As many may recall from 2021 and 2022, during the mass vaccination media campaign, Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Biological Products Advisory Committee, was a near-ubiquitous presence on U.S. cable and network television news pushing Kariko and Weissman’s mRNA shots on the American public – and indeed the world – as a “safe and effective” vaccine.  Offit changed his tune last year, slightly, by voting against the bivalent booster: the shot that instructed the body to produce the original Wuhan spike protein and the spike protein of what was then the latest Omicron variant.

“Any time you take any medicine or any biological there’s a downside.  The downside may be rare, it may be very rare, but nonetheless, there’s always a downside.  And we’re going to find out about this vaccine over time… it is a novel strategy.  We were certainly surprised by myocarditis, by pericarditis, and we’ll see whether or not over time, you know when we’re five years into this, ten years into this, fifteen years into this, whether there’s any evidence of residual myocardial disease because the reason you have myocarditis is because you’re making immune response to your own heart muscle.  It appears to be generally transient and short-lived, but there is invariably a spectrum of disease and we’ll find out about that over time, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to take those risks if the benefits are clear, but if the benefits are not clear then it’s not so reasonable to take risk, even rare risk.”

“Right, I think you get to the point where you have to compel people to do the right thing. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a great line which is that when people don’t use reason or logic to reach a certain conclusion, reason or logic isn’t going to talk them out of it. I think at this point it’s not a matter of saying vaccines are safe and effective, I think that should be obvious at this point, so you have to compel them to do the right thing.”