An assertion by Florida’s politically appointed surgeon general that Covid-19 vaccines can contaminate human DNA has been dismissed as “scientific nonsense” by public health experts, who say he is putting lives at risk by wanting to block distribution.
Dr Joseph Ladapo, who was handpicked by the state’s far-right governor and fellow vaccine-skeptic, Ron DeSantis, to be the state’s top public health official, called for a halt in the distribution and use of mRNA Covid boosters, in an official bulletin published on Wednesday by the Florida health department.
His assertion that components of the shots “pose a unique and heightened risk of DNA integration into human cells”, potentially causing cancer, is the latest in a series of false claims by Ladapo, a prominent anti-vaxxer previously found to have manipulated data on vaccine safety.
Dr Ashish Jha, a former White House Covid-19 response coordinator and dean of Brown University’s school of public health, said Ladapo’s position has no merit.
“We’ve seen this pattern from Dr Ladapo that every few months he raises some new concern and it quickly gets debunked,” he told the Washington Post, referring to an erroneous claim in September that the latest release of Covid boosters had not been tested on humans.
“This idea of DNA fragments, it’s scientific nonsense. People who understand how these vaccines are made and administered understand that there is no risk here.”
Dr David Gorski, professor of surgery and oncology at Wayne State University and managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, which debunks misinformation in medicine, told the newspaper: “I’ve never seen a state health authority parrot anti-vaccine disinformation as a justification for stopping the use of a vaccine that has saved so many lives before.”
The Harvard-educated Ladapo is aligned with a rightwing group called America’s Frontline Doctors, which has pushed bogus Covid-19 cures according to a Time investigation, and has been accused by colleagues at the University of Florida of sullying the name of its flagship medical school. Other critics have accused him of “normalizing medical quackery”.
In the health bulletin, Ladapo says the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had not properly assessed a risk that “DNA fragments” in popular mRNA vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech can cause “contaminate integration with human DNA”.
Conspiracy theories that the shots contain dangerous DNA sequences including the monkey virus Simian Virus 40 cited by Ladapo are popular with vaccine skeptics, but have been widely debunked.
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In an email to the Associated Press, a spokesperson for Pfizer dismissed the claim that its Covid-19 vaccine contained contaminant DNA fragments.
“The vaccine is a completely synthetic vaccine. There were preclinical animal challenge studies utilizing rhesus macaques; however, no part of our vaccine or studies utilized green monkeys. The claim that the vaccine includes monkey DNA is inaccurate,” Pfizer’s statement said.
The Associated press contributed reporting
