South Florida Sun Sentinel – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration fought back on Friday against what it calls “the proliferation of misinformation” by Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
In a letter earlier this month to the FDA, Ladapo had questioned the agency’s drug approval and raised alarms about what he sees as the risk of potential cancer posed by COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Ladapo, the leader of Florida’s health department, said he believed the drug delivery system used by mRNA vaccines could be an “efficient vehicle for delivering contaminant DNA into human cells.”
But a top researcher with the FDA released a public response to Ladapo on Friday saying the Surgeon General’s scientific assertion regarding the cancer risk is “implausible.”
Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research for the FDA, said the premise asserted by Ladapo that DNA contaminant could cause cancer in vaccine recipients is not scientifically accurate because there is no way that minute amounts of DNA fragments could find their way into the nucleus of human cells where DNA resides.
He added that this type of disinformation results in vaccine hesitancy.
“Given the dramatic reduction in the risk of death, hospitalization and serious illness afforded by the vaccines, lower vaccine uptake is contributing to the continued death and serious illness toll of COVID-19,” Marks wrote.
Indeed, only 11% of Floridians have received an updated COVID-19 booster, despite the state’s large population of elderly who are most at risk for poor outcomes.
Even more, only about a third of the state’s vulnerable long-term care population has had the updated shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention …
In his Dec. 6 letter, Ladapo had pressed the FDA and CDC to answer three questions by Dec. 13:
- Was the risk of DNA integration evaluated by drug manufacturers and provided to the federal agencies;
- did FDA standards take the COVID-19 vaccine’s delivery system into account;
- and was a risk evaluated of integration with reproductive cells beyond the local injection site?
