InTown’s Man of the Year for 2021
Dr. Peter Hotez
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by Marene Gustin
ouston’s own Dr. Peter J. Hotez is for many the face of the pandemic, the man who’s been on every newscast and quoted in every paper and periodical. Truly the most recognized local authority on COVID-19. He’s gone from being a rock star in just the medical community to a household name. The 63-year-old scientist and pediatrician has a resume that could fill pages, but the highlights are Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine where he is also the Co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) and Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair of Tropical Pediatrics. He is also a University Professor at Baylor University, Fellow in Disease and Poverty at the James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Senior Fellow at the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A&M University, Faculty Fellow with the Hagler Institute for Advanced Studies at Texas A&M University, and Health Policy Scholar in the Baylor Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. Pretty impressive credentials. He’s also spent a good portion of time lately on social media debunking myths and rumors surrounding the current pandemic, so we asked him a few questions about what scientific information can predict for the New Year. And the resounding theme is vaccination, vaccination, vaccination. And he’s doing his best to make that happen. Current data indicates the Omicron variant might pass pretty quickly. What does that mean for the public? I think that assessment may be premature, yes, the numbers in the UK and South Africa are starting to come down not long after they went up, but we’ve seen other peaks start to come down and then plateau for a period of weeks. It may happen, and that would be great, but I don’t think we can count on it. But there will likely be new variants in 2022. Will that require new vaccines or more boosters? As long as we fail to vaccinate the Southern Hemisphere, we risk generating new variants, that’s how we got Delta from India and Omicron from Southern Africa. So, vaccinating the world is a priority. What’s the importance of Corbevax, or BioE COVID-19 that you helped develop at the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development? Corbevax is the vaccine from Biological E in India, co-developed with our technology. The center is co-headed by myself and Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi. We’re hoping this 16 | Intown | January + February 2022
will be released soon for Emergency Use (EUA) in India, followed by authorization in additional countries where we also transferred the technology. Will the world go from a pandemic to an endemic situation and how will the public deal with that? It’s not predestined if we can vaccinate the world. There are lots of different possible situations. What needs to happen on the world stage to prevent situations like this in the future, or can we? We must build vaccine development capacity locally across the world’s low- and middle-income countries (LMICs are defined as countries with $1,006 to $3,955 Gross National Income per capita). The current model is way too dependent on the Big Pharmas and we’ve seen in this pandemic what happens when we do that — the Northern Hemisphere gets vaccinated, leading the Southern Hemisphere vulnerable. At Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, we’re working hard to fix that situation by partnering with vaccine producers in LMICs. Keep informed about COVID-19 and Dr. Hotez’s efforts on peterhotez.org or follow him on Twitter @peterhotez. You can donate to the vaccine efforts here: waystogive.texaschildrens.org/reasons-to-give/vaccine-development-covid.html.
