Amid ongoing upheaval at the FDA and other federal health agencies, prominent vaccine expert and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. critic Paul Offit, M.D., has been blocked from one of the U.S. regulator’s key advisory panels.
Offit—who also directs the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—can no longer participate on the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) due to the expiration of his Special Government Employee (SGE) term.
The VRBPAC is one of four main advisory committees that help direct U.S. vaccine policy, alongside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC's) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS') National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC) and the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines. The VRBPAC specifically makes recommendations to the FDA commissioner, with the group managed by the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER).
Offit no longer appears on the VRBPAC roster published on the FDA’s website, although his name was present among the list of members as recently as August. Prior to the change, Offit’s entry noted that his term was set to run until Jan. 31, 2027.
Offit told CNN and several other news outlets this week that his original term was slated to expire in January 2025 before a senior FDA official asked him to extend his tenure at the VRBPAC—a request Offit acquiesced to. But the paperwork required to grant that extension was subsequently “held up” at HHS for several months, he told CNN.
Offit explained in the CNN interview that he ultimately received an email last week indicating he could no longer contribute to the panel because his renewal forms were never approved.
Offit said he hadn’t received an explanation as to why he’s been blocked from participating on the panel, though he was quick to admit that he’s been a “vocal critic” of HHS Secretary RFK Jr. “for many years.”
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaccine activist who has these fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs that vaccines are dangerous,” Offit told CNN last month following the HHS’ resurrection of a childhood vaccine safety task force.
The exchange of criticism between the two has flowed both ways, however, with RFK Jr. blasting Offit over alleged conflicts of interest around the oral rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq during a June interview with Fox News. Offit, for his part, has contested those claims.
RFK Jr. has frequently cited conflicts of interest to justify major shake-ups across the U.S.’ federal health apparatus this year, contending that many experts responsible for guiding health policy for the nation are in Big Pharma’s pocket.
Those concerns were a key motivation behind the purge of all 17 sitting members of CDC’s ACIP in June, which has since been restaffed by RFK Jr. picks that include well-known vaccine skeptics and critics of governmental policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although RFK Jr. at the time described the move as an effort to prioritize “the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda,” rates of financial conflicts of interest at both the ACIP and the VRBPAC had been exceedingly low since 2016, according to research from the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics published last month.
Meanwhile, Offit and the 17 ousted ACIP members are far from the only experts to walk—either by choice or pressure—from the FDA.
In late March, Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., who had led the FDA’s vaccines and biologics-focused CBER unit since 2016, announced his departure from the agency. In a scathing resignation letter, Marks wrote that “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
In an interview with the Associated Press, Marks subsequently claimed that his resignation came after he stood firm on blocking RFK Jr.’s unfettered access to a federal vaccine safety database, fearing that RFK Jr.’s team would “write over it or erase the whole database.”