Florida Health Official Calls for a Discontinuation of Covid Vaccines
Florida’s surgeon general Wednesday called for a stop to the use of Covid vaccines, citing widely debunked concerns that contaminants in the vaccine could become permanently integrated into human DNA.
“These vaccines are not suitable for use in humans,” said Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the state’s surgeon general and chief health official, said in a statement released by the Florida Department of Health.
Federal health officials and other experts have done so searched repeatedly Unpleasant refute Dr.’s incorrect comments. Ladapo on the vaccines, noting that careful examination of the scientific evidence has found no basis for his statements.
The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that it had identified no “safety concerns related to the sequence or amount of DNA remaining.”
Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid vaccines use so-called messenger RNA, or mRNA, a type of genetic material, to instruct the body to make immune molecules against the coronavirus.
The latest statement from Dr. Ladapo reinforces Florida’s escalating anti-vaccination stance. He was appointed surgeon general in 2021 by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and has since increasingly joined anti-vaccine claims that the shots cause serious harm.
In March 2022, Dr. Ladapo guidelines out advise against healthy children receiving the vaccines, despite studies showing the vaccines are safe and effective at all ages. That fall, he advised young men between the ages of 18 and 39 to avoid mRNA vaccines due to a high risk of cardiac death. He came to that conclusion by changing the findings of a state-led investigation.
Last year, Dr. Ladapo life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere linked to Covid vaccines, prompting FDA to publish a rebuttal. And in September, Florida advised all residents under 65 to skip the vaccines.
Dr.’s last statement Ladapo is “highly irresponsible,” said John Wherry, a vaccine expert and director of the Institute of Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania.
“However, he has demonstrated a poor understanding of science and medicine in general during the pandemic, so this is not surprising,” said Dr. Wherry.
Neither Mr. DeSantis’ presidential campaign nor his governor’s office immediately responded to requests for comment. The Florida Department of Health did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the rationale for Dr. Ladapo or its potential effect on vaccine uptake in the state.
Dr.’s increasing rhetoric Ladapo has pushed federal agencies to address his claims directly. In a letter to Dr. Ladapo Published in December, the FDA laid out the many reasons why its claims are unlikely.
The vaccinations have saved millions of livesThe agency reported this in a statement on Wednesday. It punished Dr. Ladapo for fueling misinformation that contributes to low vaccination rates and continued deaths and serious illnesses from Covid.
Covid is making a resurgence in the United States, and fewer than one in five American adults have received the latest vaccinations. Even among those aged 75 and over, who are most at risk from Covid, only around one in three have received the latest version of the vaccine. Florida’s vaccination rate is among the lowest in the country.
“The FDA firmly stands behind the safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality of the approved and authorized Covid-19 vaccines, and respectfully disagrees with the views of the Florida Surgeon General,” the agency said.
In his statement on Wednesday, Dr. Ladapo that contaminants in the vaccines could integrate into human DNA, theoretically causing chromosomes to become unstable and healthy cells to become cancerous.
Experts in the field of virology and immunology said these ideas were nonsensical.
“You’ll see a lot of ‘powers’ there,” says John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “There is no evidence that this chain of ‘powers’ is actually happening or even could happen.”
DNA vaccines contain many orders of magnitude more DNA than is present as mRNA vaccine contamination, and yet they have never been linked to cancer, Dr. noted. Moore op.
“Every member of my immediate family has had a dose of the mRNA vaccine,” he added. “I am absolutely certain that none of them are at risk of contracting cancer.”
To counter Dr. To make Ladapo happen, humans would need an enzyme that can incorporate foreign DNA into their genomes.
“We don’t have that,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.
“There is no mechanism and no credible evidence,” said Dr. Rubin.
Mike Ives And Nicholas Nehamas reporting contributed.