For the powerful with vested interests in fossil fuels or alternative cures, it’s a new twist on an old technique. If you can’t rebut the data, silence the scientist.

Climate scientist Michael E. Mann, presidential distinguished professor and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, and Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, have both experienced the confusion and fear of being targeted by media mobs aimed at them by corporations and politicians who feel threatened by their work. 

During the pandemic, the barrages got so bad that they began to feel that science itself was under attack. A first step in fighting back, they decided, was to collaborate on a book that investigated the people, the means, and the motives behind the attacks they experienced and to spell out the broader implications. That book – “Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World” – was published this week. 

Yale Climate Connections: I’d like to begin our discussion by asking each of you to recount a moment when you realized you were no longer living in the world in which you first trained to be a scientist. To play on the “Lord of the Rings” analogy you use throughout the book, when did you realize you weren’t in the Shire anymore?

Peter Hotez: It was during the pandemic. Texas was one of the worst-affected states in the country. About half of its deaths were needless because so many Texans refused to take a COVID vaccine. That’s when I realized that this is not just political rhetoric; it’s a killing force. Forty thousand to 50,000 people in my state of Texas needlessly perished because of anti-science activism. And that’s when the light bulb went off: “Wow, this is awful.” 

Michael E. Mann: My first experience of this was around 2000, shortly after my colleagues and I had published the thousand-year hockey-stick graph. Suddenly, I was seeing our work attacked on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal by right-wing pundits. I was still a postdoctoral researcher, an early-career scientist, and I had never experienced anything like that. I was aware that scientists like Ben Santer or Steve Schneider or James Hansen had been subjected to character attacks in an effort to discredit their work. Now I was being attacked by people trying to discredit me as a person in an effort to discredit my science because it was inconvenient to their interests. 

And so when I witnessed Peter being subjected to the same sort of attacks, I reached out to him, or maybe Peter reached out to me, but we found each other and became friends. Then we realized that we really had to write a book together.

Hotez: It really revved up in the summer of 2023, because I got taunted by Joe Rogan and Elon Musk to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., which I refused to do because I had dealt with him years before, and I knew he wasn’t a straight shooter when it came to vaccines. 

We talk about this episode in the book. Science is done through peer review and scientific papers and presentations at conferences and grant applications, not from debating an unqualified individual. 

So when I refused, even despite some financial incentives that Joe Rogan put out there, a massive bullying campaign was launched against me. I was portrayed as a public enemy. It was a very dark time for me. 

You can think of the attacks on climate science and the attacks on biomedicine as two circles in a Venn diagram. There’s a significant overlap where both groups of scientists are being attacked by the same actors. That was the inspiration for the book.

YCC: Were you both fans of “The Lord of the Rings”? 

Hotez: I’m not as enmeshed as Mike is. But I appreciated the metaphor. 

Mann: It seems like a tale for our times. When things feel darkest, we need to find inspiration to continue on. I think that’s an important message of the book. And so I do think “The Lord of the Rings” provides a very meaningful frame for the existential battle we’re engaged in.

YCC: The core of your book is an analysis of the five Ps and how they create the siege on science. The five Ps are the Plutocrats, the Petrostates, the Pros, the Propagandists, and the Press. You’ve already mentioned one of your plutocrats, Elon Musk. 

Mann: Elon Musk could be put in multiple categories. He’s also a propagandist; he uses Twitter, or X as he now calls it, to promote misinformation and disinformation at a massive scale. 

YCC: So we have plutocrats, incredibly wealthy people who are funding political causes and engaging with, and even owning, media outlets. How do petrostates enter into this?

Mann: Petrostates are nations whose economy is driven primarily by the extraction and selling of fossil fuels. They tend to be authoritarian in nature. They tend to promote anti-science framing to support their authoritarian interests, because the findings of science can represent a threat. Saudi Arabia, obviously, is a petrostate. Russia’s economy, too, is substantially dependent on their fossil fuels; much of what drives Vladimir Putin’s political strategy is trying to ensure that the rest of the world remains addicted to fossil fuels.

YCC: You also recognize a smaller kind of petrostate, such as states within the U.S.

