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Dr. Paul Offit, a staunch vaccine advocate and outspoken critic of U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will no longer serve on the committee that advises the FDA on vaccine approvals.
Offit, an infectious disease specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Endpoints News today in an email that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not tell him why he was being dismissed from the agency’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC).
According to Endpoint News, a spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the FDA notified certain committee members that their Special Government Employee terms had expired and that they were no longer permitted to do their committee work.
In June, an FDA spokesperson told The Epoch Times that no changes to VRBPAC were planned “at this time.”
The committee reviews and evaluates data concerning the safety, effectiveness and appropriate use of vaccines. The FDA has historically supported the committee’s recommendations.
Offit had served on the committee since 2017, according to Medpage Today.
According to The Epoch Times, Offit was slated to serve on VRBPAC through Jan. 31, 2027.
Although Offit is no longer listed on the FDA’s VRBPAC website, several other committee members whose terms were also set to expire at the same time are still listed. They include Archana Chatterjee, M.D., Ph.D., dean of Chicago Medical School and Hayley Gans, M.D., a clinical professor at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.
The FDA is accepting applications for its advisory committees. VRBPAC members are selected by the FDA commissioner or the commissioner’s “designee.”
Offit has been the mainstream media’s go-to commentator on vaccine issues.
Earlier today, Offit appeared on MSNBC. He praised COVID-19 vaccines and did not mention his dismissal from the FDA’s vaccine committee.
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‘Vaccine inventor, pharma spokesperson … and vociferous denier of vaccine harms’
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland, in a February 2024 op-ed, described Offit as a “Vaccine inventor, pharma spokesperson … and vociferous denier of vaccine harms.”
His dismissal comes less than three months after Kennedy named eight researchers and physicians to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory panel to replace approximately half of the members he fired from the panel on June 9.
Offit served on the CDC panel from 1998-2003.
In a late May interview with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy explained that members’ financial conflicts of interest — including Offit’s — had plagued the CDC panel for years.
“This was a long time coming, Tucker,” Kennedy said. He gave an example to illustrate.
Years ago, the CDC committee approved adding a rotavirus vaccine to the childhood immunization schedule, he said.
Four of the five committee members had “direct financial interest in the rotavirus vaccine,” Kennedy said. “They were working for the companies that made the vaccine, or they were receiving grants to do clinical trials on that vaccine.”
Within a year, that specific rotavirus vaccine was linked to “disastrous” disease in kids and pulled from the market. It was replaced by a different rotavirus vaccine that then-committee member Offit had helped develop.
“Then [Offit] and his business partners, Dr. Stanley Plotkin, and a couple of other people, sold that vaccine to Merck for $186 million,” Kennedy recalled.
According to Kennedy, Offit told Newsweek that he won the lottery. “It’s been said of him that he voted himself rich, so that kind of conflict was typical on that committee.”
Update: This article was updated to clarify that Offit served on the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel from 1998 to 2003.
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