Respectfully, Dr. Offit: Where There Is Risk, There MUST be Choice.
Who Is Dr. Paul Offit?
Dr. Paul Offit, MD is a member of various vaccine committees and a pediatrician who, according to his website, specializes in infectious diseases and is an “expert on vaccines, immunology, and virology”. Dr. Offit spent time during the COVID pandemic forcefully advocating for widespread vaccine mandates. Now, as “the dust is settling on this pandemic,” Dr. Offit appears to be backpedaling much of his earlier commentary, even going so far as to act incredulous that COVID vaccine mandates still exist in some universities in the US.
During the COVID era, there were “misinformation busters” everywhere, doing their best to ensure that people adhered to “public health” guidelines and mandates. Dr. Paul Offit has been among the most prominent, appearing all over the media throughout the pandemic to push for public health guidelines. Now, blaming some prior mistakes on “learning in retrospect,” Dr. Offit downplays, justifies, or ignores his earlier draconian stances.
Dr. Offit spent the pandemic using his position to push COVID vaccines onto all ages as strongly as possible, including advocating for vaccine mandates for schoolchildren. Now, however, he appears to admit that perhaps we never needed mandates in the first place and even expresses concern that mandates still exist in some universities.
Dr. Offit’s credentials are manifold:
- CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices- Former Member
- Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania – Professor of vaccinology, pediatrics
- The The Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) – Director
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) working group of vaccines – Member
- FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC)- Member
- Vaccinate Your Family, The Franklin Institute – Board Member
(Note – this organization has a long list of donors that includes Pfizer, Merck, J&J, and Dr. Offit himself.)
As public as he was as a “misinformation buster”, on June 8, Dr. Offit appeared on a podcast of an organization called JOWMA (Jewish Orthodox Women’s Medical Association). While Dr. Offit still insists that the COVID vaccine is “safe and effective,” the JOWMA interviewer, Dr. Alisa Minkin, MD, asked Dr. Offit some tough questions that seemed to have caught him off guard. In this interview, Dr. Offit’s tone was far more cautious than it has been for the past two and a half years.
A look at Dr. Offit’s past stance on children’s COVID vaccines and mandates from back in 2021 reveals that he advocated HARD for vaccine mandates in schools, Not only that, he urged schools to utilize different tools to convince parents to vaccinate their children.
- From an interview with Michael Smerconish, on his show Smerconish on CNN:
Michael Smerconish: “Should the COVID-19 vaccine be added to that list (of vaccines that are mandated for children to attend school)?”
Dr. Paul Offit: “Yes… The thing about vaccine mandates is, they work!”
- In a Nov 2021 interview with the American Medical Association (AMA) Dr. Offit said, in response to the question of whether the COVID vaccine should be mandated by schools, “Yes… Sometimes you just have to compel people to do the right thing by mandating a vaccine”.
- In the same interview, when asked how to approach the vaccine with your children, Dr. Offit said: “So I think we need to try and explain to the parent and to the child that this makes them superheroes, this makes them Superman. Now the virus or bacteria can just bounce off them”
- More recently, in an April 2023 Substack article titled “Tying the Hands of Public Health,” Dr. Offit’s chief complaint about the pandemic response is that the flood of lawsuits brought across the country in response to mandates effectively “tied the hands of public health” before the arrival of the next pandemic. In other words, he’s frustrated that public health authorities won’t necessarily be able to force behaviors in future pandemics as they did during COVID, due to the backlash.
JOWMA Podcast
Now, let’s see how Dr. Offit’s tone has changed in the JOWMA podcast, and his surprisingly candid responses to tough questions.
1. “What Human Price Did The COVID Vaccine Demand?”
Dr. Offit responded: For the mRNA vaccines the “price was small.” He discussed myocarditis as the main risk from the mRNA vaccines, but asserted that it was “relatively rare and mild” and that it was a “self-resolving phenomenon.”