Mann: Absolutely. Both of our home states, Pennsylvania and Texas, are in some manners petrostates. The economy of Pennsylvania, at least historically, was dependent on fossil fuels. In this country, oil was first discovered in Pennsylvania.

Hotez: In the book, we explain why it’s understandable that petrostates would be climate denialists, why Russia, Saudi Arabia, and even the oil-dependent states in the U.S. would go after climate science. Harder to explain was why, during COVID, the congressional representatives of U.S. petrostates would attack biomedicine and vaccines.

Petrostates are very dependent on political control. And that means attacking the intelligentsia, including scientists. And so during the pandemic, one of the first things we observed was an effort to downplay the severity of COVID because they didn’t want to see the economy falter.

But then they turned to this very self-defeating approach of trying to discredit vaccines and instead pushing alternative medicines like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, which have no impact on COVID-19. 

Mann: Yeah. Two things came together here. The first is that certain fossil fuel interests funded a lot of these early efforts, like the Great Barrington Declaration. 

But second, the pandemic was also an opportunity to undermine trust in government and trust in science and scientists. It’s convenient for plutocrats and petrostates when the electorate distrusts scientists.

YCC: For a lot of the plutocrats you talk about, oil is the source of their wealth. They then fund a lot of think tanks, which create the professional contrarians, the pros you talk about. And they have ties with the propagandists, which would be media like Fox News, the Wall Street editorial page, and a variety of podcasts. 

Let’s turn to a recent example from the news: the ongoing attempt to overturn the EPA’s endangerment finding that CO2 represents a danger to human and public well-being, and thus EPA has the authority and responsibility to regulate it.

Read: The Republican campaign to stop the U.S. EPA from protecting the climate

Mann: Right. That judgment [that carbon dioxide endangers public health and welfare] was based on a whole series of scientific reports, some of them involving massive numbers of scientists contributing to either international or national reports. There are also standing committees that continue to evaluate the data. 

The first step by Trump and his EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin was to dismiss the standing committees. Then Zeldin commissioned five scientists to reevaluate the endangerment finding in a new report. Many of them are tied to conservative interest groups and fossil fuel industry groups.

YCC: That report gets published. It’s lauded by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by the Federalist, the Washington Times, and the Washington Examiner, which are the propagandists in your framework. Then the mainstream press responds. How do you think it performed in this instance?

Mann: I think we have to distinguish between the editorial pages and the news. There are times when those distinctions get blurred, but you still have some solid coverage by career environmental journalists at The Washington Post and The New York Times. Both have provided pretty objective coverage. I was quoted in a Washington Post piece. 

YCC: Is there a plutocrat in this particular story? 

Mann: Well, there are a number of them. I wrote a piece last August for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about Project 2025 and what a threat it would pose. I went through the things they were proposing to do, and one of them was rescinding the endangerment finding. So this was all telegraphed.

And what’s Project 2025? Well, it’s very closely tied to the Heritage Foundation, Koch, and other plutocrats. So the fingerprints of the plutocrats are all over this. 

YCC: Let’s turn to your circle in the Venn diagram, Peter. We saw the same thing happen with vaccines. 

Hotez: Yes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the most outspoken anti-vaccine activists, became our Health and Human Services secretary. He started attacking vaccines back in 2005 when he wrote an article in Rolling Stone [and Salon] falsely claiming the vaccine preservative thimerosal was causing autism. That article was retracted [by Salon], but it was followed by a string of moving goalposts.

That’s how I got involved, because I have a daughter with autism, intellectual disabilities. I was asked to speak with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I found he was deeply dug in; he had zero interest in the actual science.

Tragically, since becoming secretary, he’s continued his anti-vaccine propaganda. But now he has the power to alter our vaccine infrastructure. Take his response to the measles epidemic that started in West Texas at the beginning of 2025 and has resulted in approximately 100 hospitalizations and two needless deaths among school-aged kids who were denied access to the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. He says you can either get the vaccine or this useless cocktail of nutritional supplements that come out of the health and wellness influencer industry.

And he’s still seeking to resurrect the fake autism links. But for years, he’s denied known causes of autism: the genes involved in autism. There are some environmental links, but they interact with genes in early pregnancy.

So he talks in these very dark terms. And now he wants to tamper or dismantle our whole infrastructure for ensuring the delivery of safe and effective vaccines. And that includes the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and stacking the committee with ardent anti-vaccine activists.

