He became acting Florida surgeon general in September 2021, appointed by governor Ron DeSantis, and he was confirmed in February 2022.[6][7]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ladapo has promoted unproven treatments, opposed vaccine mandates, questioned vaccine safety, and associated with America's Frontline Doctors, a right-wing group known to promote falsehoods about the pandemic.[8][9][10][11] In March 2022, he recommended that healthy children not be vaccinated against COVID-19, a decision contrary to the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics.[12] Experts cited by Ladapo expressed concern about how he used their work.[13]
Wikipedia is not a good source for politically sensitive or contentious subjects as these tend to be taken over by self-appointed keepers of The Truth™ who only allow their own narrative to stay on the page, removing anything else.
If you want to link to Wikipedia anyway it is best to link to the Talk and Edit history pages as well:
Regarding child vaccination against Covid—-if the vaccine doesn’t prevent infection, doesn’t prevent transmission of Covid if a vaccinated person is infected, and if a child’s severe Covid risk was already so low that there is statistically no way to determine if vaccination impacts severe Covid events in children but there is an increased risk of cardiac events just exactly what is the benefit of Covid vaccination for children?
I’m vaccinated, but my son and his wife chose to not vaccinate my granddaughters. I was happy that they made that decision.
In some cases the vaccine made sense, particularly for folks over 50 and with chronic health conditions, but if you are a healthy <40 year old I don’t see a risk to reward benefit in it.
I definitely don’t see any benefit to doing it to healthy children.
Pointing to Wikipedia as any kind of unbiased take on a person is laughable and immature.
Fortunately for my friends, family, and I, many of us appreciated and appreciate getting the other side of this pharma-first time we find ourselves living in.
> Pointing to Wikipedia as any kind of unbiased take on a person is laughable and immature.
Attacking someone's maturity for describing Wikipedia as "interesting" surely says something about your conversational instincts. Anyways, I find the passage about how Ladapo claims to have treated COVID patients at UCLA pretty concerning, since staff at UCLA appear to have come out to say that there are no such hospital records.
I think it's fair to judge that either UCLA and Lapado's colleagues are lying about hospital records or Lapado is the one lying about medical records in order to spin narratives for political gain.
I don’t see anywhere OP claimed Wikipedia was unbiased. They merely said it was interesting - which it is. He’s clearly not in the same ideological camp as his federal counterparts.
> During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ladapo promoted treatments unproven against the virus (namely, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin), opposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates, questioned the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, and associated with America's Frontline Doctors, a far-right group known for promoting falsehoods about the pandemic... In a March 24, 2020, opinion column in USA Today, Ladapo wrote that he "spent the past week taking care of patients with COVID-19 at UCLA's flagship hospital", an assertion he repeated in a later column published by the Wall Street Journal. However, UCLA staff scheduling records from that time period reportedly did not show him assigned to treat COVID patients, and four UCLA colleagues told MSNBC in November 2021 that they did not believe Ladapo had treated COVID patients there.
Except that's just Moderna. And it's just a "pause." And they still recognize that mRNA vaccines are generally efficacious. But other than that, yes, similar.
The Danish government is mainly focusing on 50 and over, and not offering it to those under 50. (Those under 50 that interact with the elderly or are immunocompromised are still recommended to get it)
Your linked article is specifically against Modernas mRNA vaccine, mentioning Pfiser has fewer cardiac related side effects. OP is about any and all mRNA vaccines so abit different.
I made this submission and it seems ridiculous that a state press release gets censored. Obviously you can (and should) critique the statistical analysis or reject it altogether, but that the Florida Department of Health makes this announcement is in itself of obvious public interest and worthy of discussion.
Your submission and its flagging has been disturbing me for many hours now.
The issue is that this is “political” and dang has written about this.[0]
However, what are vaccines? They are biotechnology. Technology is what this site is about, correct?
The problem is overlap. But everything has been, or is becoming politicized in the United States. This means that every day we will have less and less to discuss here on HN.
The other issue is one of partisan bias. I now realize that I need to take a deep hard look at this. As should HN.
I guess the solution, as I understand it, is that I begin to flag things that I see as political. Like say, any post about immigration.
Section 230? Should we all flag that? Clearly that’s political. What’s next?
