Florida’s Surgeon General on Wednesday asked to stop He opposed the use of coronavirus vaccines, citing widely debunked concerns that contaminants in the vaccines could become permanently integrated into a person’s DNA.
In a statement released by the Florida Department of Health, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the state’s Surgeon General and top health official, said, “These vaccines are not suitable for use in humans.”
Federal health officials and other experts say asked repeatedly to Rebutting Dr. Ladapo’s incorrect comments Regarding vaccines, he noted that after careful consideration of the scientific evidence, he found no basis for his declaration.
The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that it had not identified any “safety concerns regarding the sequence or amount of residual DNA.”
The coronavirus vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna use so-called messenger RNA (mRNA), a type of genetic material, to instruct the body to make immune molecules against the coronavirus.
Dr. Ladapo’s latest statement further strengthens Florida’s anti-vaccine stance. He was appointed Surgeon General by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021 and has since increasingly aligned himself with anti-vaxxers’ claims that vaccinations cause serious harm.
In March 2022, Dr. Ladapo published guidance advise against Healthy children are receiving vaccines even though studies show they are safe and effective for all ages. In the fall of the same year, he recommended that young men between the ages of 18 and 39 avoid the mRNA vaccine because of the increased risk of cardiac death, concluding that: Change your findings Results of state-led research.
Last year, Dr. Ladapo blamed COVID-19 vaccines for life-threatening symptoms reported from Florida and elsewhere, urging the FDA to: publish a rebuttal. And in September, Florida advised all residents under 65 not to get vaccinated.
John Wherry, a vaccine expert and director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania, said Dr. Ladapo’s latest claims are “highly irresponsible.”
“This is not surprising, however, as he has shown a poor understanding of science and medicine in general over the course of the pandemic,” Dr. Wherry said.
Neither DeSantis’ presidential campaign nor the 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 basis of Dr. Ladapo’s evaluation. or the potential impact on vaccine uptake within the state.
Dr. Ladapo’s escalating rhetoric has prompted federal agencies to directly address his claims.in Letter to Dr. Ladapo In a paper published in December, the FDA detailed a number of reasons why his claims are difficult to believe.
vaccine has saved millions of livesthe agency said in a statement Wednesday. It accused Dr. Ladapo of promoting misinformation that contributed to lower vaccination rates and continued deaths and severe illness from the coronavirus.
COVID-19 infections are resurging across the U.S., and fewer than 1 in 5 U.S. adults have received the latest vaccination. Even among people over 75, who are most at risk of contracting the coronavirus, only about one in three people has received the latest version of the vaccine.Florida’s vaccination rate is in the bottom layer In the country.
“The FDA steadfastly supports the safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality of the approved and authorized COVID-19 vaccines and respectfully disagrees with the opinion of the Florida Surgeon General,” the agency said.
In a statement Wednesday, Dr. Ladapo argued that contaminants in vaccines could integrate into a person’s DNA, theoretically destabilizing chromosomes and turning healthy cells into cancer.
Experts in virology and immunology expressed these thoughts it was nonsense.
“You can see there are so many ‘possibilities’ out there,” says John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “There is no evidence that this series of ‘might’s’ actually happened or could happen.”
DNA vaccines contain orders of magnitude more DNA than is present as a contaminant in mRNA vaccines, yet Dr. Moore pointed out that it has never been linked to cancer.
“All my immediate family members have been vaccinated with mRNA vaccines,” he added. “As a result, we are confident that none of them are at risk of developing cancer.”
For Dr. Ladapo’s claim to be true, humans would need to have an enzyme that can integrate foreign DNA into the genome.
“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’s no mechanism, no reliable evidence,” Dr. Rubin said.
mike ives and Nicholas Nehamas Contributed to the report.