Paul A. Offit
Nationality	American
Occupation	Pediatrician
Known for	Developing a rotavirus vaccine, public advocacy for vaccines

Paul A. Offit is an American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases and an expert on vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine that has been credited with saving hundreds of lives every day. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He has been a member of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.^[1] Offit is also a Founding Board Member of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF).^[2]

Offit has published more than 130 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety,^[1] and is the author or co-author of books on vaccines, vaccination, and antibiotics. He is one of the most public faces of the scientific consensus that vaccines have no association with autism, and has, as a result, attracted controversy and a substantial volume of hate mail and occasional death threats,^[3][4] but also support for his position.^[1][5]

Life [edit]

Offit grew up in Baltimore, the son of a shirtmaker. He went to his father's sales meetings and reacted negatively to the tall tales told by salespeople, preferring instead what he saw as the clean and straightforward life of science.^[6] When he was five years old, he was sent to a polio ward to recover from clubfoot surgery; this experience caused him to see children as vulnerable and helpless, and motivated him through the 25 years of the development of the rotavirus vaccine.^[1][7]

Offit decided to become a doctor, the first in his family.^[8] Offit earned his bachelor's degree from Tufts University and his M.D. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. One of his mentors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was Maurice R. Hilleman, the greatest vaccine-maker of the 20th century.^[6]

By 2008 Offit had become the U.S.'s leading advocate of childhood immunizations. He was opposed by vaccine critics, many of whom believe vaccines cause autism, a belief not supported by scientific data. He received a death threat and received protection by an armed guard during meetings at the CDC.^[1] His 2008 book Autism's False Prophets catalyzed a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the U.S.^[3] He donated the royalties from the book to the Center for Autism Research at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.^[9] Offit serves on the board of the American Council on Science and Health.^[10]

Rotavirus vaccine [edit]

Paul Offit (right) along with H. Fred Clark. Clark and Offit are two of the three inventors of the rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq,^[8] which is credited with saving hundreds of lives a day.^[1]

Offit worked for 25 years on the development of a safe and effective vaccine against rotavirus, which is a cause of gastroenteritis,^[4] and which kills as many as 600,000 children a year worldwide, about half as many as malaria kills; most deaths are outside the West.^[3] His interest in the disease stemmed from the death of a 9-month-old infant from rotavirus-caused dehydration while under his care as a pediatric resident in 1979.^[4][7]

Along with his colleagues Fred Clark and Stanley Plotkin, Offit invented RotaTeq,^[8] a pentavalent rotavirus vaccine which is currently manufactured by Merck & Co. RotaTeq is one of two vaccines currently used against rotavirus, which replaced an earlier vaccine withdrawn after being blamed, perhaps incorrectly, for very rare cases of intussusception.^[3]

In February 2006, RotaTeq was approved for inclusion in the recommended US vaccination schedule, following its approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.^[3][11] Premarketing studies found that RotaTeq was effective and safe, with an incidence of adverse events comparable to placebo and no evidence of association with intussusception.^[12] RotaTeq is credited with saving hundreds of lives a day.^[1] Offit received an unspecified sum of money for his interest in RotaTeq.^[6]

Smallpox vaccine [edit]

In 2002, during a period of fears about bioterrorism, Offit was the only member of the CDC's advisory panel to vote against a program to give smallpox vaccine to tens of thousands of Americans. He later argued on 60 Minutes II and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that the risk of harm for people getting the vaccine outweighed the risk of getting smallpox in the U.S. at the time.^[8]

Recognition [edit]

Offit is a recipient of numerous awards, including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health.^[9]

Michael Specter wrote that Offit "has become a figure of hatred to the many vaccine denialists and conspiracy theorists." Specter reported that Offit had often been threatened with violence by anti-vaccine advocates, necessitating precautions such as screening Offit's packages for mail bombs and providing guards when Offit attends federal health advisory committee meetings.^[13] At a 2008 vaccine activism rally in Washington, DC, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized Offit's ties to drug companies, calling him a "poster child for the term 'biostitute'."^[6] Curt Linderman Sr., the editor of the Autism File blog, wrote online that it would "be nice" if Offit "was dead".^[8]

Such vilification has provoked statements in Offit's defense. Peter Hotez, a professor and vaccine researcher at George Washington University, has been quoted in a Newsweek article:

Peter Hotez ... says government health officials should take a bolder stand in reassuring the public. Hotez feels as strongly as Offit does about the science (saying vaccines cause autism, he says, "is like saying the world is flat"), but, like other busy scientists, he's less willing to enter the fray. "Here's someone who has created an invention that saves hundreds of lives every day," says Hotez, whose daughter, 15, has autism, "and he's vilified as someone who hates children. It's just so unfair."^[1]

In 2011 Offit was honored by the Biotechnology Industry Organization with the 2011 Biotech Humanitarian Award.^[14] Offit donated the award’s $10,000 prize to the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.^[15]

In 2001 Offit was elected to the Institute of Medicine at the group's annual meeting.^[16]

Publications [edit]

Offit has written or co-written several books on vaccines, vaccination and the public, and antibiotics, as well as dozens of scholarly articles on the topic. Isabelle Rapin, a neurology professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, wrote in Neurology Today about Autism's False Prophets:

This book explores why parents, seeking in vain for a cure and for an explanation of their child's problem, are so vulnerable to false hopes and to the nasty predators who have from time immemorial always taken advantage of the desperate in our society. ... [Offit] became outraged by Dr. Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study in the Lancet that blamed the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine for causing autism. Dr. Offit predicted the paper would precipitate a resurgence of measles and its serious complications, and even deaths–a prophecy soon realized.^[17]

