Dr. Peter Hotez's battle against the 'anti-science confederacy' is a lifetime in the making FacebookTwitterEmail Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer The antivaccine movement taught vaccine researcher Peter Hotez not to ignore conspiracy theories, no matter how scientifically unfounded. But in late spring of 2020, the virulence of the made-up stories he began hearing about COVID-19 astounded him. One hoax held that Bill Gates had created the new coronavirus to force all Americans to be vaccinated with eensy devices that would create a sci-fi global-surveillance network. Another said that the launch of a 5G network in Wuhan, China, had spawned the virus. Some people claimed, falsely, that Gates, Hotez and Dr. Anthony Fauci stood to get rich off patents related to the COVID vaccine.