The leader of Florida’s health department plans to buck federal guidance and recommend against giving the COVID-19 vaccine to healthy children, a move that ignores overwhelming evidence about the safety and efficacy of the shots.
Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who has been widely scrutinized for his opposition to vaccines and masks throughout the pandemic, announced the plans Monday at a roundtable arranged by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Ladapo, whom DeSantis appointed last year, said during the last few minutes of the meeting.
It was not immediately clear which age range Ladapo’s new guidance would affect.
Earlier during the roundtable, Ladapo suggested the medical community and other vaccine advocates have been conspiring to mislead Americans and exert control over them.
“[There’s] individual rights, individual choice, and truth on one side, and really sort of overarching powers, overarching government, abuse of powers, abuse of data, dishonesty and frankly, a lot of unethical behavior on the other side,” he said.
Ladapo is an outlier on this issue. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which employs thousands of scientists, doctors and other medical experts, firmly advocates for children 5 and up to receive the COVID-19 vaccine approved for that age group, citing rigorous studies and a thorough approval process by the Food and Drug Administration.
Among both adults and children, side effects or other complications linked to receiving the vaccine are extremely rare, the CDC has found. The most serious of those possible conditions are much more common in people who are actually infected with the virus.
So far, more than 8 million kids ages 5 to 11 in the U.S. have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. The FDA approved the Pfizer-BioNTech series for that age range in October.
Ladapo has refused to say whether he is vaccinated against the coronavirus and repeatedly evaded questions about it, saying that’s private medical information.
“I personally believe that people can make their decisions for themselves with information, and I think that in some ways they probably make decisions that they’re more comfortable with if elements like coercion or misrepresentation of data or hiding of data are not part of the process,” he said when pressed about his vaccine status last month.
Ladapo and his aides also refused to wear face masks when visiting the office of state Sen. Tina Polsky, who was about to begin radiation for breast cancer, last fall. Polsky says she told Ladapo she had a serious medical condition and needed him to wear a mask, but that he refused and would not tell her why.