Books [edit]

• E. Allison Hagood; Stacy Mintzer Herlihy; Paul A. Offit (foreword) (2012). Your Baby's Best Shot: Why Vaccines Are Safe and Save Lives. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 1-4422-1578-X. 
• Offit, Paul A (2011). Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02149-9. 
• Offit, Paul A (2008). Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-14636-4. 
• Offit, Paul A (2007). Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases. Smithsonian Books/Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-122795-0. 
• Offit, Paul A (2005). The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10864-4. 
• Offit, Paul A; Louis M. Bell (2003). Vaccines: What You Should Know ((third edition) ed.). Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-42004-0. 
• Marshall, Gary S; Penelope H. Dennehy, David P. Greenberg, Paul A. Offit, and Tina Q. Tan (2003). The Vaccine Handbook: A Practical Guide for Clinicians. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. ISBN 978-0-7817-3569-8. 
• Offit, Paul A. and Louis M. Bell (1999). Vaccines: What Every Parent Should Know. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-02-863861-4. 
• Offit, Paul A; Bonnie Fass-Offit and Louis M. Bell (1999). Breaking the Antibiotic Habit: A Parent's Guide to Coughs, Colds, Ear Infections, and Sore Throats. John Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-31982-5. 

Medical articles [edit]

• Gerber JS, Offit PA (2009). "Vaccines and autism: a tale of shifting hypotheses". Clin Infect Dis 48 (4): 456–61. doi:10.1086/596476. PMC 2908388. PMID 19128068. Lay summary – IDSA (2009-01-30). 
• Offit PA, Moser CA (2009). "The problem with Dr Bob's alternative vaccine schedule". Pediatrics 123 (1): e164–9. doi:10.1542/peds.2008-2189. PMID 19117838. Lay summary – WebMD (2008-12-29). 
• Offit PA (2008). "Vaccines and autism revisited—the Hannah Poling case". N Engl J Med 358 (20): 2089–91. doi:10.1056/NEJMp0802904. PMID 18480200. 
• Coffin SE, Clark SL, Bos NA, Brubaker JO, Offit PA (1999). "Migration of antigen-presenting B cells from peripheral to mucosal lymphoid tissues may induce intestinal antigen-specific IgA following parenteral immunization". J Immunol 163 (6): 3064–70. PMID 10477570. 
• Moser CA, Speaker TJ, Offit PA (1998). "Effect of water-based microencapsulation on protection against EDIM rotavirus challenge in mice". Journal of Virology 72 (5): 3859–62. PMC 109610. PMID 9557670. 
• Coffin SE, Offit PA (1998). "Induction of rotavirus- specific memory B cells in gut-associated lymphoid tissue after intramuscular immunization". Journal of Virology 72 (4): 3479–83. PMC 109862. PMID 9525687. 
• Brown KA, Offit PA (1998). "Rotavirus-specific proteins are detected in murine macrophages in both intestinal and extraintestinal lymphoid tissues". Microb Pathog 24 (6): 327–31. doi:10.1006/mpat.1997.0198. PMID 9632536. 
• Moser CA, Cookinham S, Coffin SE, Clark HF, Offit PA (1998). "Relative importance of rotavirus-specific effector and memory B cell responses in protection against challenge". Journal of Virology 72 (2): 1108–14. PMC 124584. PMID 9445006. 
• Coffin SE, Moser CA, Cohen S, Speaker TJ, Offit PA (1997). "Enhanced protection and mucosal immunity induced by intramuscular inoculation of mice with microencapsulated rotavirus". Journal of Virology 71 (10): 7851–6. PMC 192140. PMID 9311873. 
• Coffin SE, Moser CA, Cohen S, Clark HF, Offit PA (1997). "Immunologic correlates of protection against rotavirus challenge after intramuscular immunization of mice" (PDF). J Virol 71 (10): 7851–6. PMC 192140. PMID 9311873. 
• Moser CA, Speaker TJ, Offit PA (1997). "Effect of microencapsulation on immunogenicity of a bovine herpes virus glycoprotein and inactivated influenza virus in mice". Vaccine 15 (16): 1767–72. doi:10.1016/S0264-410X(97)00106-0. PMID 9364681. 
• Lomotan EA, Brown KA, Speaker TJ, Offita PA (1997). "Aqueous-based microcapsules are detected primarily in gut-associated dendritic cells after oral inoculation of mice". Vaccine 15 (17–18): 1959–62. doi:10.1016/S0264-410X(97)00108-4. PMID 9413108. 
• Moser CA, Speaker TJ, Berlin JA, Offit PA (1996). "Aqueous-based microencapsulation enhances virus-specific humoral immune responses in mice after parenteral inoculation". Vaccine 14 (13): 1235–8. doi:10.1016/S0264-410X(96)00026-6. PMID 8961511. 

Other [edit]

• Offit PA (2009-10-11). "Nothing to fear but the flu itself". New York Times. 
• Offit PA (2008-03-31). "Inoculated against facts". New York Times. 

References [edit]

External links [edit]

• Paul A. Offit, MD
• "The Vaccine War", PBS FRONTLINE documentary, April 27, 2010. Extensive interviews with Dr. Offit.
• The Dangers of the Antivaccine Movement, Meredith Melnick, Time Magazine Feb. 24, 2011. Interview with Offit.