Today Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo called for a “halt to the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines” in a press release and X thread. In a statement posted on X, Ladapo wrote, “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have always played it fast and loose with COVID-19 safety, but their failure to test for DNA integration with the human genome – as their own guidelines dictate – when the vaccines are known to be contaminated with foreign DNA is intolerable.”

The announcement follows an exchange of letters in December between Ladapo and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As detailed in our exclusive interview, Ladapo’s letter asked questions about a recent preprint documenting the detection of billions of DNA fragments per dose in the approved Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines; Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA was also found in Pfizer vials. In the letter, Dr. Ladapo points out that the vaccines use lipid nanoparticles to efficiently deliver mRNA into human cells, so the vaccines may be equally efficient at delivering the DNA contaminants into human cells.

The risks of this contamination could include the integration of these DNA fragments with human DNA, changes to our genes that could be passed down to offspring, and the development of cancer because the genes within a cell control whether the cell is healthy or cancerous.