Twitter flags anti-vaccine guidance from Joseph Ladapo as misinformation

Twitter temporarily took down a post by Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on guidance against COVID-19 vaccines for those under 40. The move comes as medical experts and scientists criticize the Florida Department of Health recommendations for being based on weak data that never saw peer review.

Ladapo on Friday issued new guidance recommending against mRNA vaccinations for COVID-19. “Studying the safety and efficacy of any medications, including vaccines, is an important component of public health,” Ladapo said. “Far less attention has been paid to safety and the concerns of many individuals have been dismissed — these are important findings that should be communicated to Floridians.”

The Department of Health release claimed an 84% increase had been found in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination. That followed what the agency described as analysis through a self-controlled case-series.

But the methodology drew immediate criticism from experts.

The guidance was based on cross-referencing data from the state’s reportable disease repository, the Florida State Health Online Tracking System and death records from the state’s vital statistics.

Dr. Kristen Panthagani, an emergency medicine resident at Yale who has written widely on COVID-19 vaccination data, noted the analysis appeared to be a Microsoft Word document that listed no authors and had not faced any kind of peer review.

“They looked at death certificates, and any death that had an ICD 10 code under ‘Other forms of heart disease’ (ICD I30-I52) was included,” Panthagani said in a social media post.

“1. ICD-10 codes are not necessarily accurate or specific. 2. There isn’t a clear rationale why they included these specific ICD-10 codes vs other cardiac-related codes (i.e. ischemic heart disease is not included?). 3. “Cardiac arrest” is included, which simply means ‘the heart stopped’ and can be the terminal event for many different diseases, not just cardiac issues. Overall, it is a somewhat random list defined not by a hypothesis, but by the arbitrary structure of hospital billing. In short, this list is too broad to be meaningful, excludes some cardiac issues but not others, and most of the diagnoses are far more likely to be caused by other ongoing disease processes rather than vaccination.”

Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of medical journals, called the analysis a “bogus study.”

“Unreal that University of Florida allows this to go unchecked,” he tweeted.

The concerns prompted Twitter to take down a tweet from Ladapo as misinformation, as shown in a screenshot shared by Bryan Griffin, Press Secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“Twitter censored data posted by the Florida State Surgeon General that showed an increase risk of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination,” he said. “This is an unacceptable and Orwellian move for narrative over fact.”

The post taken down from Ladapo’s account announced the release of new guidance. “This analysis showed an increased risk of cardiac-related death among men 18-39,” he tweeted. “Florida will not be silent on the truth.”

Based on Twitter post timings, the post appeared to be down for two hours.

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