LA Times, Michael Hiltzik (1/9/24): Column: Meet the most dangerous quack in America

An excerpt:

It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state…Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines…

Last January, a faculty committee at the University of Florida medical school found that Ladapo engaged in “careless, irregular and contentious” research practices that may have violated university rules…

That brings us to Ladapo’s latest adventure in medical quackery, his claim that no one should take the mRNA vaccines….Ladapo’s advice is based on what he says is research that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID vaccines contain fragments of DNA that are injected into human cells, which they can contaminate and turn into cancer cells…

The human cell has a panoply of mechanisms to destroy foreign DNA. Even if the fragments managed to penetrate the cell nucleus, which can’t happen, they would have to cut up the existing DNA, which would require a mechanism the fragments don’t have.

“So the chance that DNA could affect your DNA is zero,” Offit said..

Ladapo’s words and actions have surely contributed to his state’s pathetic performance in getting its citizens vaccinated against COVID. With 11.6% of its population fully vaccinated with a booster as of last May, Florida had a rate among the lowest in the nation. (California’s rate was 20.6%.) Among those 65 and older — purportedly the population that Florida strives to protect — only 31.2% were fully vaccinated. (California: 48.3%.)

Florida’s death rate from COVID of 375 per 100,000 people is among the worst in the country. (California: 283.) You can ignore the defense that the difference is due to Florida’s relatively older population; states with even older median ages have done much better: Vermont (170), New Hampshire (245) and Maine (252). The difference is the indifference of Ladapo and DeSantis to their own residents’ health.

Related blog posts:

• Bad Advice for COVID, Then and Now
• Florida Narrative Ignoring Inconvenient Data with COVID-19 Vaccine Safety
• Misinformation in Medicine