Another month, another round of changes in US healthcare.
Paul Offit – one of the co-inventors of the rotavirus vaccine – has been booted from the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. Earlier this year, Offit had accepted a third term that would extend his tenure on the panel until 2027. He says he has received no explanation. However, media reports have speculated that Offit’s history of criticizing RFK Jr may have been a contributing factor.
Since being released by the panel, Offit has been interviewed by MSNBC, where he raised concerns about rising cases of measles, child deaths from influenza and whooping cough. “This is getting worse and worse, and I imagine next year will only be worse because we have a secretary of health and human services who is a virulent anti vaccine activist and science denialist. Why would we ever imagine this is going to be getting better?”
He says the CDC can no longer be trusted – and neither can the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices “because Robert F Kennedy Jr has stocked that committee with people who really aren’t experts in the field.”
Expertise and role in developing a rotavirus vaccine
Paul Allan Offit, born in 1951 in Baltimore, is a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist. After earning his MD from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, he trained in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh before joining the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). One of his early mentors was Maurice Hilleman, who is considered a pioneer in vaccines. Offit later became the became director of CHOP’s Vaccine Education Center. Today, he is the Maurice R Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Director of the university’s Vaccine Education Center. He has received numerous awards over his career.
In the early 1980s, Offit joined forces with CHOP colleagues Stanley Plotkin and Fred Clark to tackle rotavirus, a pathogen that at the time was killing hundreds of thousands of children each year worldwide through severe diarrhea and dehydration. The team spent decades developing an oral vaccine that would safely expose infants to the virus without causing disease.
The first licensed vaccine against rotavirus was Wyeth’s RotaShield, which was introduced in 1998. However, it was later withdrawn after post-marketing data revealed a link to a rare intestinal blockage (intussusception). Offit and his CHOP colleagues had been working on a different vaccine strategy. Their approach used a bovine rotavirus backbone engineered to express human viral proteins, reducing the risk of complications while still provoking broad immune protection. The result was RotaTeq, which was licensed by the FDA in 2006 and is now part of routine immunization programs around the world.
Further US controversies
Offit is the latest in a series of controversial departures from prominent positions in US healthcare. At the end of August, Susan Monarez was fired from the role of CDC director – one month after being confirmed by the Senate. However, her lawyers dispute the legality of Monarez being removed from her role.
“When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted,” said a statement from her lawyers.
The White House has reportedly said she was removed because she was “not aligned with the president’s agenda.”
In response to Monarez being removed, four other officials have also resigned from the CDC, including Debra Houry (Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director for Program and Science), Demetre Daskalakis (Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases), Jennifer Layden (Director of the Office of Public Health Data, Science and Technology), and Daniel Jernigan (Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases).
Her replacement has been named as Jim O’Neill, the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services.
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