FDA/CDC Correct Florida Official’s Vaccine ‘Misinformation’
FDA and CDC sent a 3/10 joint letter to Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo to correct “misinterpretations and misinformation” about Covid-19-related data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) cited in an earlier letter from Ladapo to the agencies.
The letter took issue with Ladapo’s “focusing on adverse events in the absence of causal association and without the perspective of countervailing benefits… Like every other medical intervention, there are adverse effects from vaccination. Serious adverse events from Covid-19 vaccines are rare and are far outweighed by the benefits of these vaccines for every age group. The claim that the increase of VAERS reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the Covid-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public.”
The letter also told the surgeon general that adverse event reports to VAERS following vaccination do not mean that a vaccine caused the event. “Since December 2020, almost 270 million people have received more than 670 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the U.S., with over 50 million people having received the updated bivalent vaccine,” it said. “Recent concerns about increased reports of cardiovascular events provide an instructive example of the need to do further analysis when increased reporting of an event occurs. Despite increased reports of these events, when the concern was examined in detail by cardiovascular experts, the risk of stroke and heart attack was actually lower in people who had been vaccinated, not higher.”
Additionally, the letter told Ladapo that there is no evidence of increased risk of death following mRNA vaccines, and data have shown that “being up to date on vaccinations saves lives compared to individuals who did not get vaccinated. The most recent estimate is that those who are up to date on their vaccination status have a 9.8 fold lower risk of dying from Covid-19 than those who are unvaccinated and 2.4 fold lower risk of dying from Covid-19 than those who were vaccinated but had not received the updated, bivalent vaccine. Roughly 90% of deaths from Covid-19, as carefully classified by the CDC, in recent months have occurred among those who were not up to date on their vaccines.”
The letter emphasized that Covid-19 misinformation has caused some Americans to avoid getting or obtaining up-to-date vaccinations, leading to “unnecessary death, severe illness and hospitalization.”