Florida Surgeon General recommends against mRNA vaccines for males aged 18-39
floridahealth.gov
floridahealth.gov
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]
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.
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.
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.
If you want to link to Wikipedia anyway it is best to link to the Talk and Edit history pages as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Joseph_Ladapo
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Ladapo&act...
The edit warring is clear to see with subjects related to SARS2 and ´transgenderism' being the most contentious.
> 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.
https://www.sst.dk/en/english/corona-eng/vaccination-against...
It is about science, or possibly the misrepresentation there of. Is this not appropriate for nerdy discussion?
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?
This is not good.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Because looking at the comments I was surprised at how relatively civil it was, considering this a matter of life and death.
The “Florida man” type comment (or five) can easily be handled at the comment level.
Edit: oh, I see this, but there seem to be conflicting reports on vouching for flagged submissions.
And a personal disclaimer, I don’t enjoy delving into this meta malarkey. However, for this post it seemed worthwhile.
What is happening to us .. y'all ?
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).
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.
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. [...]
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.
The story is that a state's surgeon general made this recommendation.
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.
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.
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.
1: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
2: https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+population+tha...
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.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
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".
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[1] https://twitter.com/FLSurgeonGen/status/1578515633159180289
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
https://eua.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/providers/clini...
It's likely the risk profiles will change over time. The study is set to complete Nov 22, 2022.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT04283461
Also note, this is run by Moderna, not an independent compny so... we shall have to wait longer for any independent trials.
[citation needed]
Do we actually know what that demographic consists of? Because that's just an "acceptable" reason not to take it.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7114e1.htm
> 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.