State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo spread anti-vaccine misinformation by telling Floridians to avoid mRNA vaccines. Vaccine experts and historians can't remember another state health leader urging residents to avoid an FDA-approved vaccine.

In what has become a pattern of spreading vaccine misinformation, the Florida health department is telling older Floridians and others at highest risk from COVID-19 to avoid most booster shots, saying they are potentially dangerous.

Clinicians and scientists denounced the message as politically fueled scaremongering that also weakens efforts to protect against diseases like measles and whooping cough.

A prominent Florida doctor expressed dismay that medical leaders in the state, leery of angering Gov. Ron DeSantis, have been slow to counter anti-vaccine messages from Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, including the latest COVID bulletin. Ladapo is a DeSantis appointee and the top official at the state health department.

The bulletin makes a number of false or unproven claims about the efficacy and safety of mRNA-based COVID vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, including that they could threaten “the integrity of the human genome.” Florida’s guidance generally regurgitates ideas from anti-vaccine websites, said John Moore, a professor of microbiology at Weill Cornell Medicine.

  • @indomaraEnglish
    6•17 hours ago

    This shit is getting old. I was in the Novavax trial here in Australia and one of the things the clinicians said that stuck with me is that they were “surprised that there wasn’t much interest”.

    See, Novavax is a traditional vaccine, not an MRNA vaccine. It is (and has been) approved everywhere.

    They expected that all the antivaxxers who were afraid of “changes to their DNA” would come in for this traditional vaccine.

    Except they didn’t. Because it isn’t about MRNA, it’s about being part of a group, part of people who “understand you” and echo and validate the fears you have about living in this world.

    This is killing people.