“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce ​science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win ⁠the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce literature,” the US health chief said.

Arabs have won all those prizes. Peter Hotez, who ​is a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and specializes in vaccine development and tropical medicine, said his late ​colleague, Nobel Prize winner Ahmed Zewail, who was Arab and died in 2016, “would disagree” with the US health chief’s comments.