Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo advised against administering COVID-19 vaccines to healthy children on Monday, making the Sunshine State the first to counter federal health experts and issue such a recommendation.
Ladapo was joined by Gov. Ron DeSantis at a press briefing on Monday, along with controversial health experts who have been pilloried for their scientific perspectives that contradict mainstream pandemic thinking.
“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Ladapo said on Monday without going into specifics.
The forthcoming guidance from Florida health officials would run counter to what health officials in the Biden administration, as well as many doctors and public health experts, have been telling parents since fall 2021 when the Pfizer vaccine was deemed safe for children as young as 5 years old.
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Healthy children are less likely than older adults, especially those with underlying health conditions, to experience severe illness due to COVID-19 infection. However, the Food and Drug Administration and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend that parents vaccinate their children as soon as they are eligible.
Still, the members of DeSantis’s panel, such as vaccine scientist Robert Malone, said, “The consensus of over 17,000 physicians and medical scientists are that the risk-benefit ratio for children does not justify vaccination.”
Malone was referring to a declaration put forth in January at the Global COVID-19 Summit attended by doctors and medical scientists who argue that healthy children who receive the vaccine “face negligible risk from covid, but face potential permanent, irreversible risk to their health if vaccinated, including heart, brain, reproductive and immune system damage.”
The Pfizer vaccine was deemed safe for children by the FDA’s independent panel of vaccine experts as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But DeSantis said that endorsement from public health authorities may not be enough to assuage parents wary of vaccinating their young children.
“This discussion has crystallized a lot of things I think we’ve seen,” DeSantis said. “You have this lack of trust in the medical establishment and in the CDC and the politicization of those institutions, and that’s not going to bode well for us as a society going forward.”
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Florida health officials recorded more than 2,100 new COVID-19 cases in people 19 and younger in the week leading up to March 3. Over 1.1 million children in that age range have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.
