessly died because they refused Covid vaccines during the Delta and BA1 wave in 2021, 2022. It was a targeted health disinformation campaign, and we document the role Fox News and the Murdoch media empire took in promoting that every night. Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity…

Mann: Elon Musk.

Hotez: In their zeal to push back against vaccine mandates, which you could sort of understand, they unfortunately went the next step and falsely discredited the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Then members of Congress, the House Freedom Caucus and Senator Ron Johnson and Senator Rand Paul weighed in. And then it picked up a converging thread from the wellness and influencer industry that is built on buying up whatever they can find in bulk that is available as low cost generics, and they'll jack up the price and pair it with a telehealth visit. Have you ever noticed why they're all anti-parasitic drugs, Paul? Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, or Fenbendazoles? Because they're cheap and they can buy them in bulk, they’re generic. They repackage them and sell it with a telehealth visit. So they joined forces with that kind of health wellness movement, and now Kennedy has shifted his language accordingly to adjust to that.

So if you notice now he says, “well, you can either get your measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, the MMR vaccine, or you can get this useless cocktail of supplements like vitamin A, budesonide, clarithromycin, and cod liver oil.” That call comes from the health and wellness influencer. So, politics and money basically.

Krugman: But what's interesting to me is that at some level one can understand the anti-climate change stuff because it was very clear, from the perspective of the fossil fuel industry, money was at stake.

Mann: I mean, that connection is much more direct. It's much more obvious. And you have to sort of step back then to think about, why is it that these same actors, these same forces, are promoting Covid-19 anti-science? In the book we talk about that. You have to understand the historical origins of this.

The lockdowns were a real threat to the fossil fuel industry, to Koch Industries, because it meant decreased transportation, decreased energy usage. It was going to hurt them. That is when they stepped in, they realized that the lockdowns and the social distancing that was necessary to deal with the pandemic was a threat to their bottom line.

Krugman: Sorry I'm interrupting. But I had a simple story that I told ten years ago which was, fossil fuel interests want to deny climate change because they want us to keep burning fossil fuels as long as possible, and that everything else flowed from that.

I think it was Naomi Oreskes who did the study, “What proportion of scientific climate denial articles are financed by the fossil fuel industry?” And the answer is 100%. But I didn't expect it.

Mann: I think you’re right.

Krugman: And it was actually to an important extent the same guys, the fossil fuel guys.

Hotez: Yeah, plus the wellness influencers. That was the second financial component.

Mann: There's something else going on here that I think is really important. For decades, the fossil fuel industry's playbook was literally what the tobacco industry had used. And so we see the continued use of this playbook and the modus operandi is to discredit scientists and to discredit science.

It’s part of a larger effort to discredit expert opinion, to discredit experts, and we see that now. That's metastasized into what we're seeing in the United States right now where expertise itself—science—is a threat to the conservative movement, to the MAGA movement.

And so it makes sense that you would see this sort of libertarianism intersect with this rejection of intelligentsia, rejection of science, rejection of authority. It's all come together in this perfect storm that we're dealing with now.

Hotez: In fact, we look at historical precedents in the book. And that brings us right to what Stalin did in the 1930s and 40s, where he threw the Mendelian geneticist Vavilov in the Gulag where he ultimately perished, one of the leading geneticists of his day, in favor of Trofim Lysenko, who promoted these phony baloney, vernalization Lamarckian theories that you sow the Russian wheat in snow and then you toughen it up and all of this nonsense.

It didn't matter if 2 million Soviet peasants died from famine. It was a way of authoritarian control. Stalin would go after the theory of relativity and physicists. And then you start reading the works of people like Anne Applebaum or Ruth Ben-Ghiat or even going back to Hannah Arendt, this is what authoritarianism or totalitarianism is all about. As Michael says, you target the intelligentsia, but you begin first with the scientists because they are the top threat.

Krugman: For listeners, Lamarckianism is the idea that acquired characteristics are passed on, none of this genetic code stuff. That basically, giraffes got long necks because they kept on stretching and passed that on to their descendants. That idea dominated Soviet biological science for quite a long time because Stalin backed Lysenko, who bought that idea. And as you say, millions died in famines as a result.