Dr. Offit added that the risk of getting vaccine-induced myocarditis for boys between the ages of 16-17 is 1/6600, and thus concluded in his response that the overall price for the mRNA vaccines was very small.
Dr. Peter McCullough, in contrast to these claims, describes exactly what myocarditis does to the body and how it can cause death.
2. “The Price is in Distrust”
Dr. Minkin asked Dr. Offit if the price paid for mandates was in distrust (of the medical system). Instead of answering directly, Dr. Offit pivoted his response to avoid discussing distrust aimed at himself and his colleagues. Instead, he directed the audience’s attention to his claim that both Presidential Administrations were at fault for distrust among medical professionals.
The examples he gave included President Trump promoting hydroxychloroquine as an early treatment for COVID, and pushing the FDA to approve the vaccine before the 2020 election. Dr. Offit also mentioned President Biden’s announcement of a booster rollout to those over the age of 16, in 2021, before the regulatory committees had passed approval, causing confusion among public health officials.
It’s unfortunate that Dr. Offit couldn’t simply answer the question directly or take responsibility for his own role in sowing distrust among the general public.
3. Natural Immunity Vs. Vaccine Mandates
Masks: Dr. Minkin brought up the specific example of masks, challenging the confusing mixed messaging that was given in the early days of COVID.
Dr. Offit’s response was: “Anyone who commented on this virus, or this disease, or this vaccine early in this pandemic was wrong.”
Dr. Offit, I respectfully submit The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) as proof that this was not the case. The GBD was a statement signed in 2020 by Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorf, and Sunetra Gupta, that has been borne out to be correct in every aspect.
Natural Immunity vs Vaccine Mandates:
Dr. Offit conceded that the White House knew that natural immunity was strong by early 2021, nonetheless required vaccines for everyone. Dr. Offit admitted that he was included in a meeting in 2021 with the Biden administration regarding allowing natural immunity to be recognized in relation to vaccine mandates:
“I can tell you that the administration was considering it. They considered saying ‘in this setting’ (because we were starting to mandate vaccines) if someone comes in a workplace or hospital and says I don’t want to get vaccinated, but I’ve been naturally infected, and I think natural infection will prevent me from getting a serious disease, therefore I don’t want to get a vaccine, there’s every reason to believe that natural infection would prevent against serious disease, and the data came out fairly quickly showing that was true. But the administration, for more reasons having to do with bureaucratic concerns- because this added another layer (to prove one was naturally infected)… and that was just another layer they didn’t want to consider”
This confusing response essentially acknowledges that vaccine mandates were political, not scientific, from the get-go.
4. Risk/Benefit Assessment
Dr. Minkin asked Dr. Offit about doing risk/benefit assessments individually, instead of a “one size fits all” solution. She brought up a specific example of a teenage boy, in the high-risk age group for myocarditis, who’s already had COVID or COVID plus one shot, yet the message and the mandates were to disregard the natural immunity and to keep vaccinating him.
Dr. Offit responded that it was a fair point but “again, you learn this in retrospect.”
Respectfully to Dr. Offit – that’s a contradiction to what you just said. You admitted that you and your colleagues knew that natural immunity was strong in early 2021, well before the mandates rolled out for younger age groups.
Dr. Offit also brought up university vaccine mandates. He made it clear that he does not think that these are reasonable or necessary now.
Again, as a prime driver of college mandates, Dr. Offit cannot simply wash away his previous stances that had real-world effects on millions.
5. Where There Is Risk There Must be Choice
Dr. Offit’s current stance is that anyone who has not yet been vaccinated or been naturally infected should get the COVID vaccine. Dr. Offit acknowledged that vaccines pose risk, but he ignored the issue of choice vs. force. What he neglected to mention is that while he himself stated that you could “argue that you never need mandates“, the fact is that there WERE mandates. Widespread, tyrannical mandates placed millions of Americans in heart-wrenching positions that violated their human civil rights and bodily autonomy to its very core.
