Asking The Uncomfortable Questions About Vaccines | Dr. Paul Offit
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What are the challenges of vaccine acceptance?
It's understandable, right? I mean, children get, in the first few years of life, will get vaccines to prevent 14 different diseases, which can mean as many as 27 inoculations, to prevent diseases most people don't see, using biological fluids most people don't understand. That there's pushback on vaccines makes perfect sense. I get it.
Honestly, I get it too. I wanted to cut through the noise. So I called a friend of the channel, Dr. Paul Offit, who's a world-renowned pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology. But he's not just a medical expert. He's also a member of the FDA Vaccines Advisory Committee, a celebrated author, and a co-creator of the RotaTeq vaccine, which has helped save the lives of hundreds of children every day. Given Dr. Offit's commitment to making the world a healthier place, I was really excited to set the record straight on why China was actually responsible for COVID, the vaccine approval process, and I ended up even giving him my two cents on the value of transparency in medical communication. Pleasure having you back.
Thank you.
Very excited to talk about the idea of innovation in healthcare and how innovation comes with its own challenges. And something that I've been seeing in the health space, especially when it comes to the health media space, is whenever there's a breakthrough, now people are talking about it earlier than ever before, meaning earlier in its stages of development. What are the risks of getting too excited about new technology?
Right. Well, it used to be that there were, in terms of the number of journal articles that were published per day internationally, it was about 4,000 journal articles a day. That has doubled in the time of COVID. And also there are many more preprints that are published. People will even reference preprints, meaning non-peer-reviewed preprints. I'm waiting for people to reference something I heard on the bus on the way to work. They are saying. There's sort of a little bit of a loss, I think, in terms of the degree to which there is oversight of that kind of information. So you're right, and we're very quick to jump to the next magical, mystical thing that's going to make everything better, not realizing that
All these innovations, historically, every single one of them have been associated with some human price. There's always a human price to pay for knowledge, always. And I don't think we accept that. We think we're so far along now in the world of science and medicine that that learning curve is finished, and it's never finished.
What is that human price that we have to pay for innovation?
that there were adverse events that followed something, whether it was vaccines or whether it was blood transfusions or whether it was chemotherapy, whatever it was that you didn't know about. And so... I think if you ask people, do you think we're going to know more about science or medicine 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now, than we know now, everybody would say yes. But when it comes to their disease or most recently our pandemic, they want you to believe you know everything right now when you don't, because you never do.
Yeah. Like thinking about innovation right now, people's minds go to AI, CRISPR gene editing. Where do you think those scenarios play out in our lifetimes?
Right. What worries me there is that it's scientific innovation without conscience. I mean, without necessarily an overarching ethical, moral conscience, which is historically true of scientists. I mean, scientists will see sort of science uber alice, and they don't necessarily see the bigger picture. I mean, if you look at at people like William Shockley, who invented the transistor, or James Watson, who was with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins figured out the structure of DNA. They saw that as the cure-all, that we could, with eugenics and sterilization, that we could make for a better population. Because they just saw science as a cure for everything, not realizing that there are ethical and moral problems with that kind of style. But you see it now. I mean, you see it now with our politics. I mean, the notion that people are coming to this country with bad genes. So that still hasn't gone away.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What are the challenges of vaccine acceptance?
0:00–16:31
2
How is the vaccine approval process conducted?
16:31–37:17
3
What is the impact of misinformation on vaccine hesitancy?
37:17–51:35
4
What are the ethical concerns surrounding scientific innovation?
51:35–1:34:20
5
How do we combat vaccine misinformation?
39:09–1:34:20
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Checkup with Doctor Mike
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