YCC: You get rid of the established scientists and replace them with your proxies. All right, let’s talk about remedies. You devote your last chapter to this. You say we need to communicate effectively. We need to defeat disinformation. And we need to support scientists. Where do we begin? How do we conduct this battle? 

Mann: I think there’s a certain amount of shock and awe. This assault on science, on environmental preservation, on public health science is just so comprehensive that people don’t even know where to start. They don’t know what to do.

Part of the problem is that the media too often portrays it as just random junk on the internet. Or they’ll call it “the infodemic” or “misinformation.” One point of our book is to say it’s none of those things. It’s organized, it’s deliberate, it’s politically motivated, it’s financially motivated as well. And it’s a killing force.

And so we try to create some structure to help people understand what they’re up against and how formidable it is. That’s the first important step. Then you can start to identify the vulnerabilities in this system and begin dismantling it.

YCC: You present this as a battle of good versus evil, which is what we have in “The Lord of the Rings.” There are dangers in doing that from a communication standpoint. Why do you take that risk?

Mann: There are dangers whenever you make a choice that plays to emotion, but that’s what the other side is doing. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using the emotions that we should be legitimately feeling for what’s being taken away from us, for the assault on us and our children and our grandchildren. 

There are studies that show that doomism, which is widespread today in the climate realm, can actually lead to disengagement because people throw up their hands, thinking there’s nothing they can do to stop the climate crisis. Polluters are happy with that because it leads people who would be on the front lines to the sidelines.

I’ve written about this extensively in my last two books. Righteous anger, studies have shown, can be a very enabling and motivating emotion.

Hotez: One of the problems on the biomedicine side is the silence from the academic health centers and the scientific societies. They don’t want to call attention to themselves and bring on further attacks. 

And so they’ve become risk-averse in their communications. They don’t like scientists speaking out and defending science because it creates unwelcome attention. The message to faculty and staff is mixed: You’re an academic, you’re free to speak out – but don’t screw up and put the institution at risk.

Mann: But [not speaking out] makes us invisible. Surveys repeatedly find that 75% of Americans cannot name a living scientist. But when they’re invisible, bad actors can portray scientists as nefarious characters in white lab coats, lurking in the shadows, plotting terrible things. That’s the narrative that’s out there right now.

YCC: So we’ve discussed the terrible things that have been happening in recent weeks. Are there any positive signs? Will we be able to enact the remedies you propose?

Mann: I do sense that the righteous anger I talked about is building. Will it be adequate in the midterm elections, enough to reverse course, at least partially? We’ll see. Obviously, one of the dangers right now is that this administration is dismantling democratic institutions, and that makes it more difficult to win an honest election now. But what happened in this last election is that roughly a third of the electorate sat it out. Trump didn’t even get a majority of those who turned out. He won the popular vote with something like 49%. So I think it comes down to making sure people don’t fall into despair and despondency and disengagement. We have to inspire them, with righteous anger, to show up.

YCC: Peter, what are your thoughts? 

Hotez: It may get worse before it gets better in the sense that now I’m seeing a globalization of U.S.-style anti-science rhetoric. I do a lot in Latin America because I’m in Texas. And for years, I’d go down there, talk to pediatricians, and congratulate them on holding the line against the U.S. anti-vaccine movement. Now that’s starting to falter.

Mann: Right. What happens in the U.S. doesn’t stay in the U.S. That’s why it’s so important that we take action here, because the entire planet is at stake. One of the things that both Peter and I have learned is that it’s not enough to just present our science to fellow scientists and to write up our work for academic journals. There was a time when that was possible, but it’s not now. 

You have to be an active proponent of science itself; you have to recognize that you’re up against these forces, the five Ps that we describe in the book: plutocrats, petrostates, pros, propagandists, and the press. We have to recognize that we are in a battle.

Many of the things that scientists are warned not to do in their peer-reviewed publications, you must do to communicate effectively with the public. And we need to be effective. 

But we have to be faithful to the science at the same time. The other side has no compunctions about engaging in dishonest discourse or promoting disinformation and propaganda. So that’s the challenge: to be both faithful to the science and effective at the same time.