mRNA Vaccines, Mask Mandates, and the COVID-19 Response (Paul Offit)

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2024

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a member of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee and a former member of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices to the CDC, Dr. Paul Offit has been in the room for the creation of policies that have affected hundreds of millions of people.

Four years after the outbreak of COVID-19, he reflects on our response to the pandemic: what went well and what didn't.

Shermer and Offit discuss: mRNA vaccines • loss of trust in medical and scientific institutions • overall assessment of what went right and wrong • mandates vs. recommendations • economic costs • lab leak hypothesis vs. zoonomic hypothesis • debating anti-vaxxers • treatments • high risk vs. low risk groups

Paul Offit is the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Professor of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. Offit has published more than 170 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC and WHO.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. The Michael Sherber Show Here's the new book. Tell me when it's over. An expert's guide to deciphering
0:29.3	COVID myths and navigating our post-pandemic world.
0:33.0	Hi Paul, nice to see you.
0:34.0	Hi Michael, how are you?
0:36.0	Let's start with that.
0:37.0	How do you know that COVID-19 vaccines are not the eighth story of science gone wrong
0:41.0	or part of the long and risky history of medical
0:43.5	innovation to quote your previous books. Right well you never know everything you learn
0:49.2	as you go and I mean I'm on the FDA's Vaccine Advisory Committee so when in December of
0:54.0	2020 we considered Pfizer's vaccine which was a 40,000 person placebo
0:58.8	control trial or Modernist vaccine which was a 30,000 person placebo control trial, what did we know?
1:04.8	We knew that 35,000 people had been vaccinated with a novel technology, MRNA, which we'd never
1:10.8	used before. We had no experience to try and to feed a virus,
1:14.6	SARS-Cove2 which had unusual biological and clinical characteristics.
1:18.1	You know, your heart's in your throat. You're being asked the question, do you agree with authorizing
1:24.9	recommendation for a vaccine is going to be given to hundreds of millions of
1:28.3	people knowing that the other shoe was going to drop at some point because it has to
1:32.4	because you only know so much when you look at
1:34.8	tens of thousands of people and you'll learn more when you look at hundreds of millions and it did.
1:39.1	You know, I think the shoe was actually a fairly light one in the sense for MRNA vaccines.
1:43.3	It was myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle,
1:47.6	which was generally short-lived and self-limiting.
	...

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