Hotez: Now the pseudoscience manifests through Mr. Kennedy and what he articulates, comparing MMR vaccines to a useless cocktail of supplements or claiming, ridiculously, that autism is the consequence of an environmental exposure in the first year of life, denying the role of autism genes and how they interact in early fetal brain development well before kids ever see vaccines. Or his ridiculous posture on mRNA vaccines to promote a much less safe, older, whole inactivated virus technology that you can't even make anymore. If you were writing a play, asking, “could Lysenko come back to the United States?” You've got the perfect character.

Mann: Yeah and the consequences, as in the case of Lysenko, are deadly. And that's true with vaccine denial.

Hotez: And that's ultimately the reason for the book. It’s not just to have this sort of academic or arcane discussion, but actually to sound the alarm that this is an existential threat to humanity. If we look at two of the biggest existential threats to humanity—pandemics and the climate crisis—we argue now there's a third leg to that tripod, which is the disinformation empire and the anti-science empire that prevents us now from addressing it.

The United States is no longer in a position to address pandemic threats or to address the climate crisis. So we're heading towards an apocalypse, unless we can figure this out.

Krugman: Related to motives, did you ever talk about Rick Perlstein's history of the right in the book?

Mann: No we don't get into that.

Krugman: Okay, because one of the things that really struck me was a revelation from his work quite some time ago that if you look at the origins of talk radio, it actually started with direct mail before talk radio became the source of online disinformation. Also there’s the extraordinary extent to which the financial base of all of that stuff is selling quack medicine and nutritional supplements.

Krugman: If you ask, “how does Alex Jones make his money?” It's by selling quack science. There was a financial drive.

Hotez: We point that out. That's clearly there. The corrupt wellness and supplements industry is now worth half a trillion dollars. It's almost as big as the pharmaceutical industry, and still gaining in ascendancy.

Mann: That’s parallel with the fossil fuel industry profits. It's a different type of profit motive.

Krugman: Right. So there's money to be made. Obviously there's a susceptibility to this stuff that makes it work. This wouldn't work if the kind of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh didn't find this kind of stuff appealing. You do talk a fair bit about why money itself can't buy this, it has to have a receptive audience.

Hotez: It has a sense of tribal belonging. I do say that there is nothing inherently anti-science about the Republican Party. I moved to Texas 15 years ago, and I was with George H.W. Bush, Jim Baker-Republicans. I didn't always agree with them, but you never doubted for a minute that they cared about the country and they were all-in on science and medicine. They were fabulous people. It made Texas the great state it is in terms of science and innovation. It's the new stuff that is so dark and twisted and so harmful.

Mann: There was a transition there, right? Nixon gave us the EPA, Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, George H.W. Bush gave us cap and trade to deal with acid rain. It wasn't that long ago that the Republican Party was not fundamentally an anti-science or an anti-environmental party. But back in the early 2000, that's when we really saw, as the fossil fuel industry was coming in, a sort of purity test emerged: the Republican candidates had to kiss the ring of the fossil fuel industry.

We saw a purging of those “moderate”, so-called, New England Republicans of the sort that we used to have, you're right. There is this Republican base, the MAGA base, that are receptive to this misinformation and disinformation. But that's not accidental. That's because it's been very carefully created. It's been nurtured. There's been an effort for decades to weaponize their base for an agenda that goes against their base’s own interests: environmental degradation. I mean, if you look at the policies now of the Republican Party, almost every single policy goes against the interests of the voters who are actually voting for them. That's the amazing achievement, that they've been able to create this army that wins elections and is weaponized to further their very specific agenda, the agenda of the plutocrats at the top of this whole structure who profit from this.

Krugman: Does this even work for the plutocrats? I would have thought that even if you're Jeff Bezos or the Koch brothers, that somehow living in a world ravaged by pandemics and destroying --

Mann: I mean Paul, do you think it's accidental that people like Elon Musk want to go to Mars? They want to. They figure they're going to destroy this planet, but they can probably colonize some other planet. They think that their wealth and technology can buy them out of any problem we create, and that simply isn't true, but I think that’s the thinking.

I imagine the Koch brothers, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, living in a tower with walls on the side that protect them from the encroaching seas, and the people who are rebelling against this autocratic world that we're headed towards. I think there's a certain level of sociopathy that is involved here. To believe that somehow you can survive and prosper in a world where everybody else doesn't.

Krugman: I thought the point you said about RFK was really interesting. This is something I've seen quite a lot, which is that you buy into a little bit of the anti-science stuff, maybe with some very specific interests, and somehow that leads you on and you end up buying into the whole package.

