Comments on: Paul Offit’s Mythical Millions (v. 2)

By: Bez BIK

Bez BIK — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:39:24 +0000

Good article. Yours

By: David N. Brown

David N. Brown — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 03:34:04 +0000

Bit of an update: I have a new version of this up at “Evil Possum”. The new draft makes a few corrections. I have also finally determined just how Olmsted justified (to others or himself) his central claim that Clark and Plotkin were ineligible for CHOP payments: Rather than looking at documents from the 1998/2000 patent on which rotateq is actually based, he consulted documents from a 1994 patent.

By: David N. Brown

David N. Brown — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:55:55 +0000

Another note to Jake:
The main commetn that caught my atteention was “(Offit) may already have earned $10 million from Rotateq”. No qualifier there.

By: David N. Brown

David N. Brown — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:03:09 +0000

Jake,
If you agoing to argue that Offit received 448K for CHOP royalties (it appears to me it could have been more or less), all well and good. But Olmsted did not give this figure or explain his reasoning (also a problem with his argument for Offit being eligible for Wistar payments). A reasonable claim does not make up for a poor argument.

Also, to readers in general, I would like it to be noted that this piece was originally titled “Revenge of Offit Revisited”, and appears on evilpossum.weebly.com with that title. It appears the substitution was made to fit the desired tone of LBRB, which I have no problem with.

By: Sullivan

Sullivan — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:30:45 +0000

David,

You spent much more time on Wistar than I. I couldn’t get a solid answer from the information I found. My interest level in correcting homework for Mr. Blaxill and Mr. Olmsted dropped off significantly after they refused to correct their CHOP estimates.

I did key in on the “hostile” and “threatening” messages bit in the above. Since you and I are the two people who sent messages, I can only assume this is some cheap shot at us. Since they are not responding to my request for clarification, I am posting my communication with them (Olmsted and Blaxill) shortly to demonstrate what the editors at the age of Autism consider “hostile” and “threatening”. Suffice it to say, they are spinning facts.

By: Visitor

Visitor — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:27:28 +0000

What strikes me as interesting is the comparison.

Paul Offit co-invents a vaccine, which saves children’s lives, and receives enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his life, and thus has no bread-and-butter concern about whether thimerosal and/or MMR cause autism or not.

Andrew Wakefield invents a vaccine, and other products, which are 100% junk, accomplishing nothing for anybody, is fired from his job, and this has ever bread-and-butter reason imaginable for promoting fear of vaccines, off which he intends to live out the rest of his life.

By: Mike Stanton

Mike Stanton — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:31:24 +0000

Thank you, David, for taking on the unenviable task of tackling Olmsted and Blaxill’s creative accounting. It is a good job they are not bankers. With their financial acumen they would quickly bring the country to its knees … Hang on, that’s been done already.

What they never mention is that rotavirus hospitalizes 2 million children every year and kills 600,000 – probably the ones who do not have access to hospital care. Dr Offit’s vaccine is a life saver. He deserves every penny he gets.

By the way, do you know if our financial wizards took account of the fact that Merck is committed to selling Rotateq at cost price to GAVI eligible countries? Their biggest market is probably in these 70 poorest countries in the world and neither they nor Dr Offit will make a penny piece in profits from any sales to these countries.

By: Jake Crosby

Jake Crosby — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:29:40 +0000

“Even granting his doubtful claim of CHOP royalty payments through Q3 2007 won’t quite get to $1.6M without rounding”

That’s because it involves combining the CHOP earnings of $448,000 plus the Wistar earnings of $993,000 which will bring us to $1.41 million, add that to $8.442 million and we have $9.852 million which rounds up to $10,000,000, or is as my fellow editors Mark and Dan state: “approximately $10 million in income from Rotateq® royalties through 2009.”

So their math is correct. You are simply mad at them for not being spot on, which is a canard anyway since their estimate is an approximation that is correct when rounded to the nearest whole number in units of millions of dollars.