This is the time of year when the annual push for flu shots is on, now being combined with promotion of COVID and RSV shots. Have you decided yet?
While your public health director is almost certainly all for it, there is one dissenting voice.
The surgeon general of Florida, Joseph Ladapo, M.D., advises against the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
The graph below illustrates the proportion of people who got COVID with and without getting vaccinated. While at first saying that if you got vaccinated you wouldn’t get COVID, authorities changed the message to saying that “the vaccines appear to greatly reduce the risk of hospitalization and death.”
The CDC’s current official advice is: “Everyone ages 6 months and older should get the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine. This includes people who have received a COVID-19 vaccine before and people who have had COVID-19.”
The Florida Department of Health guidance states that:
- It is important to provide patients with informed consent.
- The most recent booster approval was granted in the absence of booster-specific clinical trial data performed in humans. Furthermore, this booster does not protect against the currently dominant strain, accounting for approximately 37% of infections in the United States.
- The federal government has not required COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers to demonstrate their boosters prevent hospitalizations or death from COVID-19 illness.
- The federal government has failed to provide sufficient data to support the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 boosters, or to acknowledge previously demonstrated safety concerns associated with COVID-19 vaccines and boosters.
- Elevated levels of mRNA and spike protein from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine persist among some individuals for an indefinite period.
- Potential DNA integration from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines pose unique and elevated risk to human health and to the integrity of the human genome.
Individuals need to be aware of these considerations, ask their doctor questions, and do a risk-to- benefit analysis: Is this new shot right for you?
Additional information:
- “The Efficacy of COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters against Severe Illness and Deaths: Scientific Fact or Wishful Myth?” J Am Phys Surg, spring 2023
- “Referenced Data for Parents Concerning the Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccination for Children Aged 5 through 11 Years,” J Am Phys Surg, winter 2021
- “Panicdemic: COVID-19 Panics Physicians, Policymakers, and Pundits, as well as the Public,” J Am Phys Surg, summer 2020
