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.
Looking forward to reading this, Dr. Offit, and learning more about your experience and front row seat. I'm committed to learning more about how to understand where we are with the pandemic, how to lend advice and take advice, and how to build deeper trust and understanding for us all.
Number of deaths quoted are off. It was about 100k Covid deaths in the US by end of May 2020 and 350k during all of 2020. I just checked these numbers on the CDC Wonder website.
No one needs to read non fiction about COVID-19. This author is a serial liar who recommended and continues to recommend you inject yourself with a poison that has proven to not stop you from getting Covid-19 doesn’t stop you from transmitting Covid-19 doesn’t reduce your risk of hospitalization or death in fact it increases both risks. A poison that has killed between 13-17 million people world wide which is 2 times the number killed by the disease itself and most of those deaths were caused by the treatment given in the hospitals. So no one wants to read your lies and distortions of reality. The fact that the National Geographic is behind this is another good reason I stopped subscribing to it after 40+ years. As they have lost their way and no longer report anything but climateism narrative
Hi Paul - to have a wider audience, you need an ebook version.
You also need quality control in the comments - the ill-informed antivaxx comments are atrocious and spread deadly disinformation about vaccines that harms public health. For example, I would delete the astoundingly ignorant response of LX below.
I've just started watching the post-Covid season on New Amsterdam and it's the first show that's really including Covid and its many effects as a main part of the story. We in NZ avoided most of the worst of the disease itself, and only had to contend with the vaccine resistance and associated Trump support (bizarre in a country that matters so little to him), so watching this fictional take kind of makes it feel like it *was* fiction. What a privileged position this is to have.
Offit declined the most recent booster and then admitted he didn’t get last year’s either. Although in his 70s he said he was concerned about myocarditis.
I find it ironic that so many of the comments here criticize the development and use of the vaccine. My problem is that we who are most at risk - the elderly (those over 65+ are 30 million people) are barred from getting two or even three vaccines or more, to perhaps prevent infection at all. No infection equals no hospital visits and no deaths. I know that preventing infection is a very limited outcome from vaccination, but any improvement in mortality is worth it unless there is an equal or greater negative impact. You have been one of the most consistent advocates of limiting vaccine shots. Yet you have not come up with any credible description to the downside of more vaccines being delivered. You implicitly address that issue in your article above by referring to annual vaccines and maybe some who shouldn't
get them at all. Defend your position for us please. What is the downside?
Pretend that what was said over and over and over again (if you are vaxxed you cannot get or transmit the virus) and unvaxxed were looked upon as lepers was never said?
The exchanges between BillyJoe and the naysayers demonstrate why it is so challenging to combat the disinformation around vaccines. I appreciate his determination to stick to the science (although it doesn't seem to penetrate the propaganda wall). For some, it appears that facts are disputable and depend on whether you fancy elephants over donkeys. We know that just as drinking bleach is useless and unwise, ivermectin has no place in the anti-SARS-CoV-2 toolbox. If only we put as much effort into adjudicating the pandemic as we put into January 6, we might be able to arrive at consensus on what went right and what went wrong. Dr. Offit is one of the few who's tried to do that.
The obstacle to accepting science over gospel seems to be a misconception about how science works. It is by definition a work in progress that relies on navigating uncertainty. An iterative process to make sense of what we observe around us. The process takes time, a luxury that is in short supply during a pandemic. Considering what we had to work with (exactly nothing in the beginning), our accomplishments were remarkable, especially given the government's stance on science in 2020.
The bleeding of the anti-vaxx mindset into the routine childhood vaccine sphere is what alarms me. As a pediatrician and public health advocate, I shutter at the idea that the progress we made in eradicating measles in the US might be erased by ideologues who feel compelled to spew their rhetoric across the blogosphere. Decades of experience and billions of MMR doses show us that these vaccines are safe and effective. Measles was GONE in this country.
Do you actually have a job where you treat people or do you spend your time trying to convince a retired 68 year old woman how smart you are? Never siting references.. I never got the COVID jab and as far as I know never gave COVID to anyone. I guess I’m in the field with many who know nothing at all and am so glad to be there. Yes most of the people got vaccinated in the beginning and then they stopped, most after 2, then the rest after 4 jabs. When they were getting COVID over and over again. I don’t speak for everyone, I just look at the numbers. People are not buying into the narrative anymore. and you speak about people who won’t listen to any narrative but their own. Look in the mirror that is you. And who are you anyway. I am not a hard core antivaxxer. I love how you all think that we are because we don’t think like you. You can post again, but I’m done with this thread. Go try to help some people instead of trying to impress me with just how brilliant you think you are!
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.
I wish that some of the anti-vaxx folks would read this and learn the true story of the pandemic and its response
Will there be an audiobook at some point please?
