White House demands ‘unified front’ on science, says physician

The White House has been demanding lockstep uniformity from scientists who advise the government, according to a top physician who lost favor with White House officials.

Vaccine messianist Dr. Paul Offit serves on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, has published over 150 scientific papers and has co-edited Vaccines, the country’s preeminent vaccine textbook. He is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, the Vaccine Education Center Director at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a former member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the CDC. 

Last month Dr. Offit revealed the White House “wasn’t happy” when he failed to show enthusiasm for a bivalent COVID-19 booster last year. The vaccine, manufactured by Pfizer for Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, had not been tested on humans and thus contained no human trial data.

Nevertheless, the Biden administration bought 171 million doses of the vaccine and peddled them to the American public aggressively. White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha assured Americans it would “offer better protection” than previous vaccines.

But the lack of data had Dr. Offit unconvinced. Furthermore, when trial data eventually did come in, the BA.4/BA.5 sub variants had become obsolete.

“It didn’t look very good,” Dr. Offit said on The Short Coat podcast last month, describing when he and the rest of the FDA advisory committee members were presented with the booster. “Those data were pretty unconvincing,” he added.

In one of his many media appearances, Dr. Offit was asked by CNN’s Pamela Brown for his professional opinion on the booster. After playing a clip of Dr. Jha claiming the booster was more effective than the original vaccine, Brown asked Dr. Offit if he agreed.

“I felt this compelling need to be honest,” Dr. Offit recalls. Instead of outright disagreeing with Jha, Dr. Offit simply pointed to recent evidence from the New England Journal showing the booster was not significantly more effective than the original vaccine.

This irked White House officials.

"I contradicted somebody who was the Coronavirus Task Coordinator, Ashish Jha at The White House, and he wasn't happy about that and others weren't happy about that because you have to have this unified front. Because when you show in any sense that you're questioning it, it looks bad,” explained Dr. Offit.

“But it’s the only way science works,” he continued, saying science demands adherents to be “constantly questioning.”

Dr. Offit is arguably the country’s most influential vaccine promoter and leads the opposition against those who blame vaccines for autism. Offit himself is a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation and the Foundation for Vaccine Research.

Wikipedia hails Offit as a martyr for child vaccinations, pointing out that he received “hate mail and death threats” and "has become a figure of hatred to the many vaccine denialists and conspiracy theorists.”