Mann: Yeah. You become a member of the tribe, and you have to adopt the tenets of that tribe. That's what has been so effective for the Tea Party and/or MAGA movement, this sort of purity test that is used to create an army of people who support this agenda.

Hotez: They also use their wealth and power to support think tanks and even colleges and universities. You've seen this kind of degradation happen. Even places like Stanford University have adopted some of this stuff. It's very dark and very scary. We try to find ways not to begin walking it back because the consequences are so grave.

Krugman: I'm just curious, what happened at Stanford? I don't know that story.

Hotez: Well, the Fox News talking heads were railing against vaccines and saying that we're going to have herd immunity by April 2021, and all of this kind of pseudoscience. They got together for a large conference and even got the president of Stanford John Levin to bless it, endorse it, and speak at it. We tried to discourage it because it was an entire parade of pseudoscience. They tried to get me and others to join in on it, I didn't want any part of it. Of course, there was an accusation that they were being censored, which was ridiculous because they're on Fox News every night talking to 3 million Americans, they’re hardly censored. What they wanted was endorsement from the serious scientific community. It goes to show you how quickly established institutions and think tanks can, like the Hoover Institution, go down that rabbit hole and espouse a whole system of pseudoscience and find ways to justify it as well.

And it very much began to remind us of Stalinism or even some of the stuff that went on in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and into the 30s. Which is another reason for writing the book, to sound that warning and forestall it from happening.

Mann: Yeah and it went actually even beyond that, Stanford defunded the Internet Observatory, which was an institute led by Rene de Resta, a researcher who has been examining the spread of anti science and disinformation, and the actors involved. That's a threat to them because they're prospering through the use of social media to spread disinformation that favors their agenda.

We saw Republicans in Congress target Stanford. They targeted de Resta. They didn't want academic researchers peeking behind the curtain and exposing the disinformation apparatus that they've created and that they're exploiting. And Stanford rolled over. Stanford canceled the observatory and basically defunded the entire effort. That was truly disturbing. That was one of the first truly disturbing developments that I witnessed in higher education, that suggested that our institutions are failing to stand.

Krugman: When did that happen?

Mann: That’s about a year ago.

Hotez: It was before the election.

Krugman: So this is before Trump --

Mann: Even before the election, yeah.

Krugman: It's funny, we all talk about Columbia, maybe Harvard, but Stanford has not been in the crosshairs as a capitulation. But you're saying they capitulated way early.

Mann: Yeah.

Hotez: They avoided getting into the Trump crosshairs because of their actions, probably. I don't want to slag off all of Stanford University. I have some amazing colleagues there and they're extraordinary individuals and incredibly committed humanitarians as well. But there is that undercurrent in the leadership.

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, Stanford has always had Hoover in there, which kind of benefits from the prestige without the standards. That's been much more obvious in my field than probably in yours in the past.

Hotez: It’s spilled over to the medical school.

Mann: Also the Silicon Valley tech bro, conservative libertarian. Silicon Valley culture has clearly had a tremendous influence on Stanford, which is right there.

Krugman: Which, you would think if you're a tech bro and so on, your stance would be: “science is the basis for everything.”

Mann: We thought the nerds would be on our side, right?

Hotez: Yeah. It's when it started, when Elon Musk came to Texas and built Starbase. I was excited, environmental concerns aside, that had to be addressed, but overall anything that was bringing technology and innovation to Texas, or the Texas Medical Center, I welcomed.

But there's now this new turn and twist. This is what I still don't understand, it's so self-defeating and so unnecessary. There was no reason why they had to make that pivot, but they felt compelled to anyway.

Krugman: Houston is, after oil and oil-adjacent, a healthcare complex. Must be a huge driver.

Hotez: The Texas Medical Center is the most extraordinary place I've ever worked. It's the first medical city of 120,000 employees and 60 institutions. And the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children's Hospital; they’re all an incredible place to work and have allowed me to let our group make low cost vaccines that reached 100 million people during Covid. No patent, no strings attached. Now parasitic disease. We talk about that in the book.

It’s the contradiction, that it’s also the epicenter of the anti-vaccine movement in America. 40,000 Texans perished because they refused Covid vaccines, mostly in the rural conservative areas of west and east Texas and up in the Panhandle, less so the cities. When you look at our terrible measles epidemic that we had this year, with 100 hospitalizations and two needless deaths among school age kids, guess where it started? In West Texas, up in the Panhandle, that same place.

