RFK Jr. criticized CHOP vaccine expert Paul Offit in a Fox News interview. Here’s how he responded.

A prominent Philadelphia vaccine expert, Paul Offit, is drawing national attention after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. targeted him during a Fox News interview on Thursday.

Offit codirects the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and has served during his career on scientific committees that advise the federal government on the use of vaccines.

The role of such committees has been under scrutiny this week after Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the use of vaccines.

Kennedy, a leading anti-vaccine activist prior to becoming President Donald Trump’s top health official, stoked further controversy when he subsequently named eight new appointees to the panel, including some who have been critical of vaccines in the past.

In Thursday’s Fox News interview explaining his actions, Kennedy singled out Offit as an example of ethical concerns raised over these advisory panels. He accused Offit of voting to add the rotavirus vaccine to a schedule of recommended vaccines while having a financial conflict of interest.

Kennedy’s statement was false, Offit said, publicly denouncing Kennedy’s claims in a video posted Thursday night to the social media platform X.

“There was no conflict of interest,” he said in the video.

“I would ask Secretary Kennedy to do his job,” he added. “Focus on the things that will make America healthy again, rather than by dividing us and vilifying people unnecessarily and without the facts.”

Offit clarified his work, explaining that he served as a voting member on the ACIP, the vaccine advisory committee that Kennedy purged, between 1998 and 2003.

He helped to develop a vaccine for rotavirus, a contagious viral disease that can cause severe diarrhea in children.

But when the rotavirus vaccine, for which he was a copatent holder, came up for a vote in 2006, he had already been off the committee for at least three years.

Because Offit worked at CHOP, the institution owned the patent, he added. “I didn’t sell out the patent, because it wasn’t mine to sell out,” he said in an interview. Ninety percent of what the patent sold for went back to CHOP, he said.

Offit called the financial reward of creating a rotavirus vaccine irrelevant to him. His motivation was the prospect of eliminating the 70,000 hospitalizations linked to rotavirus each year in the U.S., he said.

“We weren’t working on that to make money. We were working on that to save lives,” Offit said.

» READ MORE: Paul Offit, Philly’s most vocal vaccine advocate, on science and truth

Offit has sparred publicly with Kennedy for decades.

But he called this week’s Fox News remarks the tipping point.

“He’s not just some fringe guy anymore,” Offit told The Inquirer. “He’s the secretary of Health and Human Services. So that’s what prompted me to do something.”