Peter J. Hotez is one of America’s most prominent vaccine experts. A professor at Baylor College of Medicine, he’s also co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, which has developed and licensed a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine that has been distributed widely in the third world.

He’s also among our most prominent critics of the anti-vaccine and anti-science movements that have so thoroughly infected our public discourse — most recently in his 2023 book “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.” In my columns I’ve quoted him often on that theme.

But Hotez, 66, has had nothing to do with research into the origins of COVID-19, which is supposedly the principal topic of inquiry by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

So that raises the question of why the subcommittee chose to post a tweet about Hotez on Monday, completely out of the blue.

The tweet accused Hotez of complicity with an effort by David Morens of the National Institutes of Health to circumvent freedom-of-information inquiries by using a private, rather than official, email account. As these things go, the tweet exposes Hotez to public vituperation on social media and possibly physical harm.

The tweet read as follows:

“Meet Dr. Peter Hotez. Friend and potential accomplice to Dr. Fauci’s Senior Advisor — Dr. David Morens. New evidence suggests Dr. Hotez frequently communicated with Dr. Morens about FOIA evasion tactics and COVID-19 origins.”

Also on Monday, the subcommittee demanded by letter that Hotez turn over all documents and communications between him and six federal agencies and 25 individuals, most of whom are scientists researching COVID’s origins. The letter asserted that Hotez was “involved in frequent e-mail discussions” with Morens and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance “regarding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.”

A subcommittee spokesperson told me by email that its rationale for targeting Hotez is that among the 30,000 pages of emails Morens provided for its inquiry, “Dr. Hotez is involved in thousands.” In its letter, however, the panel cited only two emails; there are indications in the files it has released that to the extent Hotez is “involved” in emails with Morens, it’s as an addressee in group exchanges with other scientists.

The spokesperson also stated that “Dr. Hotez has relevant communications regarding the origins of COVID-19 with not only many individuals in the federal government and other scientists pertinent to our investigation, but also with Chinese scientists and researchers.” If it knew that, however, why would it need to ask Hotez to provide the communications? Plainly it’s engaged in a fishing expedition.

In any event, the panel’s letter doesn’t cite any evidence that Hotez was “a potential accomplice” of Morens’, much less justify singling him out via a tweet. The subcommittee’s Democratic membership, who I previously condemned for their cowardly and shameful complicity in the panel’s attack on Daszak, didn’t respond to my request for comment.

Its tweet and its letter demonstrate how far the subcommittee has gone off the rails, its inquiry having deteriorated into a campaign to smear legitimate scientists working on what may be the most important public health imperative of our time: preparing to fight the next pandemic by understanding the latest one.

The message, observes scientist and science writer Philipp Markolin, is crystal clear. It’s “speak up against us and our political myth making, and we will publicly smear and punish you with the power of the state.”

As I’ve written, to advance this campaign the subcommittee has placed respected scientists in the dock and showered them with public vituperation, misrepresented their research and ridiculed the scientific method. It has stigmatized EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, provoking government bureaucrats to cut off their funding.

On Monday, the subcommittee turned its gunsights on Fauci, a revered expert in virology and immunology who was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years and a key figure in the development of therapies to fight HIV infection.

That hearing was grounded to a complete halt when member Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a tear accusing Fauci of killing dogs and asserting “he belongs in prison.” The panel struggled mightily to get Greene to shut up so the hearing could continue. But that was only one low note among many as the GOP majority lived down to our worst expectations.

Instead of responsibly examining the origins of COVID, the subcommittee has burrowed into a series of rabbit holes. It has sought proof that Fauci manipulated a scientific paper to “suppress” scientific findings that the pandemic originated with a leak from a Chinese virology institute.

That effort has failed because not only is there no evidence to support it, but because its own evidence proves that Fauci urged researchers to notify law enforcement authorities if they determined that a lab-leak actually happened. As I’ve reported, learned scientific opinion overwhelmingly supports the theory that the pandemic originated in a spillover of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, from infected wildlife to humans.

