Joseph Ladapo Bucks the Covid Vaccine Orthodoxy The Florida surgeon general’s critics ignore the science and resort to personal attacks.By Allysia Finley
Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t the only black conservative target of a recent media drive-by. Last week Politico published a hit piece on Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has long resisted the left’s Covid orthodoxies.
The story, by Arek Sarkissian, claims that Dr. Ladapo “personally altered” a state study last year to show that mRNA vaccines posed a significantly higher cardiac health risk for young men “than had been established by the broader medical community.” In reality, he simply reviewed a study conducted by lower-level staff before publication.
Nowhere in Politico’s piece will you find an explanation of what’s supposed to be wrong with Dr. Ladapo’s edits. It merely quotes people who denounce it, such as Matt Hitchings, an assistant biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, who asserts without elaboration: “I think it’s a lie.” Politico does include a link to the pre-published study, which indicates Dr. Ladapo’s edits and shows how Mr. Sarkissian is making a Matterhorn out of a molehill.
Dr. Ladapo’s study found a doubled risk of cardiac death for men 18 to 39 in the 28 days after vaccination. His offense appears to be that he removed a “sensitivity analysis” in the draft study that showed a statistically insignificant increase in cardiac mortality among young men after the second dose.
A sensitivity analysis uses different assumptions to assess an outcome. But when a study is considering a rare outcome, a sensitivity analysis may yield a statistically insignificant result even when an association actually exists. That was the case here. These technical details appear to have eluded journalists who have piled on Dr. Ladapo.
A staff dispatch from the Miami Times—which describes itself as “South Florida’s leading Black-owned media company”—harrumphs that “the question now is not whether Ladapo has a credibility problem, but why Governor Ron DeSantis chose him for this job, why the governor has not yet fired him, and what DeSantis intends to do now in response to revelations such as these.” Perhaps commend Dr. Ladapo for doing his job?
Liberals aren’t merely lying; they’re being hypocrites. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s studies undergo multiple levels of review before being published, and you can bet agency leaders edit them to ensure their findings don’t conflict with the official public-health guidance. Many of its studies also don’t include sensitivity analyses.
Unlike the CDC, whose school-reopening guidance was shaped by a powerful Democratic donor—teachers unions—Dr. Ladapo based his recommendation against young men getting vaccinated on science. That includes his study and many others that have found an increased risk of myocarditis among young men after vaccination.
A study in Hong Kong found that about 1 in 2,700 adolescent males were hospitalized for myocarditis or pericarditis after their second Pfizer dose. A Kaiser Permanente study in the U.S. found that these cardiac problems occurred in about 1 in 6,800 men 18 to 39 after vaccine boosters.
These risks aren’t enormous, but they aren’t trivial either. And while experts stress that postvaccine myocarditis is usually “mild,” most young men get hospitalized and the longer-term health effects haven’t been well-studied. A Lancet Child & Adolescent Health study of 12- to 29-year-olds with postvaccine myocarditis found that 26% were still receiving medication at least 90 days after their diagnoses and 20% reported difficulties with usual activities.
Some myocarditis cases are also “subclinical,” meaning patients don’t experience physical symptoms. These risks also haven’t been well-studied, but it may in rare cases result in death: The Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the Michigan Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine investigated unexpected deaths of two teenage boys days after getting vaccinated. Neither boy had complained of fever, chest pain, palpitations or shortness of breath, but their autopsies revealed atypical myocarditis similar to “broken heart syndrome,” which “can develop in patients with extreme physical, chemical, or sometimes emotional stressor.”
Dr. Ladapo’s findings might not be accepted by the “broader medical community,” but they also aren’t outliers. A study in Nature Communications in March found a 70% increased risk of cardiac death after a second mRNA vaccine dose among 12- to 29-year-old males in England. (The study still found the absolute risk of death to be very small—about 1 in 360,000.)
The orthodox view is that the myocarditis risk for young men from vaccines pales in comparison to Covid infection, but that isn’t clear since their risk of severe illness from the virus is tiny and the vaccines don’t prevent infection. That’s why Dr. Ladapo recommended against them for young men. If he’s wrong, why are his critics responding with personal attacks rather than data and analysis?
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