The process of flagging is just very opaque to me. I don't know why it was flagged. I don't know who flagged it. A moderator, a high karma poster, multiple people? I don't know if I could appeal it. Your question as to the reason remained unanswered. It's an anonymous process abstracted from transparent human engagement that is somewhat typical for technologized user enviroments.
I lost my old account and maybe you need karma, but the option to vouch for an article seems gone too. Wouldn't solve the issue, but I think it would be interesting to make transparent who did the flagging.
Because this goes against the lies the fascist totalitarians have spend years now spreading. And they just can't accept they are wrong in this as they might be wrong with other things as well...
Is someone honestly afraid that a reader of news.g0dD@mn.ycombinator.com seriously going to harm themselves by reading a press release from a state health department ?
Because it ends up just triggering ad-honimen attacks of discussions that quickly devolve into pointless nitpicking of "the science" instead or anything about the actual state policy. Put another way, readership isn't mature enough to have the nerdy part of the discussion
Individuals were excluded if they (1) had a documented COVID-19 infection, (2) experienced a COVID-19 associated death, (3) received a booster, or (4) received their last COVID-19 vaccination after December 8, 2021 (to ensure each individual had the 25-week follow-up period to experience the event of interest).
Just on exclusion criterion 3 alone, this study doesn't actually apply to basically anyone. It only applies to people who still haven't had a single vaccine dose, which after three years of Covid is heavily biased towards individuals with immunocompromised medical conditions.
But, at least they know this, and of course the news article(s) will skip over that because you get more clicks if you lie about what the research showed:
These data are preliminary, based on surveillance data, and should be interpreted with caution. The results have several limitations: While this method has been used to assess risk of death following COVID-19 vaccination, it violates the assumption that an event does not affect subsequent exposure (for mRNA vaccines), which may introduce bias. Further, it does not consider the multidose vaccination schedule required for mRNA vaccination.
This study cannot determine the causative nature of a participant’s death. We used death certificate data and not medical records. COVID testing status was unknown for those who did not die of/with COVID. Cardiac-related deaths were ascertained if an ACME code of I3-I52 were on their death certificate, thus, the underlying cause of death may not be cardiac-related.
Unfortunately, in this case it's not a news article. It's Florida's government health officials. And instead optimizing for ad clicks, they're optimizing for saying whatever will let them stay in office.
Nothing about this paper should have been used as a basis for policy. That only thing this is a basis for is "further study". Which the paper even calls out:
Additional studies should be conducted to further understand the risks and benefits of vaccination of males between 25-39. Increased risk in the primary analysis for the 25 - 39 age group was based on a small sample size. Additionally, significant mortality from diagnosed COVID-19 infection occurred among all adult age groups. [...]
And of course the final paragraph:
Lastly, this analysis was conducted during the first months the vaccines were available. Both COVID-19 mortality due to infection or risk of mortality associated with vaccination have likely changed over time. In the fall of 2022, most people have either been vaccinated or have natural immunity to COVID-19. Many have had multiple vaccine doses, multiple infections or both. Research to assess the current risks and benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine to help update vaccine recommendations should be studied in this context.
What a beautiful example of executive level Florida man still being Florida man.
I think the point was attempting to isolate factors.
Receiving a booster would effectively confound the factors dramatically -- timing of dose, amount of dose, batch of vaccines, etc would all play a larger role.
This is pretty much how normal studies are conducted.
Regarding the comment:
> Unfortunately, in this case it's not a news article. It's Florida's government health officials. And instead optimizing for ad clicks, they're optimizing for staying in office. Nothing about this paper should have been used as a basis for policy. That only thing this is a basis for is "further study".
The policy of pulling up to a facility, not speaking with your doctor, and getting an untested vaccine without monitoring is also a strange policy. The news, politicians, and NIH pushed it because it was believed to have overall beneficial effects to the community; but we didn't and still don't know the long-term effects.
My understanding is the surgeon general of florida has a difference of opinion and based on the risk profile of young males (very very low risk of covid) and from the risk which appears to be present in the COVID19 gene therapies has made a different determination.
For reference moderna is still completing it's phase 1(!) trial for the COVID19 vaccines
Firstly this isn’t a news article in case you didn’t RTFA.
Secondly,
> It only applies to people who still haven't had a single vaccine dose, which after three years of Covid is heavily biased towards individuals with immunocompromised medical conditions.