The subcommittee also has become fixated on evidence that Morens deliberately tried to evade public records laws and NIH policies by conducting some of his correspondence with NIH-funded scientists via private emails, which he mistakenly thought would protect them from freedom-of-information requests. The members may be right about Morens’ activities, but that doesn’t get them any closer to the origins of COVID — after 15 months of wheel-spinning.

That brings us back to the attack on Hotez. He appears to be an innocent bystander to the subcommittee’s campaign of character assassination waged against Fauci and other leaders in COVID research until the panel tried to drag him through the swamp it created.

Hotez hasn’t participated in research into COVID’s origins; he mentioned that research in his book about anti-science, but only as an illustration of how the lab-leak theory became part of the disinformation epidemic related to COVID. That epidemic includes misrepresentations about the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines, which is an area in which Hotez has considerable expertise.

So let’s examine the subcommittee’s claims about Hotez.

How many emails are behind the subcommittee’s assertion in its letter to Hotez that “you were involved in frequent e-mail discussions” with Morens and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance regarding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic”?

Two, according to the letter itself and the file of emails the subcommittee released as evidence in its investigation of Morens.

Both emails were cited in the subcommittee’s letter to Hotez. But neither has anything to do with the origins of COVID-19. In one, Hotez tells Morens in a jocular tone that he has sent “many emails to [Fauci] over the years, but I don’t think anything incriminating.”

The second referred to an email that Morens mistakenly sent to Hotez but was meant for Daszak; Hotez wrote back to advise Morens that he sent the email to the wrong Peter, which Morens promptly acknowledged.

The panel’s letter, issued over the signature of its chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), points out rather gleefully that Hotez responded to its tweet by stating, also by tweet, that “anyone who wants my emails and can stomach the Qanon, Putin, and Nazi threats is more than welcomed to them. Some I’ve published in my books, others in my articles on anti-science and antisemitism.”

The members seemed to take that as an official offer, as opposed to a mordant joke. But it’s unclear that Hotez even has the authority to fulfill the subcommittee’s demand, since he conducts all his correspondence via his Baylor email account. That suggests that a decision about whether and how to respond would be in Baylor’s hands; the school hasn’t yet responded to the subcommittee.

The fact is that the subcommittee has wasted nearly a year and a half chasing a chimera. Its members have nattered on endlessly about their responsibility to safeguard the taxpayers’ money. But how much has it squandered in this spavined, untrustworthy inquiry?

Wenstrup and his colleagues can’t be unaware that their public smear of Hotez may well place him in the crosshairs of people intent on doing him harm. Last year, he was accosted in front of his home by two anti-vaccine agitators demanding that he debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about vaccine safety. In his book he reproduced vituperative emails, including one that called him “a living Mengele.”

That’s the atmosphere pervading the public discussion of science in the U.S. today. The Select Subcommittee has done its best to contribute to this poisonous miasma. It needs to retract its statement about Hotez, post-haste. And the Democrats on the subcommittee need to speak out about their GOP colleagues’ invasion of a scientist’s privacy and their vilification of science and scientists generally. If they remain silent, they can’t evade responsibility for the consequences.

SpaceX launched its Starship spacecraft into orbit Thursday in a fourth test flight intended to assess its ability to control the craft’s descent.

Stacked on a Super Heavy rocket, the Starship capsule blasted off at 5:50 a.m. Pacific time from the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, launchpad. The rocket, the most powerful ever built, is designed to eventually send astronauts to the moon and to Mars.

The goal of Thursday’s uncrewed test flight of Starship is to have the spacecraft and its rocket return to Earth in controlled descents — the capsule in the Indian Ocean and the rocket in the Gulf of Mexico — but there were no plans to recover the stages.

In future flights, Elon Musk’s Hawthorne-based company is expected to attempt landings on pads so the spacecraft and rocket can be reused, an essential technology to making space flight cheaper.

The space-launch system, at 397 feet, is taller and has about twice the thrust of the Saturn 5 and Apollo capsule that carried men to the moon. It is collectively referred to as Starship.

This was the second major launch this week and came after Boeing on Wednesday finally launched its Starliner spacecraft with a crew aboard to the International Space Station. Starliner, which has had its launches repeatedly delayed, is competing to service the station with SpaceX, which already has sent more than half a dozen crews to the orbiting lab. Starliner is expected to dock with the station at 9:15 a.m. Thursday.

