Event Recording
In conversation with Jeremy S. Faust
September 26, 2025
What is the connection between the health of our communities and the health of our democracy? Environmental justice activist Catherine Coleman Flowers and public health advocate Peter Hotez join us for an illuminating conversation on their tireless work to overcome deep-rooted social iniquities and an increasingly dangerous anti-science movement that compromises the well-being of the most vulnerable Americans. “No one in science wants to talk about politics. Our training says we should be politically neutral,” Hotez has written. “But how do we as scientists uncouple anti-science attacks from politics? How do we uncouple anti-science because it doesn’t belong, and it’s going to kill people?”
Flowers and Hotez discuss how they are reckoning with the effects of the climate crisis, as well as the devastating Hookworm study that first brought them together and exposed the widespread neglect of rural communities with limited access to clean water, air, sanitation and soil.
“It’s very important for us to learn how to work together to solve big problems, so that our children and grandchildren can live in a more sustainable world,” Flowers has written. “The issues can seem so overwhelming. Thinking back to the courage and fortitude of the Civil Rights Movement is such a gift for understanding how we possibly can find a counterforce to all this.”
WIT Literary Festival livestreams and recordings were produced by CTSB with promotional support from The Nation.
Learn more about WIT 2025 here.
Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), which seeks the implementation of best practices to address the reduction of health and economic disparities, improve access to clean air, water, and soil in marginalized rural communities by influencing policy, inspiring innovation, catalyzing relevant research, and amplifying the voices of community leaders. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, she sits on the board of directors of the Climate Reality Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Rocky Mountain Institute. She served as the co-vice chair of the inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and is a practitioner-in-residence at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. She is the author of Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope (2025)and Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret (2020) and has written for the New York Review of Books and The New York Times, among other publications. In 2023, she was recognized as one of the TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world and was recently named a TIME magazine Earth Award honoree.
Peter Hotez is a Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also Co-Director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine. He is a vaccine scientist, biochemist, and pediatrician who has led or co-led the development of vaccines for parasitic infections-hookworm, schistosomiasis, Chagas disease-currently in clinical trials, and several coronavirus vaccines, including two low-cost COVID vaccines for global health so far administered to 100 million children and adults in India and Indonesia. He is the author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, Preventing the Next Pandemic, and The Deadly Rise of Anti-science. His new book, co-authored with the climate scientist Michael Mann, is Science Under Siege (2025). The author of more than 700 scientific papers, he is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has been honored with numerous awards for his achievements in public health and his support of scientific freedom. He served as U.S. Science Envoy for the Middle East and North Africa in 2015-16 and appears frequently on national media to explain biomedicine and pandemics.
Jeremy S. Faust is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, editor-in-chief of MedPage Today, and the author of the Inside Medicine newsletter on Substack. His research on COVID-19 outcomes, medical epidemiology, and public health policy has appeared in many scientific journals, magazines, and newspapers, and he has been a frequent guest on national and international news programs. From 2010 to 2020, he served as board president and artistic advisor for Roomful of Teeth. He now serves as conductor and artistic director of The Longwood Chorus, Boston’s 85-voice ensemble of medical and science professionals.
