One of the most media-savvy vaccine advocates in the U.S., perhaps second only to record-breaking federal pensioner Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, has allegedly been caught falsely claiming he was not invited to address a federal vaccine advisory panel's recent meeting and spreading wildly inflated numbers on hepatitis B infections, a subject of the meeting.

The perceived gotcha on Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia but also a skeptic of COVID-19 boosters for healthy young people, prompted critics to flag other instances in which Offit allegedly refused to engage and to pick apart his media appearances and choice of venues, such as entertainment-focused TMZ.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials "repeatedly" contacted Offit to present at its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices' meeting last week, "via emails, phone calls and a speaker-request form," physician-turned-investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi wrote this week, contradicting Offit's claim to CNN on Dec. 5 on day two of ACIP's meeting.

"I actually wasn't invited to present at today's meeting" but rather invited in October "to speak about vaccines to this group," Offit told the host in the 9-minute interview when she asked why he declined to speak. (He has appeared on CNN several times this year.)

Offit then tried to redirect the conversation toward how ACIP had become an "anti-vaccine advisory committee" that threatens children's health by no longer recommending COVID vaccines by default. He didn't elaborate on how young children "clearly … benefit" from COVID vaccination, given their near-nil risk of serious harm from the virus. 

When the host pressed Offit to clarify what he thought the October invitation meant, he said he received a "vague recommendation to come speak to us" but not to speak "about this subject" – hepatitis B vaccination, whose recommendations ACIP changed later that day to wait two months to vaccinate newborns whose mothers test negative for the virus.

Offit strongly supports vaccination within 24 hours of birth, doing a promo for the Hepatitis B Foundation a week before the ACIP meeting. "In the 30 years since infants have been getting this vaccine at birth, we have virtually eliminated this disease in young people. Why would we stop now knowing how successful we have been?" he asked.

Demasi posted screenshots of CDC emails to Offit's address at Penn Medicine, after confirming with Penn Medicine itself the correct address, and to his address at CHOP, for which the CDC also filled out a speaker-request form seeking Offit. 

The emails to his addresses at Penn Medicine – which also copied its dean, Jonathan Epstein – and CHOP didn't mention hepatitis B but did ask him to speak at an "upcoming" ACIP meeting and to "connect" with him to "provide more context." 

The Penn Medicine invitation also mentioned already having left a voicemail. Offit didn't respond to any invitation, according to Demasi.

"There is nothing 'vague' about any of this" or any "ambiguity about which meeting the CDC meant," since ACIP only had one meeting between October and December, Demasi said. As a former ACIP member, Offit "knows exactly how the committee operates" and "how invitations are issued and what they refer to."

He also told CNN there were 30,000 hep B cases in children under 10 in 1991, the year vaccination at birth was first recommended, and half of them got it from "relatively casual contact" with someone who has a "chronic" case, "of whom there are millions" in America, half of whom don't know they have it.

Offit, who didn't give a source, was apparently referring to a 2001 modeling study – the kind used to justify draconian COVID lockdowns in spring 2020 – that tried to "estimate infections by combining small serosurveys with assumptions about maternal infection, household transmission and demographics," Demasi said.

She dismissed the estimate as "speculative reconstructions, not surveillance data. The CDC surveillance data presented to ACIP, by contrast, showed roughly 400 cases of "acute" hep B cases in children under 10 before the 1991 universal recommendation.

In his closing comments, Offit inexplicably claimed “50% of people in this country have chronic hepatitis B and don’t know it" and that children could get it from a nanny, daycare worker or family member. 

The CDC estimates 640,000 adults have chronic infections and specifies it can be transmitted through sexual contact and "sharing needles, syringes, or other drug-injection equipment," but doesn't mention casual contact. Hep B can't be transmitted by "kissing or sharing utensils" or "sneezing, coughing, hugging, breastfeeding, or food or water," the CDC emphasizes.

Demasi noted a 2020 Freedom of Information Act production to the Informed Consent Action Network found no "documentation sufficient to reflect any case(s) of transmission of Hepatitis B in an elementary, middle, or high school setting."

Yet Offit "invoked the spectre of infection through ordinary contact" by half of America "to heighten public fear and justify universal newborn vaccination," and did not respond to her offer to "clarify his remarks," Demasi said. Offit didn't respond to Just the News queries to his email addresses at CHOP and publicly advertised on Facebook.

Vaccine injury lawyer Aaron Siri told Just the News that Offit did not respond to his July 2024 offer to "have a public exchange, with equal time, where we can each present evidence about each vaccine’s safety and efficacy," following their social media exchange and Siri's lengthy rebuttal a year earlier.

Vaccine Safety Research Foundation President Steve Kirsch said Offit won't talk to him despite offering him $1 million, while former CDC Director Robert Redfield, who recently called for the removal of mRNA vaccines, will talk for free.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, a Just the News contributor, rehashed a 17-year-old conflict with Offit this spring stemming from her CBS News report about his undisclosed financial relationship with pharmaceutical company Merck, which prompted the Orange County Register to publish a "clarification" about Offit's claims in his Register op-ed three years earlier.

Offit has departed from COVID orthodoxy in a few ways, especially by opposing boosters for low-risk youth and challenging the Biden administration's push to authorize new shots based on underwhelming data from his perch on the Food and Drug Administration's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

He opposed jab-or-job COVID vaccine mandates for individuals with natural immunity and shared in a 2022 podcast that he conveyed that to Biden administration officials in a meeting to decide how to treat recovered individuals in pending mandates.

But Offit's prolific interviews in favor of vaccination on the whole, and specifically in the face of adverse events, have given his critics fuel against him.

One clip making the rounds this week is from Offit's interview early this year with a YouTube doctor, in which he called the discovery of post-vaccination myocarditis "a very small price to pay" for COVID vaccines and said people should have "realistic expectations of the fact that you're going to learn as you go" after a vaccine's authorization.

Offit's full comments on post-vaccination myocarditis, or heart inflammation, emphasized it was "primarily in boys 16 to 29 years of age, primarily after the second dose" but "generally … transient and self-resolving" and "really wasn't that bad," citing his experience at CHOP initially treating them as admitted patients and then as outpatients.

He later acknowledged the unusually high prevalence of myocarditis in that age group, "one in 6,600," and that COVID itself was "unlikely to be fatal in them," but then claimed 1,800 minors "have died of COVID," without mentioning their underlying condition or comorbidities.