“If you’ve never been vaccinated and you’ve never been naturally infected, you should get vaccinated. That much is clear. I mean, you could argue that you never need mandates. Anyone who looks at the data and has never been vaccinated or naturally infected should get a vaccine, so to me, that’s clear. But you always take a risk, there’s no risk-free choice”
Respectfully, Dr. Offit- that choice belonged in the hands of every single American individually, and that choice was not granted to them. Where there is risk, there must be choice.
6. Original Antigenic Sin
Astonishingly, Dr. Offit admitted that the new bivalent boosters weren’t any better than the original monovalent vaccine, due to a concept called “original antigenic sin”, which is something that “COVID dissidents” have been warning about for years.
Geert Vanden Bossche, PhD, a vaccine research expert warned the world against mass vaccination during a pandemic in early 2021:
“Ongoing mass vaccination deployments are “highly likely to further enhance ‘adaptive’ immune escape as none of the current
vaccines will prevent replication/transmission of viral variants” As such, “The more we
use these vaccines for immunizing people during a pandemic, the more infectious the
the virus will become”. And “With increasing infectiousness comes an increased likelihood
of viral resistance to the vaccines”. He claims his beliefs are basic principles taught in a
student’s first vaccinology class – “One shouldn’t use a prophylactic vaccine in
populations exposed to high infectious pressure”
Dr. Offit: “Boosters boost, but it wasn’t really much of an advance because of something called Original Antigenic Sin”
Respectfully, Dr. Offit, why did you and your colleagues ignore Dr. Vanden Bossche’s warning, and now claim that you knew about this issue all along?
7. Trust Your Doctor and Don’t Do Your Own Research
Dr. Offit chastises people who no longer blindly listen to what their doctor says, and disparages patients who “do their own research”.
Moving Forward
In an ideal world, those who were correct in their COVID assessments and predictions early on, such as the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, should be the ones to lead the nation in public health moving forward. Those who were wrong, or said things they knew to be untrue, such as Dr. Offit, should be removed from positions of power and influence as quickly as possible.
As Dr. Offit acknowledged in the interview “the dust is settling” on the pandemic, and that means the time for scrutiny and investigations is now.
One of our country’s most important freedoms is that of free speech.
Agree with this essay? Disagree? Join the debate by writing to DailyClout HERE.
Dr. Offit is a good, brilliant, decent man. He’s been a voice of calm and reason throughout the pandemic. It’s unfortunate that you felt the need to cherry pick from his words to propagate antivax misinformation. Couldn’t debunk everything in one comment, but relying on Geert Vanden Bossche’s inane and false theories about “vaccine pressure” is huge fail on your part. Pretty much nothing he’s said about how the immune system works is accurate. Do some real research to understand why. Good luck.
The clip where Dr. Offit discusses the immune response system / original antigenic sin is particularly illuminating. If one listens closely, it shows how carefully weaved is the web of deception by the elites like Dr. Offit. When one so-called white lie gets damaged beyond repair in the public mind the elite class just spins again with other bits of deception now taking center stage. Astonishingly Offit continues to spin the narrative that the shots (no matter what version of course, for we know that whatever pharma makes for us is safe and effective) protect against severe disease from all variants. He cites no data to support this contention (and there never will be any, the FDA and CDC and pharma are making sure of that). And of course, other silly little endpoints that should be of concern are not mentioned by Dr. Offit. You know, things like the relationship of the number of these shots taken with the ongoing likelihood that one catches Covid, the rate of reemergence of previously dormant diseases, and all cause-mortality. But we are told we should trust the self-proclaimed experts regardless of the breadth and depth of conflicts of interest that might be revealed. I loved the final clip about this topic juxtapositioning Dr. Offit’s words with Jimmy Dore’s hilarious commentary filled with biting truths about the dangers of this sort of attitude!
I recently came across a draft of and outline for a video on Paul Offit from 2015 that I never made.
For those of you who don’t know about the complaints against him from before the pandemic.
https://gingertaylor.substack.com/p/15-reasons-not-to-trust-paul-offit