Experts sharply criticize Florida surgeon general’s warning against coronavirus vaccines

Experts slam Florida surgeon general’s warning on coronavirus vaccines "If you submitted that to a peer-reviewed journal ... it would get rejected," vaccine safety expert says about study on which it is based. Dan Diamond Washington Post

The guidance from the Florida health department came in a terse release at 6:12 on Friday evening, ahead of a three-day weekend: Joseph Ladapo, the state’s top health official, warned young adult men to stop taking coronavirus vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, citing an “abnormally high risk” of heart-related deaths.

But Ladapo’s recommendation — extrapolated from a short state analysis that has not been peer-reviewed, carries no authors and warns that its findings are “preliminary” and “should be interpreted with caution” — was swiftly condemned by medical and public health leaders, who said the Florida surgeon general’s announcement was politics masquerading as science and could lead Americans to forgo lifesaving interventions.

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More than a dozen experts interviewed by The Washington Post — including specialists in vaccines, patient safety and study design — listed concerns with Florida’s analysis, saying it relies on information gleaned from frequently inaccurate death certificates rather than medical records, skews the results by trying to exclude anyone with covid-19 or a covid-related death, and draws conclusions from a total of 20 cardiac-related deaths in men 18-to-39 that occurred within four weeks of vaccination. Experts noted the deaths might have been caused by other factors, including underlying illnesses or undetected covid.

“We’re talking about a very small number of deaths. An extra death or two would potentially change these results,” said Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and co-author of a patient-safety textbook used in many medical schools. “I’m hesitant to even call it a paper; it isn’t published anywhere. The idea that [the analysis] … is being used to change policy — it does not have the scientific chops to do that.”

“If you submitted that to a peer-reviewed journal, unless you were paying them to publish it, it would get rejected,” added Daniel Salmon, who leads the Institute of Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He called Florida’s report “a dangerous thing to do.”'

Twitter briefly removed Ladapo’s post touting the study over the weekend, citing it as misinformation, before restoring it hours later; the tweet has since been shared more than 50,000 times, cheered by anti-vaccine advocates and amplified by conservative media highlighting Ladapo’s claim that his state will “not be silent on the truth.”

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