The top health official in Florida is under fire once more for calling for an immediate stop to the use of mRNA coronavirus vaccines, citing extensively refuted reports that the injections could taint patients’ DNA.
In an official bulletin on Wednesday, Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo declared, “These vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings.” He also referred to the Food and Drug Administration’s evaluation of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots as “inadequate.”
Additionally, Ladapo made a claim in a statement that he put on X, a platform that was once Twitter, that the vaccines “are known to be contaminated by foreign DNA,” but that the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are failing to properly test them.
The FDA refuted Ladapo’s assertions in a letter sent to him this month, labeling his worries that DNA fragments would find their way into a cell’s nucleus as “quite implausible.”
The head of the FDA’s center for biologics evaluation and research, Peter Marks, referenced mRNA-based animal experiments conducted in the past ten years, claiming that there was no proof of genotoxicity—the damage of a cell’s genetic material that results in cell mutations. In addition, he mentioned the continuous monitoring of over one billion doses of mRNA coronavirus vaccines given to people worldwide, noting that there has been “nothing to indicate harm to the genome, such as increased rates of cancers.”
“With the authorizations and approvals of the COVID-19 vaccines, which have a highly favorable safety profile and which have saved, and continue to save, many lives, we firmly stand behind our regulatory decision making,” Marks wrote in the letter. The problem we still have is that there is a constant flow of false information regarding these vaccinations, which makes people reluctant to get them and reduces vaccination rates.
The former COVID-19 response coordinator for the White House, Dr. Ashish Jha, responded to Ladapo’s vaccine worries on X on Wednesday.
Joe Ladapo is an intelligent man. I don’t see why he does this, therefore,” he remarked, citing the more than 8,000 Floridians who lost their lives to the coronavirus in the previous year. Since 2020, Florida has seen more than 92,000 fatalities, according to state figures.