Mann: Yeah, a lot of this medical infrastructure was funded by conservative, Republican, Texas fossil fuel, plutocrats. They had an agenda that, obviously, was anti-climate action. They supported climate denial propaganda, but they were on the right side when it came to medical science. It's only this more recent development where this giant anti-science amoeba has now engulfed medical science, that's where we are now.

Hotez: That was a good metaphor Michael, I want to remember that now.

Mann: I tried to use a biological metaphor. I thought you'd appreciate it.

Krugman: I would have expected that there would be more ability to separately test these things...

Hotez: Well, we talk about some cases. Michael and I did not have many disagreements writing the book, but one of them was around Saudi Arabia, where clearly they have big time climate denialists and are going after climate scientists, including Michael.

Mann: And blocking global climate action.

Hotez: Yeah. But on the biotechnology side, they've thus far been all-in and very committed. So it hasn't always happened but it's now become the more common thing to happen, not the exception.

Krugman: In the book you mention petrostates, I wonder if in some sense, in a weird way, an autocratic regime might be more able to just say, “this is in our narrow interest, but that we have to keep.” Whereas once you're starting to talk to the populist base, they're not going to be able to make these distinctions: this science is good and that science is bad.

Mann: It's an interesting point, Paul. What's true is that most petrostates are autocratic and there are reasons for that. But not all autocratic states are petrostates. China is a good example. I wouldn't necessarily call them a petrostate, they're autocratic. For the reason you cite, there's an argument to be made that autocratic regimes actually might be in a better position to act on a problem like climate change because of the top down structure. They can execute a transition to clean energy very rapidly. We're actually seeing China do that too. So China's on the right side of that issue.

Krugman: In general. It's a horrifying thing, but it looks to me as if China is kind of less anti-science than America at this point.

Hotez: Well, certainly their investment in biotechnology and biomedical science is extraordinary, and their use of AI in medicine is really impressive.

Mann: They’re a leader in climate science as well. No question about it.

Krugman: I think I'm following the climate stuff pretty well. The epidemiology is entirely new ground to me. How scared should we be, Peter? What are the scenarios out there?

Hotez: We’ve got multiple significant threats. We've had three major coronavirus pandemics this century, right? We had the original severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS in 2002. Then we had Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome in 2012. Now we've got SARS 2, which is Covid-19. We'll have SARS 3, without question, because those are found all over bats across the face of Asia. They're spreading viruses to humans either directly or, through secondary intermediate animal-hosts, by some estimates 60,000 times a year. So every now and then one catches fire, then we've got zoonotic influenza, avian flu, swine flu. Then we have the next Ebola, which is also a virus of bats. So what's happening is that associated viruses, because of climate change, are migrating towards new human habitats. The people are also coming closer to the bats because of urbanization. So that's a big threat.

We have mosquito-transmitted viruses all along the Gulf Coast and Texas, now they're starting to spread out of Brazil because of deforestation and climate change. We even have yellow fever in more populated areas of Brazil that we hadn't seen before. I worry that it's going to hit the Gulf Coast and Texas, that's my ultimate fear. Yellow fever has high mortality rates and we have absolutely zero vaccine stockpile. Now with this “leadership,” and I'll use that in quotations, in HHS, there's going to be no interest in stockpiling yellow fever vaccines.

Without any kind of vaccine preparedness or pandemic preparedness, there's a third vulnerability absolutely no one is talking about. I don't have the inside baseball on this, but just from public reports from the Washington Post and elsewhere: the gearing up for producing bioweapons in Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China. We have complete vulnerability now because of that, because we wiped out all of our pandemic preparedness.

Those are three pretty big ticket items, on top of the fact that we've dismantled our vaccine infrastructure just when measles has returned, we're going to lose our elimination status for measles. Now pertussis whooping coughs are coming back. We've had polio in the wastewater in New York State. So, all arrows are pointing in the wrong direction right now.

Mann: Yeah. Meanwhile, environmental—or lack of environmental policies–are creating, as you alluded to, a perfect storm for the development of even more deadly pandemics and ecosystem destruction.

Hotez: They go hand in glove, climate change and pandemics.

Mann: Deforestation, climate change, all of it. Then at the same time, we're dismantling the infrastructure for dealing with these problems and allowing the proliferation of anti-science disinformation to sort of weaponize the public against taking the actions necessary.

