TALLAHASSEE, FL – Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo has released updated guidance from the Department of Health (DOH) regarding COVID-19 vaccines containing Messenger RNA (mRNA) – which Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines utilize – recommending against their use in males aged 18-39 due to what they say is increased risk of potentially fatal cardiac events.
Ladapo – who has a long pattern questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines – tweeted out a link to the new guidance last Friday, saying that,
“Today, we released an analysis on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines the public needs to be aware of. This analysis showed an increased risk of cardiac-related death among men 18-39. FL will not be silent on the truth.”
The Florida DOH stated that they had conducted an analysis of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through a self-controlled case series, focused on mortality risk.
“This analysis found there is an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination,” the DOH states. “Individuals with preexisting cardiac conditions, such as myocarditis and pericarditis, should take particular caution when considering vaccination and discuss with their health care provider.”
The DOH recommends that patients should be informed of the possible cardiac complications that can arise after receiving a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, and that, “the State Surgeon General now recommends against the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for males ages 18-39 years old” due to the abnormal cardiac risk.
The DOH analysis also stated that males aged 60 and over had a 10 percent chance of cardiac-related death within 28 days of mRNA vaccination; in contrast, non-mRNA vaccines were not found to have any adverse risks to coronary health in any age group.
Some medical experts have rejected Ladapo’s recommendations regarding mRNA vaccines, however, including Daniel Salmon, Director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University, who noted that the Florida DOH report has no listed authors.
“It looks to me like this is politics driving science. And the result is you get terrible science,” he said. “[The Florida DOH report] would never get published in a decent journal. Any decent journal would reject it because there’s not enough detail.”
But Ladapo, during an interview on Tueday, said that his recommendation is passed partly on his belief that the majority of Floridians now have natural immunity to COVID-19, and that he may have released alternate guidance earlier in the pandemic.
“I absolutely believe that’s the correct guidance,” he said. “And I wouldn’t have given that guidance, because I don’t know the answer to that would have required much more thought. But at this point in the pandemic, with the degree of immunity in Florida, the calculus was much simpler.”
The guidance by Florida’s Surgeon General was briefly censored by Twitter over the weekend before later being restored.
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