One year ago today, Age of Autism posted “Voting Himself Rich”, in which they claimed that Paul Offit had been paid the entirety of a CHOP inventor’s share worth between $29M and $55M for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s inventor’s share of the 1998 patent that became the Rotateq vaccine. Six months ago, I established first by research into CHOP policy history and then by confirmation from Offit that he was in fact paid $6M, or one-third of an $18M inventor’s share. Two months ago, after denying, censoring or ignoring numerous corrections, Olmsted finally admitted that the amounts he claimed were incorrect. This article will commemorate these events by reviewing how inept and/or dishonest AoA’s conduct was.
It is worth starting with an interim defense offered by Mark Blaxill around last September: “Your information is interesting but equivocal. I have information that goes in the other direction.” I will turn this into a rhetorical question: What was this information? The only things I can identify from their own accounts are the following:
Offit’s “silence”
AoA’s main rationale for this debacle has been that Offit refused to comment on the amount. This is belied by at least two items of evidence. In a 2008 interview quoted in the AoA post, Offit reported receiving a “small percentage” of the proceeds. This made it reasonably clear that he received an amount in excess of $1M, but did not support a figure in excess of $10M. Second, Offit stated in a on April 30, 2009: “I have no idea where the $29 to $55 million numbers came from, but they are off by more than a decimal point.” This all but explicitly states that his actual income was about one-tenth of AoA’s number(s), or about $6M. It also strongly suggests that Offit was unaware of Olmsted’s inquiries.
$29M unaccounted for?
The figure that AoA endorsed as a “minimum” was based on the difference between a reported $182M sale and $153M reported as income to the hospital. It was claimed “the $29 million difference… could reflect the distribution to Offit”- as if no other explanation were available for any part of this amount. Olmsted continued to take approximately this line in December: “(W)e have been unable to fully explain the $29 million difference.” In reality, specific explanations are and always were redundant. There are obviously many things the money could have been spent on: patent fees, legal fees, agents’ fees, etc, etc. The logical conclusion for AoA was that, if the $29M had anything at all to do with the inventor’s share, then it represented the maximum amount of the share.
2007 CHOP policy
The figure of $45M was based on a CHOP document which defined the inventor’s share as 30% of the $153M net income from the invention. A $55M figure was also published based on the gross of $182M, even though the 2007 policy clearly specified net. Olmsted and Blaxill overlooked or omitted to mention an important statement: “For Intellectual Property having an Effective Disclosure Date between July 1, 2005 and October 31, 2006, inclusive, Hospital Personnel may elect, which election is irrevocable, to have the Intellectual Property subject to this policy (in lieu of the 2000 Policy)...” This clearly establishes that the policy was not applicable to a patent filed before July 2005. The “Rotateq” patent, filed all the way back in 1998, was nowhere near recent enough for the 2007 policy to apply. Thus, AoA based the $45M figure on a policy which they should have known was inapplicable, and the $55M figure on an obviously invalid interpretation of that policy.
Other policies
It seems that, rather than searching out all available records on past and present CHOP policies, Olmsted and/or Blaxill went on a fishing expedition for the policies of other institutions. They reported a range of 15-35% of net income, which was offered as support for a $29-55M range. However, if calculations had been made from the $153M net, they would have come up with $23-53.5M. The figures published must have been based on the $182M net instead, despite the open admission that “most universities calculate income based on net royalties.”
Signed forms?
The most crucial and obviously weak contention in Olmsted’s and Blaxill’s original article was the assumption that the entirety of the CHOP share went to Paul Offit, even though he shared the patent with H. Fred Clark and Stanley Plotkin. If they had been aware of the additional information that these coinventors were past or present CHOP faculty, as they certainly would have been if they had made the slightest effort to investigate the backgrounds of Clark and Plotkin, they should have recognized that Offit was indisputably not the only beneficiary of the inventor’s share. Even in the absence of this information, they could easily have deduced that the most prudent course of action was to pay something to the other inventors: Regardless of technicalities of law and policy, refusing to do so would predictably have resulted in costly litigation against CHOP and/or Offit. It would also have undermined CHOP’s ability to attract and retain research staff. This last and still fairly obvious point carried a very significant caveat for AoA: If they wrongfully claimed that CHOP refused to pay Clark and Plotkin, they would be making a potentially very damaging libel against the hospital, for which they could easily have been sued.
