Bullies, PsyWar and the COVIDcrisis
Pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia illustrates how Academic Bully culture has contributed to the COVID public health fiasco
Paul A. Offit, MD, is the Director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the
Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Areas of Expertise:Vaccines
Locations:Main Hospital
What we can see from this substack and his other actions and podcasts (see this link for one of many examples) is that Professor Dr. Paul Offit is an academic bully. He has been bullying and gaslighting others his entire career.
Dr. Offit’s claim to fame is that he played a supporting role in the development and licensure of a second rotavirus vaccine, very similar to the first, but which was able to squeak through clinical trials to get licensed due to some creative nuances in how those trials were performed. That is pretty much it.
I know the type well, and have been dealing with predatory academic bullies my entire professional career. Professor Dr. Vinay Prasad of UCSF provides another example of an academic bully. You can easily identify academic bullies by their habit of sneering condescension, ad hominem attacks, and reliance on character assassination rather than focusing on ideas and making efforts to comprehend alternative points of view and data which are inconsistent with their personal research interests and biases.
Another great example during the time of COVID was Dr. Anthony Fauci’s sneering lies to Senator Rand Paul during congressional testimony concerning Fauci’s role in funding the gain of function research which created the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Classical academic bully behavior.
The first time I really encountered academic bullying was when I entered the Salk Institute Laboratories of Molecular Virology as a UCSD PhD-candidate graduate student surrounded by highly competitive post-doctoral researchers. In theory, Professor Dr. Inder Verma served as my graduate student mentor, but in reality as I found myself straying from the viral vector gene therapy mainstream and basically helping found non-viral gene therapy as a discipline, I found myself harassed and gaslit on a daily basis by both Dr. Verma and many of the post-doctoral researchers (there were 14 at the time) in his lab. This hazing played a large role in my eventual nervous breakdown, lifelong PTSD and departure from my PhD work with a masters degree- after having completed my qualifying oral exams. Of course the research findings from that masters degree gave rise to the whole field of non-viral gene therapy, DNA and mRNA vaccines, and eventually a Nobel Prize for U Penn researchers Kariko and Weissman.
The Salk Institute had a long history of this culture, and I recall post docs gleefully telling stories of how (now) Professor Dr. Susumu Tonegawa (Nobel Laureate, VDJ recombination, 1987) was harassed and hazed as a student in the Salk Molecular Virology laboratory of Professor Dr. Renato Dulbecco (Nobel Laureate, oncoviruses, 1975). Through bullying, intimidation, and hardball academic politics Dr. Verma eventually rose to head the Salk. Dr. Verma was trained by the notorious Professor and Dr. David Baltimore (Nobel Laureate, retroviral reverse transcriptase, 1975- trained in the lab of Renato Dulbecco (shared Nobel with Howard Temin) - who like Verma ended his career under an ethical cloud), and eventually Verma was forced to leave the Salk under duress consequent to having been exposed for his long history of sexual harassment of female technicians and post-doctoral students. Things had gotten so bad that the Salk required any female student, post-doc or technician who wanted to work in the Verma lab to sign a statement (before joining) that she would not hold the Salk liable for Inder’s actions. So after Inder was forced to leave, a close junior associate and ally was appointed director of the Salk.
I will never forget Inder handing me a stack of confidential research proposals he was supposed to review and telling me to read them and get ideas. A massive ethical breach, and when I raised my concerns with another Salk Professor (Walter Eckhart), I was told that “maybe Inder is not the best role model for you”. In yet another case, a famous Salk scientist (Tony Hunter) once said to me “Of course Inder lied, what would you expect him to do?” And that was that. Move on.
So it goes in academe. Just the way things are. Those who bring in the gold (in terms of donations, grants and contracts) make the rules, and rule the roost.
Paradoxically, the diversity, inclusion and equity agenda now so aggressively pursued by academia (apparently triggered by a Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action) is typically enforced by bullying rather than enabled by empathy.
So it comes as no surprise to me that we have seen the rise of academic bullying on social media including “X” and substack. What has been surprising is that this culture and behavior has been intentionally enabled and weaponized by the industrial-censorship complex which has been on a government- and Pharma-funded growth explosion during the COVIDcrisis. One of many examples now revealed involves the gang stalking by selected academics, physicians, scientists and other social media gurus of the official COVID narrative that have been organized, empowered and directed by the “Shots Heard Round the World” initiative funded by the Foundation for CDC via the “Public Goods Project” as documented by the Epoch Times and further discussed in this substack essay. This is bullying on steroids, funded by the Administrative State, using donations from the likes of Merck, Pfizer, and the Gates Foundation. Never mind that this type of organized cyberstalking and gang stalking behavior is a federal crime. If the Administrative State does it, it is not a crime.
Dr. Offit personally embodies the academic/pharma public-private culture which has enabled and profited from this whole COVIDcrisis public health fiasco. And he represents and is supported and enabled by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. https://chop.edu/doctors/offit-paul-a… He is clearly biased towards the vaccine industry, and is not able to objectively, rigorously and dispassionately evaluate clinical and regulatory data and evidence.
Instead, he acts as an apologist, propagandist, and industry advocate. Furthermore, he also illustrates how the corruption of FDA and CDC has come to this point, in that he is enabled by the HHS to bring his biases and industry advocacy into key oversight and review panels which influence FDA and CDC decision making.
What should be happening is that these oversight and review panels SHOULD BE composed of independent, rigorous thinkers and analysts- acting objectively in the public interest. Not industry advocates. I have served on many peer review panels for federal grants and contracts, often as study section chairperson, and I know that this type of insider self dealing can be easily policed if an institute is committed to an independent, fair and balanced process.
This pediatrician (Dr. Offit), together with pediatrician Dr. Hotez, illustrates how and why the whole pediatric vaccine schedule has exploded in the USA while the vaccine industry has been protected from legal accountability, and why the vaccine industry has been allowed and enabled to prey upon parents for profit.
This is not responsible objective science, this is not responsible objective medicine, this is public-private cooperative predation.
The conflicts of interest of both Professor Dr. Offit and Professor Dr. Hotez represent a clear and present danger to parents, children, and general public welfare. They should be reprimanded by their academic institutions for clear bias and COI, as well as their unprofessional behavior, and should be removed from any and all roles in government advisory oversight.
In the interest of Public Health.