Polk providers mostly mum on Fla. surgeon general's warnings against COVID vaccines

When Florida’s top medical official recently urged doctors to cease providing some vaccinations against COVID-19, calling them dangerous, many health authorities took exception.

A spokeswoman for the federal Food and Drug Administration described as “misleading” the claims of risk from Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida Surgeon General. The agency sent a letter to Ladapo calling his description of contamination risks from the vaccines “implausible.”

Dr. Ashish Jha, a former White House COVID-19 response coordinator and dean of Brown University’s school of public health, told the Washington Post that Ladapo’s claims had no merit. Dr. Paul Offit, director of its Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said that it is impossible for DNA fragments in vaccines to integrate into a recipient’s DNA, PolitiFact reported.

A spokesperson for Pfizer, one of the companies that developed a COVID vaccine, rejected Ladapo’s assertion that the vaccine contained DNA fragments that could damage the recipient’s genetic makeup.

Are local health authorities heeding Ladapo’s warnings about vaccines that use messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology? If so, most are not talking about it.

The Ledger contacted the Florida Department of Health in Polk County and the area’s largest health providers, and most did not respond.

Only BayCare, a nonprofit health care system covering West Central Florida, provided a statement on the safety of mRNA vaccines.

“The FDA has thoroughly assessed the entire process for Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccines,” Dr. Laura Arline, BayCare Health System’s chief quality officer, said in a written statement. “Researchers and scientists confirm that there is a 0% chance that mRNA vaccination would in any way affect a person’s DNA. The COVID vaccine is one of the most studied vaccines we’ve ever had, with over a billion doses administered worldwide and millions of lives saved.”

BayCare operates hospitals in Winter Haven and Bartow and other facilities in Polk County.

Ladapo, a controversial figure appointed by DeSantis in 2021, has long questioned the safety and effectiveness of COVID vaccines. He went farther in his recent statements, even calling the mRNA vaccine “the Antichrist of all products” on the podcast of conservative political activist Steve Bannon.

Ladapo said that the FDA and CDC should declare a halt to the vaccinations. His position, promoted on the Florida Department of Health’s website, signals a complete reversal from 2021, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attended vaccination events at nursing homes and his administration boasted about overseeing the vaccination of 1 million seniors.

While conventional vaccines contain a weakened or dead sample of an actual virus or bacteria that provokes an immune response, mRNA vaccines introduce a specific molecule to generate the same effect.

The synthetic mRNA provokes cells in the recipient’s body to make a viral spike protein, which the person’s immune response recognizes as foreign and produces antibodies to fight it. If that person is later exposed to the virus, antibodies and other elements of the immune system can recognize and attack it before the virus infects healthy cells.

Traditional vaccines have been used since the late 1700s. The first mRNA vaccines approved for human use were the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna varieties for COVID-19 released in December 2020. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, approved months later, used the conventional technology.

Ladapo suggested that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could contain “nucleic acid contaminants” and claimed that recipients could pass DNA alterations on to their offspring. He stated that the FDA had not done sufficient human testing of those vaccines and urged providers to recommend only non-mRNA vaccines for COVID. One example is the Novavax vaccine, released last fall.

The Washington Post quoted Dr. David Gorski, professor of surgery and oncology at Wayne State University, as saying of Ladapo’s comments: “I’ve never seen a state health authority parrot anti-vaccine disinformation as a justification for stopping the use of a vaccine that has saved so many lives before.”

Gorski is managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, a site that seeks to debunk medical misinformation.

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Ladapo’s statements came at a time when most Americans have not sought full inoculation against COVID. In Florida, only 11.7% of eligible residents have received the latest available booster shot, the CDC reports.

Nearly 93,000 Floridians had died from COVID-19 though Dec. 29, according to the state’s Department of Health.

The Florida Department of Health in Polk County did not respond to questions about its policy on COVID vaccinations. A call to the agency’s Lakeland office yielded a recording that provided a different number for calls about “coronavirus or COVID-19.”

Repeated calls to that number over three days all resulted in a recorded message: “We’re sorry. There is no one available to take your call at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try your call again later.”

A spokesperson for Watson Clinic, based in Lakeland, said that providers will administer the Spikevax Moderna vaccine, the latest booster, to our eligible patients age 18 or older. The FDA has approved the vaccine for children as young as six months.

Lakeland Regional Health did not provide a response to questions from The Ledger. Neither did Bond Clinic. A spokesperson for AdventHealth said no one was available.

National pharmacy chains Walgreens and CVS offer the latest COVID vaccinations, as does Publix.

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Polk providers mostly mum on Ladapo's warnings against COVID vaccines