Thursday’s flight came about four months after a March 14 test flight when Starship reached several milestones. However, the capsule burned up in the atmosphere on descent while the rocket failed to achieve a controlled reentry to earth.

Starship did reach orbit, though, opened and closed its payload doors and transferred fuel from one tank to another, a critical function for flights into space. The test flight also was the longest yet of the spacecraft.

The craft’s first flight in April 2023 lasted only a few minutes before the booster lost power and exploded on ascent. A second launch in November was more successful, with the rocket separating from the capsule before both were lost.

SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., views flight failures as part of its development process, an approach that differs from traditional aerospace companies that have long preferred to perfect their technology on the ground.

Starship is part of NASA’s Artemis program to return humans to the moon, with the goal of establishing a permanent base to facilitate missions to Mars. The program includes a second spacecraft called Orion, manufactured by NASA, Northrop Grumman and Airbus, and a Space Launch System rocket built by Boeing, Northrop Grumman and other companies.

Orion circled the moon in a successful 25-day mission that blasted off in November 2022 without a crew. A mission carrying astronauts is scheduled for no earlier than September 2025.

Starship also has a commercial component. It would allow the privately held company to launch more and larger Starlink broadband satellites than the company’s existing lineup of Falcon 9 rockets.

Last week, Japanese e-commerce billionaire Yusaku Maezawa tweeted that he had pulled out of a contract signed in 2018 to fly in Starship around the moon due to delays in the spacecraft’s development. Maezawa, who wanted to fly with a half dozen artists, said he had expected the private space trip to take place in 2023.

Benjamin and Christine Granillo bought their 2.25-acre property in San Bernardino County four decades ago. They built their home by hand and surrounded it with a lush grove of avocado, orange and lemon trees.

“We thought we’d be here for the rest of our life,” Christine Granillo, 77, said as she tended to her trees on a recent afternoon.

But their neighborhood in unincorporated Bloomington is rapidly transforming, as developers convert the 10 Freeway and its adjacent communities into a logistics corridor connecting goods shipped into Southern California ports with online shoppers across the nation. An industrial real estate company based in Orange County is demolishing 117 homes and ranches in rural Bloomington to make way for more than two million square feet of warehousing space. The project will serve as yet another distribution center dedicated to storing and moving the vast array of products consumers want delivered to their doorsteps.

All the neighbors across the street from the Granillos sold their homes to the developer, and many have already been bulldozed. The Granillos opted not to sell — and now look out their stately front gate at the rubble, soon to be supplanted with a 479,000-square-foot fulfillment center. Their street will become a busy truck route. Next door will be a parking lot with hundreds of truck and trailer stalls.

Christine Granillo mourns the loss of her neighbors and her view of the San Bernardino Mountains. But, she added, “What can you do about it? There’s really nothing you can do about it.”

In November 2022, San Bernardino County supervisors voted 4-0 to approve the Bloomington Business Park, a 213-acre industrial park that promises to bring several thousand jobs to Bloomington, a majority Latino community of 23,000 residents.

The deal came with trade-offs familiar to the Inland Empire communities being asked to shoulder the massive distribution centers integral to America’s online shopping habit: An environmental impact report found the development would have “significant and unavoidable” impacts on air quality. But it would bring jobs to a working-class community in need of them, and Howard Industrial Partners has pledged to provide millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements: new streets with traffic lights and sidewalks; a modern sewer system in an area that still relies on aging septic systems.

And because the warehouse project would be about 50 feet from Zimmerman Elementary School, the developer agreed to pay $44.5 million to the Colton Joint Unified School District in a land swap that will usher in a state-of-the-art school nearby.

Joaquin Castillejos advocates for Bloomington residents whose neighborhoods are targeted for warehouse projects. But he said people are experiencing the impact of years of poor planning.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Gary Grossich, a member of Bloomington’s Municipal Advisory Council, recommended that supervisors support the development. Surrounding cities like Rialto and Fontana are embracing warehouse development, he said, and this was an opportunity for Bloomington to reap the benefits of a booming industry.

