Paul Offit: Voting Himself Rich
The notorious “Television Doctor” Paul Offit was the codeveloper of the rotavirus vaccine that ACIP approved in that 2006 session. Offit is one of Dr. Fauci’s most prominent PIs and an exemplar of the kind of power, influence, and lucre available to PIs whose entrepreneurial energies are unobstructed by scruples. Offit is the darling of both mainstream and social media. He is a perennial guest on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN, on cable shows such as The Daily Show, and a former guest on The Colbert Report. He is the New York Times’s guest expert and provides regular editorials for the Times’s op-ed pages. He is a frequently quoted expert on evening news broadcasts and a regular contributor to online media outlets including HuffPost, Politico, and The Daily Beast.86 Media platforms uniformly identify Offit as a “vaccine expert” from the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). With Offit’s encouragement, they seldom, if ever, disclose his pervasive financial entanglements with Dr. Fauci and the pharmaceutical companies. In 2011, for example, while presenting at NIH for the Great Teachers Lecture Series, he unabashedly declared, “I’m sorry, I have no financial conflicts of interest.”87 Given his voluminous conflicts, the brashness of that claim indicates his shameless arrogance. Dr. Offit, in fact, is a vaccine developer who has made millions monetizing his relationships with vaccine companies. He occupies the “Hilleman Chair” at CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), which Merck funded with a $1.5 million donation and named in honor of the company’s heavyweight vaccinologist.88
Offit and his university and hospital affiliates have flourished largely based on hundreds of millions in grant monies from Dr. Fauci’s agency and from virtually all the big vaccine companies. In 2006 alone, his institution, CHOP, received $13 million from NIAID and $80 million from NIH. Offit’s biennial propaganda books—including titles like Vaccines: What Every Parent Should Know and Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure—are unabashed paeans to Big Pharma, and scourges to industry detractors and natural health. Offit uses these plugola tomes to exalt a wide range of “miracle” pharma products, to vilify vaccine hesitancy, and gaslight and bully the mothers of vaccine-injured children. Merck launders hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal payments to Offit through bulk purchases of these propaganda broadsides, which the company then distributes to pediatricians across the country.89
Offit is the most visible spokesperson for Pharma, its allied industries, and the chemical paradigm in general. He represents himself as an authoritative source of reliable information, but he is actually a font of wild industry ballyhoo, prevarication, and outright fraud. He brazenly claims, against all scientific evidence, that vaccine injuries are a myth—that all vaccines are safe and effective, that children can safely receive ten thousand vaccines at once,90 and that aluminum is safe in vaccines for babies because it is a “vital nutrient.”91 (There is no scientific study suggesting that aluminum is safe or that it has any nutritional value.) Offit says that mercury in vaccines is harmless and is quickly excreted from the body.92 (Published science demonstrates decisively that mercury is a cataclysmically harmful and persistent toxin, and it is well known that both ethyl and methylmercury bioaccumulate.) Dr. Offit vocally supports GMO foods93 and chemical pesticides and is an obstreperous foe of vitamins, nutrition, and integrative medicine.94 He warns against the fallacy of going “GMO free,” and takes the radical position that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) is harmless. He bitterly demonizes Rachel Carson for killing millions of people by hatching the plot against Monsanto’s DDT.95
Dr. Offit counsels his fellow PIs that lying is part of their job. He justifies any whopper that maximizes vaccine uptake. In 2017, Offit coached a group of fellow PIs, “You can never really say that MMR doesn’t cause autism but frankly when you get in front of the media you better get used to saying it because otherwise people hear a door being left open when a door shouldn’t be left open.”96 In his 2008 book, Autism’s False Prophets, Offit fabricated a conversation claiming that a vaccine safety advocate, J. B. Handley—a prominent Portland, Oregon, businessman with a severely autistic son—threatened one of Offit’s acolytes. Handley sued Offit for libel,97 forcing him to retract the statement, to publicly apologize for the fabrication, and to make a humiliating $5,000 donation to Jenny McCarthy’s autism charity.98 Despite such embarrassments, the mainstream media treat Offit’s most outlandish statements as gospel. Physicians rely upon the veracity of his pronouncements in making treatment decisions. Dr. Offit serves on the board of various pharma front groups99 and astroturf organizations100 and commands a vast network of bloggers and trolls, each of them directly or indirectly paid by the pharmaceutical companies to stifle debate, propagate lies, bully and intimidate the mothers of intellectually disabled children, silence scientific and medical dissent, and root out heresy.
In 1998, Offit sat on the CDC’s ACIP Committee and participated in the debate that added rotavirus vaccine to the mandatory schedule for the first time, neither from the debate nor the vote, despite the fact that he had his own rotavirus vaccine then in development. He voted that year to add Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals’s rotavirus vaccine, RotaShield, to the mandatory schedule despite the absence of functional safety studies. Offit knew that ACIP’s positive vote on Wyeth’s rotavirus jab would virtually guarantee a similar approval for his own rotavirus vaccine during an upcoming ACIP session.101
Before arriving at ACIP, every vaccine must first get reviewed by FDA’s sister “independent panel” called VRBPAC (which is also populated with Dr. Fauci’s and Big Pharma’s PIs), then licensed as “safe and effective” by the FDA. According to the findings of that 2000 Congressional investigation,102 four of the five FDA VRBPAC committee members who voted to license the Wyeth rotavirus vaccine that year had financial conflicts with the four pharmaceutical companies, Sanofi, Merck, Wyeth, and Glaxo, that were developing versions of the vaccine.
Once the FDA committee gave RotaShield its blessing, the vaccine moved to ACIP to vie for a CDC “recommendation,” which effectively mandates the vaccine for 3.8 million school children annually, guaranteeing the manufacturer a trapped market worth hundreds of millions.