It was only in the December “retraction” that Olmsted offered a coherent account of how he reasoned that Clark and Plotkin were not paid: “In the case of the Rotateq® patents, these file histories documented two separate assignment agreements: in one, Paul Offit signed the form ceding his inventor rights to CHOP; in the other, Fred Clark and Stanley Plotkin assigned their inventor rights over to Wistar.” Here is the signature from one of these forms:
It is obvious from the date alone that this document is not even about the 1998 patent, but one of several related earlier patents for rotavirus vaccines, in fact clearly identified as one dated 1990.
This, then, is the evidence on which AoA spent 10 months condemning a good researcher for supposedly being too rich: Offit’s “failure” to state explicitly what he gave enough information to deduce well before and soon after their “investigation” , an unexplained but prosaic financial discrepancy, the wrong patent policies, the wrong interpretation of the wrong policies, and signed documents for the wrong patent! To sustain this fantasy, they committed many further wrongs, from libel against a major hospital to censorship of my own comments correcting their mistake. And, now that their falsehood has been exposed, I for one am not going to let them just walk away from “18/3=29”.
The question they ought to ask themselves is: Was it worth it?
See full story of this and other incompetence and/or fraud by Olmsted:
“Olmsted Lied, People Laughed!”
If you want to reference this post in your site, use the code below to link to me from your website.
<a href="http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2010/02/18329-one-year-retrospective-on-anti-offit-hoax/">18/3=29!!: One-year retrospective on anti-Offit hoax</a>
One year ago today, Age of Autism posted “Voting Himself Rich”, in which they claimed that Paul Offit had been paid the entirety of a CHOP inventor’s share worth between $29M and $55M for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s inventor’s share of the 1998 patent that became the Rotateq vaccine. Six months ago, I established first by research into CHOP policy history and then by confirmation from Offit that he was in fact paid $6M, or one-third of an $18M inventor’s share. Two months ago, after denying, censoring or ignoring numerous corrections, Olmsted finally admitted that the amounts he claimed were incorrect. This article will commemorate these events by reviewing how inept and/or dishonest AoA’s conduct was.
It is worth starting with an interim defense offered by Mark Blaxill around last September: “Your information is interesting but equivocal. I have information that goes in the other direction.” I will turn this into a rhetorical question: What was this information? The only things I can identify from their own accounts are the following:
Offit’s “silence”
AoA’s main rationale for this debacle has been that Offit refused to comment on the amount. This is belied by at least two items of evidence. In a 2008 interview quoted in the AoA post, Offit reported receiving a “small percentage” of the proceeds. This made it reasonably clear that he received an amount in excess of $1M, but did not support a figure in excess of $10M. Second, Offit stated in a on April 30, 2009: “I have no idea where the $29 to $55 million numbers came from, but they are off by more than a decimal point.” This all but explicitly states that his actual income was about one-tenth of AoA’s number(s), or about $6M. It also strongly suggests that Offit was unaware of Olmsted’s inquiries.
$29M unaccounted for?
The figure that AoA endorsed as a “minimum” was based on the difference between a reported $182M sale and $153M reported as income to the hospital. It was claimed “the $29 million difference… could reflect the distribution to Offit”- as if no other explanation were available for any part of this amount. Olmsted continued to take approximately this line in December: “(W)e have been unable to fully explain the $29 million difference.” In reality, specific explanations are and always were redundant. There are obviously many things the money could have been spent on: patent fees, legal fees, agents’ fees, etc, etc. The logical conclusion for AoA was that, if the $29M had anything at all to do with the inventor’s share, then it represented the maximum amount of the share.