“The warehouse industry was the hot market,” he said, “and that was the only way that myself and others could see that we were going to get to the greater good, which is to get more sheriff’s deputies, more public safety, more services for our community and eventually balance our books.”

Mike Tunney, vice president of development at Howard Industrial Partners, said the developer shares those goals. “Overcoming these types of challenges and opportunities are the fundamental tenets of our development philosophy,” Tunney said.

But the project has left Bloomington fractured, with a stinging sense of winners and losers: Many who sold their homes say they got a good price and were happy to move on, while many of the neighbors left behind see a future with more concrete and semi-trailers and a hollowing out of the community’s rural culture.

Esmeralda Tabares, left, calls the conversion of rural neighborhoods to industrial developments “just a complete shift in the culture and lifestyle” of Bloomington.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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Esmeralda Tabares, 23, part of a group called Concerned Neighbors of Bloomington, described the transition from rural residential to industrial development as “just a complete shift in the culture and lifestyle we have.” Many Bloomington residents ride horses; her family owns a plant nursery.

She questions why San Bernardino County is relying on a developer to provide the community with critical infrastructure such as sidewalks and sewers.

“It’s just easier for them to shift to a warehouse and say, ‘Well, we’re going to let them come in and take over your community,’” she said. “But now what community is that going to be? Because they’re taking people out, and soon who’s going to go to the school? Who’s going to live here?”

Agents associated with Howard Industrial Partners approached Raquel Diaz several years ago about selling her home in a Bloomington neighborhood a mile south of the 10 Freeway with an offer that wouldn’t go through until the county approved the project.

She and her family had purchased their home in 2012 for $140,000. It was the first home for her family of five, she said, and they were “super excited.” But the three-bedroom house on Locust Avenue quickly became a nightmare.

The house flooded whenever it rained. It reeked of moisture, and she and her husband worried about raising young kids amid mold.

Their street had no sidewalks, but that didn’t stop people from speeding by in their cars. Accidents were alarmingly common, she said. Her kids were forbidden from checking the street-side mailbox or taking out the trash.

“We ended up with a lemon of a house,” she said. “We were happy to be in Bloomington, and it just didn’t end up working out for us.”

By the time the county approved the warehouse development, home prices across Southern California had skyrocketed. Diaz said the developer encouraged them to find a home they wanted to buy — even if it cost above the price they had originally negotiated — and to make sure it was on a hill. The company would cover the cost.

Unincorporated Bloomington is transforming, as developers look to raze neighborhoods near the 10 Freeway to create a logistics corridor dedicated to online shopping needs.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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They selected a five-bedroom, five-bathroom home in Highland, a nearby suburb at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains, and closed on the property in January 2023 for $1.05 million. The 3,800-square-foot home has a pool and views. It’s on a sewer system, and while their residential street doesn’t have sidewalks, the nearby roads have sidewalks and bike lanes.

“It still feels unreal where we ended up,” she said. “It’s beautiful. I completely love where I live.”

Diaz has heard other residents say that homeowners were harassed and pressured to sell. She is adamant that’s not the case.

“No one is forcing me out,” she said. “It was a blessing to get the opportunity to be able to have a new start.”

Carolina Rios also saw the developer’s offer as an opportunity.

Rios and her family paid $225,000 for their Bloomington home and lived there about 13 years. She has fond memories of the three-bedroom house on Laurel Avenue: She threw her daughter’s quinceañera there, and she and her husband were married in the yard.

But the house was old, and instead of storm drains, the homes on her street had pipes under the driveways that flowed into ditches. The street flooded every time it rained. They had to walk atop pallets and bricks to cross the yard.

“Across the street, their ditch was 24/7, 365 days a year full of water and mosquitoes and raccoons and snakes and all sorts of fun wildlife to go to the zoo and look at,” she said. “But not in my house, around my kids.”

She agreed to sell in 2016; she said the developer adjusted the purchase price in 2023 — to $1.4 million — after the county approved the project, in recognition of rising home prices. In late December, she closed on a new house in Riverside with an extra bedroom, a swimming pool and an enclosed patio. She paid $1.2 million in cash.