Krugman: Another tragedy with climate was that we didn't think it was going to be easy to really limit greenhouse gas emissions, then technology came along with these miraculous renewable technologies and suddenly it looked entirely easy, and yet we turned our backs on the whole thing.

Hotez: The same with vaccines. We now have the technology to make a vaccine to pretty much any pathogen we wish to, because we have a whole armamentarium of different technologies, whether it's older technologies like recombinant protein or mRNA or particle vaccines. But the technology to make a vaccine is no longer the problem. It's now: how do we combat the disinformation that allows us to get it out there, and the financing for the scale up?

Mann: Yeah. The obstacles aren't the science, they’re not the technology, they’re the politics. That's true with both of these problems.

Krugman: Of course you don't know the answer to this, but to speculate: how does this play out? There's the full Stalinist: you buy into false science or you get sent to alligator Alcatraz, or whatever our equivalent of Siberia will be. Supposing we stopped short of that, what happens? Does science sort of limp along until some sanity returns? How much damage are we looking at right now?

Mann: Yeah, it's a new frontier, as you allude to, where nobody knows the answer to this question. What we can say is that it depends on us. The obstacles are not the technology, they're not our ability to tackle these problems, they're the misinformation, the disinformation, the fraught politics. And that can change very quickly, right? If we saw massive turnout in the midterm elections in favor of politicians. Frankly, right now that's on one side of the aisle. It's the Democratic Party, politicians willing to actually do something. We could see dramatic changes. We could see the end of the current agenda, being advanced by the Trump administration.

So at least we would have a period of stasis and perhaps then in the next presidential election to elect a president who would actually prioritize undoing the damage that had been done through several years of inaction, and then making forward progress again. Recognizing that the rest of the world, I think, will move on.

At this point, all the United States gets to decide is whether we're going to be part of that or whether we're going to get left behind. I think the other nations of the world will take action.

Hotez: But the brain drain from the US has already started. I think I'm trying to maintain hope for my PhD students and my postdoctoral fellows and residents and they sometimes look at me like Moses in the desert, “why did you bring us here?”

Mann: I can see the golden calf back there, actually.

Krugman: Yeah (laughs).

Hotez: Well we shouldn't assume that this is just all going to go away in a few years. I think too often in the academic health centers the leadership is saying, “just hunker down and it'll go back to the way it was.” I don't see that happening either, but so how do we operate now in an era when government funding for science is going to diminish substantially? What can the private sector do in terms of biotech or some of the private philanthropies and can we create infrastructure around having scientists go back and forth between biotechs and allow that to happen? I think those are some of the things that we're going to have to look for if we're going to maintain some level of science in the US.

Mann: You mentioned the tech companies, Peter. What are we going to do about the massive spread of disinformation? Now, as we talk about in the book, the prospect of infinite disinformation with the use of AI machine learning, what are we going to do about that? Because if we can't win that battle, we're not going to win any of these other battles.

Krugman: Yeah, I have an encouraging thought, but then I realize it probably doesn't apply, which was: crank economics has been an official Republican doctrine for 45 years now and there is this whole alternative network of think tanks and crazy people, but it never took over the field. They're all getting jobs in the Trump administration now.

But on the other hand, economics is cheap. We don't need the kind of massive funding that the both of you guys do for your work. So this is pretty terrifying, actually.

Mann: Well, Paul, you've put your finger on something because they're actually going after that, right? We have seen efforts now, this golden standard science, this new Orwellian policy that the White House published maybe more than a month ago. It's Orwellian because it's framed as if it's trying to uphold the principles of science, but actually, it's a full frontal assault on science. They want to replace peer review with political appointees as editors overseeing the process. It's really scary.

Hotez: Yeah. They want to crush the biomedical science journals deeply. They're putting out these WordPress documents that have editorial boards that are made to look like real journals. So it's an entire alternate universe that they’re creating.

Mann: There was this DOE report that came out about a month ago, written by five climate deniers and climate contrarians. It's sort of an Alice in Wonderland, “up is down, black is white” depiction of the science. As I described it, it’s as if you took a chat bot, a large language model, trained it on the leading fossil-fuel-funded climate-change-denial websites, and then asked it to write a report about climate change. That's essentially what it was.

