Why Is Paul Offit Flirting with the Ghosts of Tuskegee
Walking in the footsteps of AIDS denialists
I’m a vaccine developer and I have tremendous respect for
. He’s one of the greatest luminaries in my field. But I’m a dyed in the wool egalitarian who was raised by wild hippies, and no amount of admiration will ever stop me from questioning authority. Plus, I would argue that pointing out a person’s errors can be a sign of true respect. So here we go.Dr. Offit, who serves on the FDA’s vaccine advisory board, has been on a summer media blitz promoting the idea that people under age 75 should be denied this year’s updated Covid boost. His reasoning in these interviews strikes me as vague. Does he think 53 year-olds like me shouldn’t worry about long Covid? Or even just the idea of missing a couple weeks of work due to Covid infection? I shouldn’t worry about passing the infection to my >75 year-old parents? Is Offit imagining some kind of lifeboat ethics where society can’t possibly manufacture enough vaccines for everybody who wants to buy them? Does he think the vaccine doesn’t really work? That it poses some grave risks I don’t know about? All the arguments I’ve heard him make are ridiculously flimsy. He doesn’t appear to be thinking very clearly about this important question.
While trying to understand how a scientist I admire fell into such a disastrous trap, I’ve been thinking about historical analogies. I recently posted an essay covering the tragedy of the Tuskegee Study, and in that example it appears that the physicians running the study were motivated by a paternalistic desire to make the “right” decisions on behalf of the syphilis patients under their care. They seem to have believed they were protecting the overall best interests of their patients when they refused to give them penicillin. They were wrong. A little humility would have served them well.
Another historical analogy hits closer to home. I’m a gay man who came of age during the peak of the AIDS crisis, and one thing that fueled my decision to study vaccine development was my anger at the AIDS denialist movement. The movement’s most famous proponent was a respected scientist named Peter Duesberg. Soon after the discovery of HIV, Duesberg expressed skepticism about whether it was really the cause of AIDS. In the beginning, skepticism was reasonable - there initially wasn’t enough scientific evidence to reach a solid conclusion about the question. The problem is that as increasingly conclusive evidence kept mounting in support of the claim that HIV causes AIDS, the denialists just kept doubling down on their skepticism. The error ultimately culminated in Thabo Mbeki’s campaign to deny South Africans access to anitretroviral medicines - a policy that is estimated to have killed 330,000 people. A little humility would have served Duesberg and Mbeki well.
Please, Paul Offit, for the love of science snap out of it before it’s too late! Have some humility on the question of whether people do or do not need a boost and simply leave the decision to us.
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