Speaker biographies

John E. Calfee is a resident scholar at AEI. He previously served at the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, where he worked on the economics of consumer protection including advertising and marketing, the tort liability system, and tobacco. He later taught marketing and consumer behavior at the business schools of the University of Maryland at College Park and Boston University and spent a year as a visiting senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has been at AEI since 1995. Mr. Calfee’s academic articles and opinion pieces cover a variety of topics including tort liability, advertising and information, FDA regulation, and the pharmaceutical market. Recent publications include “An Assessment of Direct-To-Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs,” in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics; “The Golden Age of Medical Innovation,” in The American; “The Emerging Market Dynamics of Targeted Therapeutics,” in Health Affairs (with Elizabeth DuPré); “The Vioxx Fallout,” an AEI Health Policy Outlook, and “What Do We Know About Direct-To-Consumer Advertising Of Prescription Drugs?” in Health Affairs. He has published three short books: Fear of Persuasion: A New Perspective on Advertising and Regulation (1997), Prices, Markets, and the Pharmaceutical Revolution (AEI Press, 2000), and Biotechnology and the Patent System: Balancing Innovation and Property Rights (with Claude Barfield; AEI Press, 2007). He has also testified before Congress and federal agencies on various topics, including alcohol advertising, biodefense vaccine research, international drug prices, and the Vioxx episode.

Paul A. Offit, M.D., is the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In addition, Dr. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is a recipient of many awards, including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Offit has published more than 130 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the coinventor of the rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq, for which he received the Gold Medal from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Jonas Salk Medal from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Dr. Offit has served on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is the coauthor of four books: Vaccines: What You Should Know (Wiley, 2003, third edition), Breaking the Antibiotic Habit (Wiley, 1999), The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to Today’s Growing Vaccine Crisis (Yale University Press, 2005), and, most recently, Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases (HarperCollins, 2007). 

Cole Werble is editor-in-chief of The RPM Report, published by Windhover Information. Prior to joining Windhover in 2005, Mr. Werble was an independent consultant to the pharmaceutical and health products industries. He coauthored a report on vaccines with Eileen Salinsky for the National Health Policy Forum entitled The Vaccine Industry: Does It Need a Shot in the Arm? For twenty-six years, Mr. Werble was owner and editorial director of FDC Reports, Inc., the publisher of The Pink Sheet, The Gray Sheet, and other leading news publications for the pharmaceutical industry.

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