Top RFK critic suggests experimenting on public with new vaccines
Renowned pediatrician and vaccination activist Dr. Paul Offit on Thursday suggested that vaccines like the mRNA COVID-19 shots should be experimented on the general public rather than be subjected to rigorous testing before mass marketing.
Dr. Offit made the remarks on The Bulwark podcast, where he spent the episode attacking incoming Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy is often slammed as an “anti-vaxxer” for insisting that vaccines undergo placebo-controlled trials before they are licensed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He has vowed to subject vaccines to such testing once he takes office.
On Thursday, Dr. Offit took issue with Kennedy’s stance and said that in cases like COVID-19 the public should serve as the both the experimental and control groups.
“I'm going to sort of take it a step further, and this may surprise you,” he told Andrew Egger. “I think you could argue that the COVID vaccine shouldn't have been subjected to a placebo-controlled trial, and here's why. You knew that the mRNA vaccines were novel. We had never used that technology to make a vaccine before, so we didn't know much and we needed to know more.”
Offit explained there had been an mRNA vaccine developed by the National Institutes of Health for SARS-CoV-1, which caused a viral outbreak in 2002-2004. He acknowledged that there was a lot of research for this vaccine but only some clinical data, and suggested that was enough to justify testing the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine on the public.
‘You can see . . . whether or not it's safe in retrospect’
“So now you have a virus in this country that is killing hundreds or thousands of people a day which you could argue for doing is to just give the vaccine as much as you can and then to as many people as you can, knowing that not everybody's going to get it. There will be some who get it and some who don't get it, and then you can see whether or not it works in retrospect and whether or not it's safe in retrospect,” Offit said.
Offit 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. He is on the Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, has published over 150 scientific papers and has co-edited Vaccines, the country’s preeminent vaccine textbook.
Offit also opposes those who blame vaccines for autism. Offit himself is a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation, which claims, "There is no correlation between autism and vaccines," and the Foundation for Vaccine Research.
