Florida’s vaccine fearmongering threatens US public health

As someone who has studied and written books on fear, I was deeply disturbed to hear the Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo attach the C word — cancer —to an extremely successful lifesaving vaccine, the latest COVID-19 mRNA booster, essentially warning people not to take it.

This approach ignores many major medical certainties. 

First, as Dr. Paul Offit, head of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia recently told me, many therapeutics and vaccines shed tiny DNA fragments, but they are destroyed in the cytoplasm of the cell and rarely make it close to the nucleus, let alone incorporate into the body’s DNA. 

There is essentially no concern whatsoever here about cancer unless we are talking about cancer as a personal terrorist that causes people to run from a lifesaving preventive at its very mention. In fact, as I can attest from my practice, the mRNA COVID vaccines are still quite useful in decreasing the severity of COVID in those most at risk, specifically the elderly, those with chronic health conditions, and the immunocompromised, including those with cancer.

Second, fearmongering about the vaccine ignores the essential public health reality that it is a tool to alert your immune system to virus proteins that you may not have seen ever or not seen recently. Like all vaccines, the COVID vaccines present a risk/benefit analysis, where the vaccine’s potential side effects are compared — by a doctor and his or her patient — with the risk of the virus and how much the vaccine decreases that risk. 

The ceaseless bashing is not based on public health but politics and interferes with my using the vaccine as a preventive tool. The low usage rate, around 40 percent uptake of the latest booster among U.S. adults, is concerning when you consider that the latest COVID subvariant, JN.1, is spreading widely and has hospitalized nearly 30,000 from Jan. 7-14 per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. And studies continue to show that long COVID, which is a big problem in the U.S., is less common among the vaccinated.

There is also a growing concern that fear of a useful vaccine, stoked by politics and anecdotes, is spilling over to weakening compliance in children of other crucial vaccines for polio, measles and chicken pox, leading to a resurgence of these highly contagious diseases.

Speaking of the maligned, I continue to defend against the frequently unfair attacks on top Harvard infectious disease expert and former CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky. Though I understand that controversy is part of the CDC’s job, especially when it comes to guidance with big downsides like masks and closures, when it comes to vaccines, she couldn’t be clearer or more correct. 

Speaking to me on SiriusXM Doctor Radio last week after medical education and patient treatment rounds at New York University, she said there “are things we don’t know and need to learn more,” about the vaccine, versus things that are “as close to fact as we are going to get.” The latter should “drive our policies.” 

Walensky said Ladapo’s order creates “real challenges” for Florida and could “do harm not only to his state but to people around the country.”

“He’s doing a deep disservice,” she concluded. 

Public health is about tradeoffs, and overzealous attempts to control COVID led to significant collateral damage. But public health is also about important tools. And going all the way back to smallpox, vaccines are among our greatest tools. They should not be maligned. 

The mRNA vaccines represent a step forward in vaccine technology and have saved millions of lives around the world. If politics get out of the way, they can save millions more.

Marc Siegel MD is a professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health. He is a Fox News medical correspondent and author of the new book, “COVID; The Politics of Fear and the Power of Science.