Looking forward to reading this, Dr. Offit, and learning more about your experience and front row seat. I'm committed to learning more about how to understand where we are with the pandemic, how to lend advice and take advice, and how to build deeper trust and understanding for us all.
It was on the TWIV podcast I think I heard that the MRNA technology was not untested, but had been used in the development of animal vaccines.
Number of deaths quoted are off. It was about 100k Covid deaths in the US by end of May 2020 and 350k during all of 2020. I just checked these numbers on the CDC Wonder website.
No one needs to read non fiction about COVID-19. This author is a serial liar who recommended and continues to recommend you inject yourself with a poison that has proven to not stop you from getting Covid-19 doesn’t stop you from transmitting Covid-19 doesn’t reduce your risk of hospitalization or death in fact it increases both risks. A poison that has killed between 13-17 million people world wide which is 2 times the number killed by the disease itself and most of those deaths were caused by the treatment given in the hospitals. So no one wants to read your lies and distortions of reality. The fact that the National Geographic is behind this is another good reason I stopped subscribing to it after 40+ years. As they have lost their way and no longer report anything but climateism narrative
Hi Paul - to have a wider audience, you need an ebook version.
You also need quality control in the comments - the ill-informed antivaxx comments are atrocious and spread deadly disinformation about vaccines that harms public health. For example, I would delete the astoundingly ignorant response of LX below.
I've just started watching the post-Covid season on New Amsterdam and it's the first show that's really including Covid and its many effects as a main part of the story. We in NZ avoided most of the worst of the disease itself, and only had to contend with the vaccine resistance and associated Trump support (bizarre in a country that matters so little to him), so watching this fictional take kind of makes it feel like it *was* fiction. What a privileged position this is to have.
Offit declined the most recent booster and then admitted he didn’t get last year’s either. Although in his 70s he said he was concerned about myocarditis.
I find it ironic that so many of the comments here criticize the development and use of the vaccine. My problem is that we who are most at risk - the elderly (those over 65+ are 30 million people) are barred from getting two or even three vaccines or more, to perhaps prevent infection at all. No infection equals no hospital visits and no deaths. I know that preventing infection is a very limited outcome from vaccination, but any improvement in mortality is worth it unless there is an equal or greater negative impact. You have been one of the most consistent advocates of limiting vaccine shots. Yet you have not come up with any credible description to the downside of more vaccines being delivered. You implicitly address that issue in your article above by referring to annual vaccines and maybe some who shouldn't
get them at all. Defend your position for us please. What is the downside?
Pretend that what was said over and over and over again (if you are vaxxed you cannot get or transmit the virus) and unvaxxed were looked upon as lepers was never said?
The exchanges between BillyJoe and the naysayers demonstrate why it is so challenging to combat the disinformation around vaccines. I appreciate his determination to stick to the science (although it doesn't seem to penetrate the propaganda wall). For some, it appears that facts are disputable and depend on whether you fancy elephants over donkeys. We know that just as drinking bleach is useless and unwise, ivermectin has no place in the anti-SARS-CoV-2 toolbox. If only we put as much effort into adjudicating the pandemic as we put into January 6, we might be able to arrive at consensus on what went right and what went wrong. Dr. Offit is one of the few who's tried to do that.
The obstacle to accepting science over gospel seems to be a misconception about how science works. It is by definition a work in progress that relies on navigating uncertainty. An iterative process to make sense of what we observe around us. The process takes time, a luxury that is in short supply during a pandemic. Considering what we had to work with (exactly nothing in the beginning), our accomplishments were remarkable, especially given the government's stance on science in 2020.
The bleeding of the anti-vaxx mindset into the routine childhood vaccine sphere is what alarms me. As a pediatrician and public health advocate, I shutter at the idea that the progress we made in eradicating measles in the US might be erased by ideologues who feel compelled to spew their rhetoric across the blogosphere. Decades of experience and billions of MMR doses show us that these vaccines are safe and effective. Measles was GONE in this country.
Kathy Albus is a paid troll ignore it. Look at what it follows. Nothing / nobody.
Do you actually have a job where you treat people or do you spend your time trying to convince a retired 68 year old woman how smart you are? Never siting references.. I never got the COVID jab and as far as I know never gave COVID to anyone. I guess I’m in the field with many who know nothing at all and am so glad to be there. Yes most of the people got vaccinated in the beginning and then they stopped, most after 2, then the rest after 4 jabs. When they were getting COVID over and over again. I don’t speak for everyone, I just look at the numbers. People are not buying into the narrative anymore. and you speak about people who won’t listen to any narrative but their own. Look in the mirror that is you. And who are you anyway. I am not a hard core antivaxxer. I love how you all think that we are because we don’t think like you. You can post again, but I’m done with this thread. Go try to help some people instead of trying to impress me with just how brilliant you think you are!