She knows some people are opposed to warehouse development, but she says the industry is bringing good jobs. Her oldest children, ages 27 and 24, both work at a FedEx warehouse in Bloomington, where they have flexible hours and get frequent raises, she said.

Jessie Ortiz practices roping skills in the backyard of his family’s Bloomington home.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

While some homeowners seized on the opportunity to move out of Bloomington, Felipe and Blanca Ortiz felt blindsided when their landlord sold the ranch home they were renting to the developer.

The Ortizes and their four children have lived on the two-acre property for more than a decade. They’ve maintained their family traditions from the Mexican state of Morelos, raising horses, goats and chickens on their small property.

They loved riding their horses through the hills behind their home, and regularly traveled to other cities to ride their horses in parades, decked out in traditional Mexican cowboy and cowgirl attire. They organized 100-horse processions as fundraisers for neighbors in need.

“It’s their entire lives,” Felipe Ortiz said, as he shared TikTok videos of his kids performing on horseback.

Felipe Ortiz and his family are being evicted from the ranch home they have rented for more than a decade.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

In February, the family got a notice informing them their rental agreement would end in 60 days. It came from a company connected to Timothy Howard of Howard Industrial Partners — the only indication the family had that their rental home had been sold.

That same day, footage from the Ortiz family’s security camera shows an excavator knocking down the chain link gate in front of the ranch. The two youngest Ortiz kids, ages 6 and 12, were home at the time. The family viewed it as an act of intimidation.

Tunney, with Howard Industrial Partners, said it was “regrettable” that the previous owner didn’t disclose the sale to the Ortiz family.

“Additionally, it was not disclosed to us that there were occupants on the property,” Tunney said. “The incident with the excavator was inadvertent as the operator was scheduled to work at a nearby site and confused the addresses.”

Several months later, the family is still living in the home, waiting out the eviction process. Ortiz says he is struggling to find another property that will accommodate the family of six and their eight horses. As their search wears on, he said, his kids are traumatized. His youngest returns from school each day wondering if their home has been knocked down.

“Every day, the machines pass by here to knock down homes behind us,” Ortiz said. “And you’re left with the fear that they are coming to knock down our house.”

As homes are demolished in rural Bloomington to make way for a warehousing project, the neighbors who remain look out at rubble.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

As the demolitions proceed, a coalition of environmental groups has sued San Bernardino County and Howard Industrial Partners, trying to halt the project. The lawsuit, alleging violations of state environmental and fair housing laws, seeks to vacate the county’s approval and require a more “meaningful” review.

Adrian Martinez is deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice, the group representing the defendants. He called their effort a key moment in “the fight against the freight industry and its disregard for public health.”

“There are people who don’t want these warehouses in their communities and they just want to be left with peace,” Martinez said. “I think the inflection point is this kind of misguided notion that to give a community resources, you have to stuff thousands of trucks in the community and air pollution. And there’s no place in the country that this story is more robust than the Inland Empire and Bloomington in particular.”

A hearing is scheduled for later this month in San Bernardino County Superior Court.

“Everyday, the machines pass by here to knock down homes behind us,” Felipe Ortiz says of his family’s plight. “And you’re left with the fear that they are coming to knock down our house.”

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Meanwhile, just a couple miles away, residents in southeastern Bloomington are starting to hear from developers interested in building more warehouses in the area.

Daniela Vargas, 24, said her parents bought their house there more than two decades ago. For her parents, both Mexican immigrants, it’s a deep source of pride to own a home they could pass down to their four children.

Vargas’ family raises chickens on their land, but the surrounding area is pockmarked with industry. Just a short drive from the family’s home is another warehouse complex, a railroad and the 10 Freeway.

Recently, they’ve received phone calls and “strange-looking mail” from developers interested in buying their home, Vargas said: “It looks like a check that says, ‘Here’s X amount of money, call us to make it real.’”

She said her family doesn’t want to leave, but it feels inevitable that their neighborhood will be the next to transform.

“Anyone that moves out of Bloomington, it’s all valid reasoning,” Vargas said. “My family is really prideful. But if the decision comes that warehouses are going to be developed here and everybody is leaving, we can’t remain with so much pollution around us, with so much traffic and with no real neighbors or neighborhood amenities.”

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.