Krugman: Yeah. The Trump tariffs that were announced, if you ask ChatGPT to devise tariffs, it actually came out with the exactly same thing, to the number. But that's because it’d effectively been trained on crank economics. So basically, unless it's a really earth shattering Democratic victory in the midterms, we're headed for a very long, bad period.

Mann: Yeah, well, there's always Mars (sarcastic). Let's remember there's always Mars.

Krugman: There’s the rest of the world. One of the things is that the United States may be turning itself into an island of barbarism amidst the larger world.

Hotez: One of the things that I'm faced with, running into my graduate students and postdocs and science junior scientists every day, is I really don't want to say, “well, just go to France,” right? You want to be able to find ways to hang on to them, have meaningful careers. I've been pushing pretty hard on the private sector and biotech and being more entrepreneurial, without really having in-depth knowledge of what that actually means since I've never started a biotech. I don't come from that space, but it seems to me that that could be one of the outlets. The weakness of the argument is if the government’s cuts to science are sustained and are prolonged, eventually the pipeline and innovation dries up in the biotechs and the technology driven companies won't be able to be competitive either.

Mann: It took centuries to build the leading scientific infrastructure in the world here in the United States. And it'll only take years to destroy it. And once you destroy it, you're not going to rebuild it.

Hotez: Like the Library at Alexandria. We don't want to see that happen.

Krugman: But we were able to build in physics anyway. We were able to really rather quickly take the German physics community and rebuild it on this side of the Atlantic through refugees. But I hope that that's not the story ahead.

Mann: Yeah, right.

Krugman: Last word, because we have been running long. What would you advocate that concerned citizens do aside from vote for non crazy people in November?

Mann: In the book we look at that, the big picture at the end of the book: “what do we need to do to turn back this assault on science and reason and democracy and everything that we might hold dear?” There are lots of specific things that we can do right now that we should be doing, but more generally, “what's the big thing we can do?” The big thing is reclaiming our politics, right? That means turning out and voting, voting for climate-forward, science-forward politicians. It means using our voice, in every way possible, to combat against this parallel universe that the Right has created in the podcast world. We talk about social media, and the weaponization of Twitter by Elon Musk.

We have to create a culture, a community that can rival that. Because if we don't, again, if we don't do that, if we don't match what they're doing, if we don't fight fire with fire, we know where this leads, and it's not to a good place.

Hotez: Another reason we wrote the book is to educate people about what this whole anti-science empire is like, because I think too often it's sort of promoted as misinformation or infodemic, like just some random junk out there on the internet. We detail why that's not the case. It's organized, is deliberate, it's politically and financially motivated. So that's point one. Just getting educated about that I think is the first step.

I think a second is for the scientific community to be more out there. I think too often scientists are invisible. My friends at Research America do these surveys every couple of years, and they ask the same question every 2 or 3 years: “Can you name a living scientist?” And it turns out 75% of Americans consistently cannot name a living scientist, because we're invisible.

Mann: They’ll name Bill Nye, our friend Bill Nye.

Hotez: Right, not so much a scientist struggling for grants and papers and all that kind of stuff as we do. So I think trying to find ways to encourage scientists to be out there in the public domain and not getting one hand tied behind their back by the research universities and academic health centers. They like to control their brand and don't particularly like scientists speaking out, and they don't encourage it.

I think that by being invisible, it allows the bad actors to portray us as sort of shadowy figures and white coats plotting nefarious things. The best way I think to fix that is to put us out there and make people understand that we worry about picking up our kids at school and paying bills and everything else.

Hotez: I think that could help as well.

Mann: This is the reason for the current assault on academia, right? It's not coincidental. It's not accidental. This is one of the last remaining institutions that's in a position to speak truth to power. That's a threat to the bad actors that we're dealing with today. And so those of us within academia need to do everything we can to make sure that our administrations observe and respect the bedrock principles upon which these institutions were based.

I say that here from Benjamin Franklin’s University of Pennsylvania. I often think about the importance of that legacy, and how I hope it informs how we are going to deal with this current challenge.

Hotez: And I say that here in an office from the Cullen family, who made his money in oil and gas but was all-in on science and medicine. So let's bring that back, too.

Krugman: All right. So we all need to keep on struggling. I think that's a good point to conclude. Thank you so much.

Mann: Thanks Paul. It was a real pleasure.

Hotez: Paul, thank you, it was great. I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet you.