TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — As reported by The Florida Standard on Saturday, Florida Surgeon General released new vaccine guidance, recommending against COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for men aged 18–39.
The new guidance immediately drew criticism from COVID vaccine proponents. A physician, Dr. Kristen Panthagani, wrote a long Twitter thread, where she challenged the study on a number of issues.
Panthagani questioned that the ICD-10 codes used in Ladapo’s study to establish evidence of heart-related events were a reliable method: “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,” she tweeted.
She added: The anonymous author(s) themselves note these significant limitations, stating that they ‘cannot determine the causative nature of a participant's death’ and ‘the underlying cause of death may not be cardiac related.’
LADAPO ANSWERS
But Ladapo did not agree with this critique. In a thread on Twitter, he responded to what he said was the most common attacks against the Florida Department of Health study:
“‘#1. "Diagnosis codes for cardiac-related deaths are imperfect.’ Yes! But that is true for every subgroup we examined. Only in young men was the risk extremely high, and it was also increased in older men.”
“#2. ‘COVID test information was only available on death certificates.’ No! We used all of our data resources-test results, vaccine records, death records-to exclude individuals who had documented COVID-19 infection, as we write in the Methods section.”
“#3. ‘The sample size is too small.’ 3a. Elevated cardiac risk was also found in older men, and there were thousands of deaths in this group. 3b. The total cardiac deaths meeting inclusion criteria among young men was 77, not 20, as has been going around the web.”
The surgeon general’s original tweet about the new guidance was taken down by Twitter, only to then be reinstated after a few hours.
In the tweet preceding his answers to critics, Ladapo wrote: “I love the discussion that we've stimulated. Isn't it great when we discuss science transparently instead of trying to cancel one another?”
