The U.S. Food and Drug Administration fought back against what it calls the proliferation of misinformation about the safety of Covid-19 vaccines by the leader of Florida’s health department, Joseph Ladapo. In a letter this month to the FDA, Ladapo had questioned the agency’s drug approval and raised alarms about what he sees as the risk of potential cancer posed by COVID mRNA vaccines. He asked three questions to the FDA and CDC about the risk of DNA integration, the COVID-19 vaccine’s delivery system, and the risk of integration with reproductive cells. Ladapo said he believed the drug delivery system used by mRNA vaccines could be an efficient vehicle for delivering contaminant DNA into human cells. But Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research for the FDA, said the premise asserted by Ladapo that DNA contaminant could cause cancer in vaccine recipients is not scientifically accurate because there is no way that minute amounts of DNA fragments could find their way into the nucleus of human cells where DNA resides. He said that the FDA is confident in the quality, safety, and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, and with over a billion doses of the mRNA vaccines administered, no safety concerns related to residual DNA have been identified. Dr. Kawsar Talaat, an associate professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, also dismissed Ladapo’s concerns.
