Article Citing Misinformation, Florida Health Official Calls for Halt to Covid Vaccines (Jan 2024) Federal health officials and other experts have repeatedly sought to counter erroneous comments about the vaccines by Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general.

[Michael Harrop]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/health/covid-vaccines-florida.html

Florida’s surgeon general on Wednesday called for a halt to the use of Covid vaccines, citing widely debunked concerns that contaminants in the vaccine can permanently integrate into human DNA.

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Federal health officials and other experts have repeatedly sought to counter Dr. Ladapo’s erroneous comments about the vaccines, noting that careful review of the scientific evidence has found no basis for his declarations.

The Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday that it had not identified any “safety concerns related to the sequence of, or amount of, residual DNA.”

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Last year, Dr. Ladapo attributed life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere to the Covid vaccines, prompting the F.D.A. to publish a rebuttal.

Dr. Ladapo’s intensifying rhetoric has prompted federal agencies to directly address his claims. In a letter to Dr. Ladapo published in December, the F.D.A. detailed the many reasons his claims are implausible.

In his declaration on Wednesday, Dr. Ladapo contended that contaminants in the vaccines might integrate into human DNA, theoretically causing chromosomes to become unstable and healthy cells to become cancerous.

Experts in virology and immunology said those ideas were nonsensical.

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