What? There’s a lot of healthy people who haven’t taken the vaccine.
Yes, and you can have lots of healthy people and still have an incredible bias in your data that wasn't there at the start of all of this:
If we take any group of people in which a small percentage is immunocompromised, and any non-zero percent of those people get the vaccine, those people are removed from the group and you're left with a group that now has a higher percentage of immunocompromised individuals. It doesn't matter that there are still "lots of healthy people" left, your group has become biased towards immunocompromised individuals compared to baseline. Let that happen over three years, and now your group is heavily biased.
In the Florida, like in the rest of the US, a substantial number of people got the vaccine, and have been getting theirs boosters, and the percentage of immunocompromised individuals in the pool that's left has consequently gone up substantially.
You would need to present evidence that rates of non-vaccination between immunocompromised and non-immunocompromised individuals are not equal for this to be true. Anecdotally, I know a handful of "immunocompromised" individuals (RA and its relatives run rampant in my family), and all of them are vaccinated and boosted.
20% of Florida hasn't received a single dose [1]. Even if you assume that 2.7% of Florida is immunocompromised (using a figure from a Google search [2], maybe not the most accurate), and that 0% of the immunocompromised population is vaccinated (bold assumption), that's still only ~14% of this pool that's immunocompromised.
You can't make an analytic deconstruction of bias and then just stop when you get to a level that makes you comfortable.
> the news article(s) will skip over that because you get more clicks if you lie about what the research showed
You're not wrong about news articles doing this in general.
However, in this case, it might be a little bit more justified than usual. Florida's Surgeon General seems to be posting clickbait as well, saying "Florida will not be silent about the truth" [1] instead of something more reasoned like "this is a study, and we have considered risks and benefits; and adjusted our guidelines accordingly".
Why would they exclude prior covid-19 infection? It seems like that would be the primary cohort to consider. June 27 to August 17th indicates 88% of the general population had detectable nucleocapsid antibody [1] (that means exposure to Covid). Typically the age group 18-39 would have even higher levels of exposure based on prior reporting.
I thought that prior infection had no relevance for subsequent immunity, otherwise why would they institute mandatory vaccination last year without any kind of exception for people who were already previously infected? This kind of obvious incoherency could cause loss of public trust in public health officials and regulations, and that would have been disastrous: people would then start second guessing the rules made by government officials, instead of unquestioningly following them. Only way this could have made sense if vaccination made a much stronger difference to your subsequent immune response than the actual disease itself.
This looks like it applies to the original vaccine, not the updated booster anyway - so it seems like an irrelevant paper.
There is a concept in immunology called "Original antigenic Sin", which means that a vaccine (or natural immune response) of an old variant of a virus might hinder your body's ability to generate a more tailored immune response to the current variant.
...but since updated vaccines are now available - you should get that.
Am I misinterpreting this? It sounds like they are excluding people who match any of the criteria after December 8 2021. If I’m understanding that correctly then most people would not be excluded by criteria 3. There are tons of people, even those who got vaccinated originally, who have not gotten any boosters.
I mean.. Unfortunately: Wouldn't this be expected from rushing a relatively new type of vaccine into production followed by intense external pressure from orthodox Sciencers to get it ?
People are actually drawn towards Florida for its free speech laws and its embracing of the free market. What you're hearing is a small amount of vocal people crying out, while the rest of the population is happy.
> The incidence of cardiac outcomes after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination was highest for males aged 12–17 years after the second vaccine dose; however, within this demographic group, the risk for cardiac outcomes was 1.8–5.6 times as high after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after the second vaccine dose. The risk for cardiac outcomes was likewise significantly higher after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after first, second, or unspecified dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccination for all other groups by sex and age (RR 2.2–115.2). These findings support continued use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines among all eligible persons aged ≥5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ladapo
He became acting Florida surgeon general in September 2021, appointed by governor Ron DeSantis, and he was confirmed in February 2022.[6][7]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ladapo has promoted unproven treatments, opposed vaccine mandates, questioned vaccine safety, and associated with America's Frontline Doctors, a right-wing group known to promote falsehoods about the pandemic.[8][9][10][11] In March 2022, he recommended that healthy children not be vaccinated against COVID-19, a decision contrary to the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics.[12] Experts cited by Ladapo expressed concern about how he used their work.[13]