‘He’s Made Science Political’: FDA Member Bashes Florida Surgeon General After Call to Halt Covid Vaccines

A member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Covid-19 vaccine advisory committee slammed Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo following his call to halt vaccines for the deadly virus.

The top health official in Florida called for a halt in the use of mRNA coronavirus vaccines on Wednesday in a state bulletin where he claimed the shot can contaminate a patient’s DNA.

Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA, joined CNN’s Brianna Keilar on Thursday reacting to the news by criticizing Ladapo for consistently being “on the wrong side of issues” regarding public health over Covid.

“He is the Florida state surgeon general. He has a platform. And when you have a platform, people listen,” Offit told the CNN anchor. “Consistently, he has been on the wrong side of issues relating to masks and vaccines and has been a purveyor of COVID vaccine myths. I don’t know why he does that.”

Offit noted that Ladapo’s rhetoric resembles the talking points of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and that he’s bringing politics into science.

The letter that Dr. Ladapo sent to the FDA weeks ago had a comment from Ron DeSantis where he said, we are not going to bow down to Washington edicts, meaning we’re going to do the things that we think are best for Floridians while ignoring or at least pushing back on things that come out of Washington or things that come out of Atlanta through the CDC. It’s this sort of we’re not going to be pushed around by institutions and the government. And I think that’s sort of his platform. And I think Dr. Ladapo sort of fits into that.

But it’s a shame because I think what he’s done is he’s made science political, and I think Floridians will suffer that. You know, the notion, as he said previously, that ironically, he said also don’t use many vaccines. Well, if you’re not going to use them, RNA vaccines, the only other licensed vaccine in this country is Novavax, which is also made using cells at some point and also likely contains small fragments of DNA. So it just shows, I think, his utter lack of understanding of how this process works.

Watch the clip above via CNN.