Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert who has often criticized health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been blocked from serving on a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine advisory panel.
According to a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, Offit was among several FDA advisory committee members whose Special Government Employee (SGE) terms expired, making them ineligible to participate.
The spokesman declined to elaborate on who those other members are, and whether their status would be renewed.
Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said he had been asked by the FDA to extend his term to 2027, but after filling out the paperwork, including a financial disclosure form, they were held up for months by HHS “for no apparent reason.”
Offit served on FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which evaluates vaccine safety and effectiveness data to advise whether they should be approved.
Offit joined the committee in 2017, and his term was set to end this year before he said he was asked to extend it.
Offit’s inability to participate on the panel marks the latest in a slew of experts to depart or be ousted from the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Kennedy’s leadership. HHS has defended those efforts as necessary steps to remake and restore trust in federal health agencies.
Last week Kennedy ousted CDC Director Susan Monarez, who’d been confirmed by the GOP controlled Senate just weeks earlier. Her firing prompted the departure of multiple other key CDC leaders in protest.
Kennedy is scheduled Thursday to testify before the Senate Finance Committee, where lawmakers will likely press him about his handling of vaccines and the turmoil in the agencies.
Offit is the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine and served on the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee in the early 2000s.
Kennedy has singled Offit out for what the secretary said is a conflict of interest with the rotavirus vaccine.
Offit has refuted this and posted a video on social media in June noting that the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia owned the patent for the vaccine, and that it didn’t come up for a vote until three years after he had left the CDC panel.
Kennedy cited conflict of interest concerns as a key reason for purging all 17 sitting members of CDC’s vaccine advisory panel in June, which have since been replaced by handpicked Kennedy allies, including well-known vaccine skeptics.
