Why I Wrote a Book About COVID?
Dozens of books have already been written about COVID. Why write another one?
On February 13, 2024, National Geographic will be publishing a book I wrote called, TELL ME WHEN IT’S OVER: AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO DECIPHERING COVID MYTHS AND NAVIGATING OUR POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. At this point, many of us feel that the pandemic is over. I’d like to explain why I wrote it.
Here’s how the pandemic unfolded for me. In December 2019, a novel bat coronavirus made its debut in the human population. By the end of February 2020, the first American had died from COVID. In April 2020, Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), asked me and a few dozen experts to participate in a public-private partnership called ACTIV (Accelerating Covid-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines). By May 2020, only one month after our group had its first meeting, 200,000 Americans had died from COVID.
Throughout 2020, we didn’t have antiviral medicines or monoclonal antibodies or vaccines. The pressure to create life-saving products was intense. But until something was available, all we could do was isolate, quarantine, mask, and test, test, test. By the end of 2020, more than 500,000 Americans had died from COVID.
During this period, I was also a member of the FDA vaccine advisory committee responsible for recommending authorization of COVID vaccines. On December 10, 2020, Pfizer presented results of a 40,000-adult study of its vaccine to our committee. Under the umbrella of the much-heralded government program known as Operation Warp Speed—which eliminated the risk of vaccine development for pharmaceutical companies—this was the fastest vaccine ever made. And it was made with a technology (messenger RNA or mRNA) that had never been used before. One week later, on December 17, 2020, Moderna presented the results of its 30,000-adult mRNA vaccine to our committee.
Imagine what it was like being on the committee at that time. Here was a virus, SARS-CoV-2, which had unusual biological and clinical characteristics, that we were trying to defeat with a novel, untested technology. Because the mRNA trials had been placebo-controlled (half the participants had received saltwater), about 20,000 people had received Pfizer’s vaccine and 15,000 had received Moderna’s. With data from about 35,000 people, our committee was now asked to recommend authorization for vaccines that would soon be given to hundreds of millions of people. Did we know enough? Worse, as we got to younger and younger age groups, the number of children studied was smaller and smaller. Again, did we know enough?
This is why I wrote TELL ME WHEN IT’S OVER; what did we get right, what did we get wrong, and what did we learn along the way. It’s also my attempt to debunk the many myths about COVID and COVID vaccines that arose during this pandemic.
We made a few communications errors. For example, although it was a remarkable scientific achievement, the phrase “Operation Warp Speed” worried people that corners had been cut or, worse, that vaccine safety guidelines had been ignored. Also, the CDC’s use of the term “breakthrough” to describe mild or asymptomatic infections set an unrealistic expectation of what these vaccines could and couldn’t do. Most Americans are still confused about what it means to be fully protected against this virus.
When COVID vaccines were first made available, people rushed to get them. By May 2021, about 70 percent of the U.S. population had been vaccinated. Then we hit a wall. Many people simply refused to be vaccinated, arguing that COVID wasn’t that bad, or that the vaccines were too risky. I wrote this book in attempt to understand how this happened. Why did anti-vaccine activism swing so wildly to the right? Why, for some, did “vaccines” become a dirty word?
Although the pandemic is over, the virus isn’t. SARS-CoV-2 and its variants will likely circulate for decades if not longer. Where do we go from here? Can we make a vaccine that offers broader, longer-lasting protection against all variants? How can we best treat or prevent long COVID? Does everyone need a yearly vaccine? Do children need to be vaccinated, given that they are much lower risk of dying from this disease? Is natural infection better than immunization?
Finally, did we make a mistake mandating COVID vaccines, which included many people losing their jobs? Should we have closed schools for as long as we did? Given the current pushback against all vaccine mandates, including those for schoolchildren, did we do more harm than good?
In many ways, this book has been a catharsis from what has been a rough four years. For me. For all of us. There was a steep learning curve. And I worry that this learning curve has come at the expense of the public’s trust in the people and institutions that were responsible for these decisions.
Why don't you get up to date with your vaccines before preaching to everyone else. They are obviously so harmful that you can't even bring yourself to take them. Regardless of the terrible optics of that. At least you had the decency to not lie to us about that fact, but then it begs the question, if you're really so committed to the vaccines, then you should have taken the hit like everyone else that had it mandated to keep their jobs and freedoms. It's for the greater good!
Anyway, it is exactly you and other bought and paid for mouthpieces that lead us exactly to where we are now. There were things we knew would work. Anyone with even the most basic knowledge of virology and vaccines know that the response made literally no sense unless it was to usher in this very dangerous new technology and take it mainstream. You never vaccinate into a pandemic, masks don't work for respiratory viruses spread by aerosols, you don't target a rapidly mutating target with your vaccine, you don't disallow doctors from trying out existing medications, you don't abandon early treatment, you don't recommend new untested medications to pregnant women and children, you don't lock down because more people will ultimately die if you do, you don't sabotage any attempt to get the real number of deaths FROM covid, you don't unnecessarily scare the public, you don't pass off a gene therapy as a vaccine to skirt the testing requirements, you don't lie about the origins, you don't suppress all attempts to gather data or do research that might even remotely paint it in a bad light (including miscategorisation and not origins autopsies)...
The list is almost endless. These are all medicine 101. Yet all of this was thrown out of the window and everything was done to institute totalitarian controls and take modRNA mainstream, and then you have the gall to turn around and say you were under pressure and we made some mistakes, but somehow this was still the right way to go... when excess deaths are through the roof!? And then feign surprise that people are suspicious of all vaccines, including perfectly good (or at least less harmful) non modRNA ones?! Give me a break! I know people in the industry and they have given me the truth. Most people don't have this luxury, they rely on "experts" like you, and you be have let them down very badly. You are nothing but a vaccine industry shill and history will not look kindly on you and your ilk.
OMG Dr. Offit -- you didn't need a whole book to try to explain what happened....it's really quite simple to explain why anti-vaccine activism soared: Many people experienced directly or saw in others just how REAL, how frequent and how terrible vaccine injury is....though the more one's livelihood is privileged by pharma -- the harder it is for them to overcome their brainwashing to recognize the truth of what happened right before their eyes. Stanley Milgram's work is more insightful to all this than yours is.
We don't need you to now "spin" what happened to keep the sinking boat afloat any longer. What we need is for you to open your heart, mind and eyes to the egregious harm you and your peers have facilitated and now spend the rest of your life, trying to undo it.