Florida Surgeon General Blows Off FDA in Call to Nix COVID Vaccines

Rejecting federal regulators' admonition about spreading "misinformation and disinformation," Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has called for a halt in the use of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19.

One of the most vocal vaccine skeptics among top-ranking health officials in the U.S., Ladapo released a statement on January 3 claiming mRNA COVID-19 shots "are not appropriate for use in human beings" because of the risk of contamination with Simian Virus 40 (SV40) DNA.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) characterized the claim as nonsense in a December letter addressing Ladapo's concerns that trace amounts of SV40 DNA could enter human cell centers and cause cancer.

"Perpetuating references to this information about residual DNA without placing it within the context of the manufacturing process is misleading," Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, wrote to Ladapo on December 14.

Ladapo's announcement was the latest and boldest act of his extended campaign to discredit COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. Among other controversial advisories, Ladapo in October 2022 recommended that young adult men refrain from taking mRNA vaccines in light of what he claimed was excess cardiovascular illness in vaccine recipients.

Ladapo contacted the FDA late last year to assert that the agency had not performed adequate safety testing to ensure that SV40 DNA would not enter vaccine recipients' cell nuclei and interfere with human DNA. 

In its response, the FDA indicated Ladapo was contributing to unfounded apprehension about the vaccines' safety profile.

"The challenge we continue to face is the ongoing proliferation of misinformation and disinformation about these vaccines which results in vaccine hesitancy that lowers vaccine uptake," Marks wrote.

Ladapo doubled down in his January 3 announcement calling for mRNA COVID-19 shots to be discontinued. He repeated unsubstantiated claims that dangerous quantities of SV40 DNA in the vaccines could make their way into sperm or egg gametes and be "passed onto offspring" of vaccine recipients.

"If the risks of DNA integration have not been assessed for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, these vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings," Ladapo wrote.

Elements of SV40 are used in the manufacturing process for various vaccines. The detection of trace amounts of the virus's genetic information in mRNA COVID-19 vaccines set off a firestorm of theories that spread across the internet last year, amplified by Epoch Times and other so-called "alternate" media companies, suggesting that the shots will insert SV40 DNA into human cell centers and cause cancer.

Molecular biologists and researchers defending the vaccines have moved to debunk the claims while Ladapo, an appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis, sought to legitimize them.

Paul Offit, a physician and developer of the rotavirus vaccine, says that SV40 elements used in mRNA vaccine manufacturing do not pose a health risk. In a November post to debunk the claims, he noted SV40 fragments are functionally distinct from Simian Virus 40.

"Small fragments of DNA can’t insert themselves into our DNA without enzymes that first cut our DNA. mRNA vaccines don't contain those enzymes," Offit wrote.

Offit, who supported mRNA vaccine approval as part of an FDA advisory committee, said that the vaccine production process includes a purification method to remove residual DNA. While trace amounts remain, he wrote, cellular mechanics make it unlikely that the DNA fragments could enter the nuclei and affect human DNA.

The theory that SV40 fragments pose a health risk has its roots in the oncogenic properties of the virus itself, which produces primary brain and bone cancer in animals. Contamination of the polio virus vaccine with SV40 in the 1950s and early '60s sparked a public health scare and concerns about potential excess cancer risk in those who received the contaminated shots.

Robert Malone, a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic who had a hand in developing mRNA vaccine technology, has been a primary driver of theories that dangerous DNA contamination is present in COVID-19 vaccines. He testified about it during a hearing held by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is known for having promoted elaborate mythologies about a powerful global Satanic cabal and bogus claims that the Parkland high school shooting was a false flag operation.

Ladapo's mRNA vaccine-averse policies are in line with DeSantis' increasingly oppositional stances on COVID-19 vaccination programs. Though DeSantis urged Floridians to get vaccinated at the height of the pandemic, his rhetoric has grown more and more defiant against public health measures endorsed by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"I will not stand by and let the FDA and CDC use healthy Floridians as guinea pigs for new booster shots that have not been proven to be safe or effective," DeSantis said in September.

Ladapo, Florida's lead health official, was born in Nigeria and immigrated with his family to the U.S. as a child. He attended Harvard Medical School and completed an internal medicine residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston before working as a physician at New York City hospitals and as a staff fellow for the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, a position he held until 2014, according to his curriculum vitae. He later caught the eye of the DeSantis administration after writing op-ed material in the Wall Street Journal in 2020, criticizing pandemic lockdowns.

While the mortality rate from COVID-19 has dropped significantly since the worst days of the pandemic, the virus killed tens of thousands of Americans in 2023 and remains a leading cause of infectious disease death in the U.S.

Pfizer and Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines do not contain DNA as an active ingredient, but rather messenger RNA, which is not designed to enter cell nuclei. The injected mRNA enters the intracellular space and interacts with structures called ribosomes, which convert the RNA material into a spike protein common to the coronavirus. The vaccines work by inducing an immune reaction to the proteins.