We live in an era where even an obscure doctor can rise to power and fame simply by… er… rejecting medical science. It’s one thing for a conspiracy theorist politicos, like Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is riding the wave of antivaxxers on his famous family name, to drag established medical research through the mud. But it quite something else where a Harvard-educated doctor, who once served on the med school faculty at UCLA, to trash medical science and not only side with a COVID-skeptic Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but to become that state’s most senior medical official: Florida Surgeon General. Meet Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, pictured above standing proudly with the man who appointed him.
mRNA vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives with a tsunami of statistical evidence. As I’ll point out later, these genetic wonders promise breakthroughs against so many more diseases plaguing humanity that have heretofore defied major containment. But you might be one of those MAGA Republicans who believe that keeping the labor force working during a major pandemic is the nation’s priority, and that anything that prevents that has to be un-American – like Yale/Harvard-educated Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Himself vaccinated, DeSantis revels in anything that can be used to criticize the Biden administration, which was the administration that took the COVID vaccines funded during the Trump administration… but which were just sitting there, undistributed even as hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying from preventable COVID… and massively made them available to the American public. COVID infection and fatalities immediately plummeted. Well sports and infection fans, we know that COVID is not gone, in fact a new variant is causing a very uncomfortable surge in infections, hospitalizations and, yes, deaths.
Writing for the January 9th Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik reports: “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.
“That has become harder to do as time goes on, as 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… [In early January], Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued [recently] by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines ‘not appropriate for use in human beings’ and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a ‘halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.’” Among the conspiracy theory crowds, he is drowning out the call from responsible doctors and government officials to update their COVID vaccinations (or get them if they have not already) and wear masks in crowded gatherings or in medical facilities…
“Ladapo has zero credibility within the medical establishment… [In fact, he] has become a card-carrying member of the anti-vaccine mafia. Just before Christmas, he appeared on a podcast hosted by anti-vax agitator Del Bigtree, who stirs up his audiences with hysterical rants against vaccines and who was recently appointed communications director for the presidential campaign of notorious anti-vax figure Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“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. The committee referred its findings to the university’s research integrity officer, but that officer ruled that since the behavior at issue was performed in Ladapo’s role as surgeon general, not as a UF professor, he had no grounds to take action.
“The accusations pertained to Ladapo’s recommendation that males aged 18 to 39 avoid the mRNA vaccines. He claimed that research indicated that for men in that age group, the vaccines presented a heightened risk of cardiac-related death… In fact, the research indicated no such thing; rather, it showed that the risk of cardiac death from the vaccines was statistically nonexistent and, in any case, was lower than the risk of cardiac death resulting from catching COVID-19. In fact, Ladapo had personally edited the state-sponsored analysis he cited in his recommendation to remove language in earlier drafts stating that there was ‘little suggestion of any [cardiac] effect immediately following vaccination.’” Hiltzik.
What’s particularly galling is the increasing resistance to vaccines in general, just as medical science is about to conquer preventative treatments for many of those elusive and uncontained diseases. Moderna, for example, is using the mRNA approach to focus on new preventatives. Writing for the January 6th FastCompan.com, Sy Muckherjee provides this update: “[A new report] points to a number of the company’s experimental products that are in later-stage development, including:
- An influenza vaccine that might prove more effective than standard quadrivalent seasonal flu vaccines
- A combination flu and COVID vaccine that would, if proven effective, make it easier to address two bugs that tend to spike right around the same time every year
- An RSV vaccine candidate
- An experimental cancer vaccine for melanoma
“Moderna’s Spikevax, like Pfizer’s similar COVID vaccine, is based on mRNA drug technology. Unlike traditional vaccines, ones based on mRNA tech use messenger RNA, which provide the body instructions to code for and create certain types of proteins, essentially turn your own cells into mini drug-making factories.” But then, we have purported “experts,” perhaps to gain political power and visibility, who may just kill mRNA research dollars before the lack of those expected-to-be-successful vaccines kills a vast number of us.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it is too bad that so many Americans are embracing science denial… or perhaps it is just nature’s way of culling the human herd of the minds most likely to rely on the conspiratorial judgment of others.
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