27 Facts About Paul Offit

Paul Allan Offit was born on March 27,1951 and is an American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology.

Paul Offit is a board member of Every Child By Two and a founding board member of the Autism Science Foundation.

Paul Offit has published more than 130 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety, and is the author or co-author of books on vaccines, vaccination, the rejection of medicine by some religious groups, and antibiotics.

Paul Offit is one of the most public faces of the scientific consensus that vaccines have no association with autism.

Paul Offit grew up in Baltimore, the son of a shirtmaker.

Paul Offit went to his father's sales meetings and reacted negatively to the tall tales told by salespeople, instead preferring the clean and straightforward practice of science.

Paul Offit decided to become a doctor, the first in his family.

In 1990, Paul Offit married Bonnie Fass-Paul Offit, who is a pediatrician.

Paul Offit was opposed by vaccine critics, many of whom believe vaccines cause autism, a belief that has been rejected by major medical journals and professional societies.

Paul Offit received a death threat and received protection by an armed guard during meetings at the CDC.

Paul Offit served on the board of the American Council on Science and Health until 2015 when he resigned from the group, accusing them of crossing the line for their promotion of e-cigarettes.

In 2015, Paul Offit appeared in a vaccine awareness video created by Robert Till in which he advocated teenage vaccinations.

Paul Offit worked for 25 years on the development of a safe and effective vaccine against rotavirus, which is a cause of diarrhea, and which kills almost 600,000 children a year worldwide, about half as many as malaria kills; most deaths are outside the West.

Paul Offit received an unspecified sum of money for his interest in RotaTeq.

Paul Offit was elected a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, in 2015.

In 2002, during a period of fears about bioterrorism, Paul 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.

Paul Offit 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 US at the time.

In December 2013, Sarah Erush and Paul Offit declared the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has a moratorium on the use of dietary supplements without certain manufacturers' guarantee for quality.

Paul Offit defines alternative medicine as quackery when it involves unappreciated harm and replacement of conventional therapies that work, with alternative therapies that don't.

Paul Offit has said that the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 should be overturned to provide proper oversight and action against supplement providers.

In 2018, Offit was awarded the Albert B Sabin Gold Medal from the Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington, DC for his work on the oral rotavirus vaccine and his leadership in promoting immunization.

In 2011 Paul Offit was honored by the Biotechnology Industry Organization with the 2011 Biotech Humanitarian Award.

Paul Offit donated the award's $10,000 prize to the Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Also in 2011, Paul Offit was elected to the Institute of Medicine at the group's annual meeting.

In "The Cutter Incident", Paul Offit describes fallout relating to an early poliovirus vaccine tragedy that had the effect of deterring production of already licensed vaccines and discouraging the development of new ones.

Paul Offit has written books on the instances where science generated harmful ideas and the history of religious opposition to modern medicine.

Paul Offit's most recent book is a history of medical innovations with a particular focus on how some degree of risk is always present in medical innovation.