One of the most media-savvy vaccine advocates in the U.S., perhaps second only to record-breaking federal pensioner Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, has allegedly been caught falsely claiming he was not invited to address a federal vaccine advisory panel’s recent meeting and spreading wildly inflated numbers on hepatitis B infections, a subject of the meeting.The perceived gotcha on Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia but also a skeptic of COVID-19 boosters for healthy young people, prompted critics to flag other instances in which Offit allegedly refused to engage and to pick apart his media appearances and choice of venues, such as entertainment-focused TMZ.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials “repeatedly” contacted Offit to present at its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ meeting last week, “via emails, phone calls and a speaker-request form,” physician-turned-investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi wrote this week, contradicting Offit’s claim to CNN on Dec. 5 on day two of ACIP’s meeting.
“I actually wasn’t invited to present at today’s meeting” but rather invited in October “to speak about vaccines to this group,” Offit told the host in the 9-minute interview when she asked why he declined to speak. (He has appeared on CNN several times this year.)
Offit then tried to redirect the conversation toward how ACIP had become an “anti-vaccine advisory committee” that threatens children’s health by no longer recommending COVID vaccines by default. He didn’t elaborate on how young children “clearly … benefit” from COVID vaccination, given their near-nil risk of serious harm from the virus.
When the host pressed Offit to clarify what he thought the October invitation meant, he said he received a “vague recommendation to come speak to us” but not to speak “about this subject” – hepatitis B vaccination, whose recommendations ACIP changed later that day to wait two months to vaccinate newborns whose mothers test negative for the virus.
Offit strongly supports vaccination within 24 hours of birth, doing a promo for the Hepatitis B Foundation a week before the ACIP meeting. “In the 30 years since infants have been getting this vaccine at birth, we have virtually eliminated this disease in young people. Why would we stop now knowing how successful we have been?” he asked.
Demasi posted screenshots of CDC emails to Offit’s address at Penn Medicine, after confirming with Penn Medicine itself the correct address, and to his address at CHOP, for which the CDC also filled out a speaker-request form seeking Offit.
The emails to his addresses at Penn Medicine – which also copied its dean, Jonathan Epstein – and CHOP didn’t mention hepatitis B but did ask him to speak at an “upcoming” ACIP meeting and to “connect” with him to “provide more context.”
The Penn Medicine invitation also mentioned already having left a voicemail. Offit didn’t respond to any invitation, according to Demasi.
“There is nothing ‘vague’ about any of this” or any “ambiguity about which meeting the CDC meant,” since ACIP only had one meeting between October and December, Demasi said. As a former ACIP member, Offit “knows exactly how the committee operates” and “how invitations are issued and what they refer to.”
He also told CNN there were 30,000 hep B cases in children under 10 in 1991, the year vaccination at birth was first recommended, and half of them got it from “relatively casual contact” with someone who has a “chronic” case, “of whom there are millions” in America, half of whom don’t know they have it.
Offit, who didn’t give a source, was apparently referring to a 2001 modeling study – the kind used to justify draconian COVID lockdowns in spring 2020 – that tried to “estimate infections by combining small serosurveys with assumptions about maternal infection, household transmission and demographics,” Demasi said.
She dismissed the estimate as “speculative reconstructions, not surveillance data. The CDC surveillance data presented to ACIP, by contrast, showed roughly 400 cases of “acute” hep B cases in children under 10 before the 1991 universal recommendation.
In his closing comments, Offit inexplicably claimed “50% of people in this country have chronic hepatitis B and don’t know it” and that children could get it from a nanny, daycare worker or family member.
