Health
Dr. Peter Hotez predicts rampant spread of diseases once Trump takes office
From LifeSiteNews
Dr. Peter Hotez says it will be ‘dangerous’ if the Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Prominent “vaccine scientist” Dr. Peter Hotez issued an eerie warning during an interview this week, listing a litany of diseases that may begin to spread starting on January 21, President-elect Donald Trump’s first full day in office.
Speaking with Nicole Wallace on MSNBC’s Deadline White House about how supposedly “dangerous” it would be for the country if the Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Hotez began warning of diseases that will start to spread on January 21 while slamming vaccine skeptics. Hotez has a long history of attacking “anti-vaxxers” who have raised legitimate concerns about COVID and other vaccines.
“We have some big picture stuff coming down the pike starting on January 21. Mr. (Mike) Bloomberg mentioned H5N1 that I’m really worried about,” Hotez said. “It’s all over wild birds on the western part of the United States and going up in the north. It’s getting into the poultry, we’re seeing sporadic human cases, no human-to-human transmission yet, but that could happen. It’s in the cattle, it’s in the milk. And that’s just the beginning.
“We have another major coronavirus likely brewing in Asia; we’ve had Sars in 2002, Sars2, COVID-19 in 2019. And we know these viruses are jumping from bats to people thousands of times a year.”
“But there’s still more; we know that we have a big problem with mosquito-transmitted viruses all along the Gulf Coast. Where I am here in Texas, we’re expecting dengue and possibly Zika virus coming back or Oro Pouche virus, maybe even yellow fever, and there’s more. Then we have this sharp rise in vaccine-preventable diseases going up because, in part, the anti-vaccine activists,” Hotez said.
The scientist then reiterated that we might start to see these outbreaks on January 21 under the new Trump administration.
“All that’s gonna come crashing down on January 21st on the Trump administration. We need a really, really good team to be able to handle this,” Hotez said.
There have been several responses to Hotez’s strange comments, including by cardiologist and leading COVID establishment critic Dr. Peter McCullough, who said during an appearance on Live from Studio 6B on Real America’s Voice that Hotez and “vaccine lobbyists” are pushing an “agenda of fear.”
“To lay it down and say it’s all gonna happen the day Trump takes office, you can tell what the agenda here is. There’s an agenda of fear being pushed by the vaccine lobbyists to constantly keep Americans in fear about the next viral threat so they can hold power and because they know in their minds that the only thing they’ll offer is more vaccines,” McCullough said.
LifeSite reached out to Hotez, asking him to clarify exactly what he meant by his comments, but has yet to receive a response.
However, he did offer a response to the backlash from his statements on X, saying his comments were being misinterpreted by “extremist media.”
“(I) outlined the tough infectious disease challenges the Trump appointees will face and inherit when they begin in January. They twisted it to claim we will launch new viruses at them, as totally ridiculous as that sounds,” Hotez wrote.
Hotez was a major proponent of the COVID vaccines and has slammed vaccine skeptics. In a 2022 World Health Organization (WHO) video about “misinformation” surrounding the COVID vaccine, he called those who had concerns about the vaccine a major killing force.”
Last year, after an appearance by RFK Jr. on Joe Rogan’s podcast in which they discussed his concerns over vaccines, Hotez blasted them for “misinformation” in an X post. His post prompted Rogan to challenge him to debate RFK Jr. on his show. While RFK Jr. agreed to the debate, Hotez never responded.
From the Fraser Institute
Canadians continue to endure long wait times for health care. And while waiting for care can obviously be detrimental to your health and wellbeing, it can also hurt your pocketbook.
In 2024, the latest year of available data, the median wait—from referral by a family doctor to treatment by a specialist—was 30 weeks (including 15 weeks waiting for treatment after seeing a specialist). And last year, an estimated 1.5 million Canadians were waiting for care.
It’s no wonder Canadians are frustrated with the current state of health care.
Again, long waits for care adversely impact patients in many different ways including physical pain, psychological distress and worsened treatment outcomes as lengthy waits can make the treatment of some problems more difficult. There’s also a less-talked about consequence—the impact of health-care waits on the ability of patients to participate in day-to-day life, work and earn a living.
According to a recent study published by the Fraser Institute, wait times for non-emergency surgery cost Canadian patients $5.2 billion in lost wages in 2024. That’s about $3,300 for each of the 1.5 million patients waiting for care. Crucially, this estimate only considers time at work. After also accounting for free time outside of work, the cost increases to $15.9 billion or more than $10,200 per person.
Of course, some advocates of the health-care status quo argue that long waits for care remain a necessary trade-off to ensure all Canadians receive universal health-care coverage. But the experience of many high-income countries with universal health care shows the opposite.
Despite Canada ranking among the highest spenders (4th of 31 countries) on health care (as a percentage of its economy) among other developed countries with universal health care, we consistently rank among the bottom for the number of doctors, hospital beds, MRIs and CT scanners. Canada also has one of the worst records on access to timely health care.
So what do these other countries do differently than Canada? In short, they embrace the private sector as a partner in providing universal care.
Australia, for instance, spends less on health care (again, as a percentage of its economy) than Canada, yet the percentage of patients in Australia (33.1 per cent) who report waiting more than two months for non-emergency surgery was much higher in Canada (58.3 per cent). Unlike in Canada, Australian patients can choose to receive non-emergency surgery in either a private or public hospital. In 2021/22, 58.6 per cent of non-emergency surgeries in Australia were performed in private hospitals.
But we don’t need to look abroad for evidence that the private sector can help reduce wait times by delivering publicly-funded care. From 2010 to 2014, the Saskatchewan government, among other policies, contracted out publicly-funded surgeries to private clinics and lowered the province’s median wait time from one of the longest in the country (26.5 weeks in 2010) to one of the shortest (14.2 weeks in 2014). The initiative also reduced the average cost of procedures by 26 per cent.
Canadians are waiting longer than ever for health care, and the economic costs of these waits have never been higher. Until policymakers have the courage to enact genuine reform, based in part on more successful universal health-care systems, this status quo will continue to cost Canadian patients.
Mackenzie Moir
Senior Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute
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