ORLANDO, Fla. — In the wake of federal health officials’ harshest criticism yet of their anti-COVID vaccine views, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and Gov. Ron DeSantis persisted Thursday in claiming the “mRNA jabs” are worthless at best and even dangerous, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary.
Their comments at an event in Winter Haven come as Florida now has one of the lowest rates of boosted seniors over 65, according to CDC data from March 8. The state once led the nation in its efforts to vaccinate seniors, with DeSantis leading the charge.
On Thursday, DeSantis previewed what he would do if he was in charge of another pandemic in the future, which would be to protect businesses and the economy while the government’s role would be to “make recommendations” but not mandate restrictions.
“We’re lucky in Florida,” he said. “Because I think our state, given our demographics, with a lot of elderly, (and) a tourism-based economy where really people either come or don’t come, it could have been really, really bad for us had had different decisions been made.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a letter to Ladapo last week warning that his overt anti-vaccine statements, which disproportionately focus on the few instances of adverse effects from the vaccines, are harming the public.
“It is the job of public health officials around the country to protect the lives of the populations they serve, particularly the vulnerable. Fueling vaccine hesitancy undermines this effort,” the letter reads.
The agencies stated that more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been given out globally “with little evidence of widespread adverse events.”
The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit that conducts independent health care research, has estimated that COVID-19 vaccination in the U.S. prevented more than 3 million additional deaths, 18.5 million additional hospitalizations, and 120 million more cases from December 2020 through November 2022.
Ladapo repeated many of his claims Thursday, adding that the “brilliant … sinister” media was “recreating reality” in questioning him.
DeSantis and Ladapo touted natural immunity as the best way to protect against COVID-19 and incorrectly claimed public health leaders previously denied its existence.
Ladapo referenced a study recently published in the journal Lancet suggesting that protection against infection from natural immunity might be just as good if not better than protection from vaccines.
He focused on the period seven months after vaccination, a point when natural immunity was cited as being stronger as vaccine antibodies wane, to assert that vaccinated people “are more likely to contract COVID-19 after seven months than the people who did not.”
But just like it does with vaccination, protection against reinfection due to natural immunity ultimately fades over time.
Just because someone has had COVID-19 doesn’t mean they’re protected, particularly if they caught it before the now-dominant omicron variant emerged, authors of the Lancet study noted. Boosters in many cases are still needed even in someone who was naturally infected.
Another study published in the Lancet in December found similar results but also stressed that “natural infection can lead to COVID-19-related hospitalization and death at the time of primary infection … which are risks not present with vaccination.”
DeSantis also falsely claimed that health officials all promised getting vaccinated would prevent people from getting the virus, ignoring the many variants since. At one point, he mocked doctors who tested positive for COVID who wrote on social media they were thankful they had gotten the shot.
DeSantis once was on the vanguard of promoting vaccines, traveling the state in early 2021, urging seniors to be vaccinated. He has largely become fully anti-vax, holding roundtables with vaccine skeptics and then appointing Ladapo to the state’s most important medical job.
On Thursday, DeSantis cited Ladapo in saying, “he’s not seeing a benefit at this point for anybody with the boosters. That’s something that’s pretty significant.”
The virus has mutated into a form very different from the one targeted by the first vaccines, and protection against infection from those original shots or from a prior infection wanes significantly after the first few months, which leaves unboosted people vulnerable to the virus.
A CDC study published in February found that fully vaccinated people who received the recent bivalent booster shot were 14 times less likely to die compared to the unvaccinated and three times less likely to die than people who only received the original COVID-19 vaccines.
Rates of hospitalization for boosted people were also 16 times lower than for unvaccinated people, and nearly three times lower than people who were vaccinated but failed to get an updated booster.
But only about 30% of Florida seniors over 65 have gotten the most recent bivalent booster, compared with an estimated 94% who completed their initial two-shot series, CDC data shows. That’s compared to an estimated 41% of seniors nationwide.
Medical professionals are concerned by this low uptake of boosters because this age group has the highest risk of death from COVID. From January 2022 through January 2023, 3% of Floridians over 65 who caught COVID-19 died from it, according to the latest Florida Department of Health report, compared to a fatality rate of less than 1% overall.
People over 65 made up nearly 19,000 of the about 22,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths Florida reported in the last year, the FDOH report shows.
Overall, an average of 40 people a day are still dying of COVID in Florida as of Wednesday, according to state data.
There have been more than 75 million cases in the state, and more than 86,000 deaths since the pandemic began three years ago.
David Jolly, a former GOP congressman from Tampa and co-founder of the Forward Party, said DeSantis’ motivations are political ahead of what is expected to be a bid for the presidency.
“The governor remains out of sync with science and public health, but perfectly in sync with the direction of the Republican primary when it comes to the vaccine and everything related to COVID,” Jolly said.
Such anti-vax positions are a way of outflanking former President Donald Trump from the right, Jolly added.
The Trump White House’s Operation Warp Speed, which spurred the creation of a vaccine, “was something (Trump) took great credit for, even post-presidency, though he wasn’t super vocal about it. And so now you have DeSantis, who’s essentially saying the whole thing was a waste of time. … There’s a political opportunity here that he’s trying to find a lane against Trump with.”
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