TMC PULSE

T M C » P U L S E | N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 8 14 A Vaccine Doctor Who's an Autism Dad Peter Hotez's new book about his daughter is personal R achel Hotez was diagnosed with autism in 1994 at the age of 19 months. As she grew up, her father, Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases, witnessed the rise of an influential anti-vaccine community that persists in con- necting vaccines to autism—even though the 1998 paper that first linked autism to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was retracted in 2010. In his new book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, draws on his experience as a physician, academic and father to praise the effectiveness of vaccines and explain what experts are starting to learn about autism. Q | In your new book, you write quite openly about your daughter, Rachel, and how your family coped with her diagno- sis. Your other books aren't this personal. Why write this book now? A | I feel an urgency to speak out, driven by some- thing terrible that's going on in Europe and in many of the western states in the United States, and that is the return of measles. According to the World Health Organization, we had 41,000 measles cases in Europe the first half of 2018 and 37 deaths. We've got pockets in Texas and other western states where 10, 20, 30 percent of the kids are not being vaccinated, which means we'll soon have measles return to the U.S. People forget that measles is a killer disease. Q | Anti-vaccine groups attack you regularly on social media because you have spoken out so stridently against them and written op-eds and journal articles about the dangers of a resurgence of measles. How do you think they will respond to the book? A | This is going to be a threat to them. They are going to try to exploit any vulnerability they can. One of the things that I antici- pate—because they're pretty nasty, they say I'm making millions of dollars from my hookworm and schistosomiasis vaccines, to which my wife says, 'If only!'—is they'll say I'm exploit- ing Rachel for some kind of personal gain. Q | As a little girl, Rachel often ran away. The book shares sto- ries of you, your wife, Ann, and your other children searching the neighborhood for Rachel and alerting neighbors that she was on the loose. That "mostly noncompliant little girl," as you describe her in the book, is now 26 and still living at home. What's Rachel like today? A | She's still very strong-willed and very determined. She's got, in some ways, a fuller life than she's ever had, in part because we've given her a lot of freedom to walk in our Montrose neighborhood, where she has befriended various mer- chants. Everybody knows Rachel. She recruits allies and friends. We'll go into the Hollywood convenience store and she'll say, 'Dad, this is my friend, Vin. He's from Vietnam. He doesn't speak English.' And Vin will say, 'Hi Rachel.' (Q & A continued on page 16) Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., poses in his Montrose home with his daughter, Rachel. Credit: Copyright 2017 Brian Goldman/Goldman Pictures All Rights Reserved Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism was very much driven by living in Texas and seeing what's going on down here with large numbers of kids not being vaccinated—with seeing what an anti-vaccine movement looks like unfiltered, unopposed. Somebody's got to speak out. — PETER HOTEZ, M.D., PH.D. B y M a g g i e G a l e h o u s e

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