2007 CHOP policy
The figure of $45M was based on a CHOP document which defined the inventor’s share as 30% of the $153M net income from the invention. A $55M figure was also published based on the gross of $182M, even though the 2007 policy clearly specified net. Olmsted and Blaxill overlooked or omitted to mention an important statement: “For Intellectual Property having an Effective Disclosure Date between July 1, 2005 and October 31, 2006, inclusive, Hospital Personnel may elect, which election is irrevocable, to have the Intellectual Property subject to this policy (in lieu of the 2000 Policy)...” This clearly establishes that the policy was not applicable to a patent filed before July 2005. The “Rotateq” patent, filed all the way back in 1998, was nowhere near recent enough for the 2007 policy to apply. Thus, AoA based the $45M figure on a policy which they should have known was inapplicable, and the $55M figure on an obviously invalid interpretation of that policy.
Other policies
It seems that, rather than searching out all available records on past and present CHOP policies, Olmsted and/or Blaxill went on a fishing expedition for the policies of other institutions. They reported a range of 15-35% of net income, which was offered as support for a $29-55M range. However, if calculations had been made from the $153M net, they would have come up with $23-53.5M. The figures published must have been based on the $182M net instead, despite the open admission that “most universities calculate income based on net royalties.”
Signed forms?
The most crucial and obviously weak contention in Olmsted’s and Blaxill’s original article was the assumption that the entirety of the CHOP share went to Paul Offit, even though he shared the patent with H. Fred Clark and Stanley Plotkin. If they had been aware of the additional information that these coinventors were past or present CHOP faculty, as they certainly would have been if they had made the slightest effort to investigate the backgrounds of Clark and Plotkin, they should have recognized that Offit was indisputably not the only beneficiary of the inventor’s share. Even in the absence of this information, they could easily have deduced that the most prudent course of action was to pay something to the other inventors: Regardless of technicalities of law and policy, refusing to do so would predictably have resulted in costly litigation against CHOP and/or Offit. It would also have undermined CHOP’s ability to attract and retain research staff. This last and still fairly obvious point carried a very significant caveat for AoA: If they wrongfully claimed that CHOP refused to pay Clark and Plotkin, they would be making a potentially very damaging libel against the hospital, for which they could easily have been sued.
It was only in the December “retraction” that Olmsted offered a coherent account of how he reasoned that Clark and Plotkin were not paid: “In the case of the Rotateq® patents, these file histories documented two separate assignment agreements: in one, Paul Offit signed the form ceding his inventor rights to CHOP; in the other, Fred Clark and Stanley Plotkin assigned their inventor rights over to Wistar.” Here is the signature from one of these forms:
It is obvious from the date alone that this document is not even about the 1998 patent, but one of several related earlier patents for rotavirus vaccines, in fact clearly identified as one dated 1990.
This, then, is the evidence on which AoA spent 10 months condemning a good researcher for supposedly being too rich: Offit’s “failure” to state explicitly what he gave enough information to deduce well before and soon after their “investigation” , an unexplained but prosaic financial discrepancy, the wrong patent policies, the wrong interpretation of the wrong policies, and signed documents for the wrong patent! To sustain this fantasy, they committed many further wrongs, from libel against a major hospital to censorship of my own comments correcting their mistake. And, now that their falsehood has been exposed, I for one am not going to let them just walk away from “18/3=29”.
The question they ought to ask themselves is: Was it worth it?
See full story of this and other incompetence and/or fraud by Olmsted:
“Olmsted Lied, People Laughed!”
If you want to reference this post in your site, use the code below to link to me from your website.
<a href="http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2010/02/18329-one-year-retrospective-on-anti-offit-hoax/">18/3=29!!: One-year retrospective on anti-Offit hoax</a>