TALLAHASSEE, Florida (LifeSiteNews) — Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Wednesday pushed the head of the FDA for answers regarding a preprint study that alleged the contamination of mRNA COVID-19 shots with plasmid DNA.
“The American people and the scientific community have a right to have all relevant information pertaining to the COVID-19 vaccines to properly inform individual decision making,” Dr. Ladapo wrote in the December 6 letter addressed to FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf, MD, MACC.
On today’s episode of: What the FDA… I asked @DrCaliff_FDA to address the DNA fragments detected in mRNA COVID shots & how they are hitchhiking into human cells. DNA integration into the human genome & oncogenesis are known risks, even acknowledged by @US_FDA in ’07. pic.twitter.com/V7TBaeM1WN
— Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD (@FLSurgeonGen) December 6, 2023
Ladapo, who has frequently resisted the prevailing narrative on COVID-19 vaccination — even warning young men not to get the shots at all — previously wrote to the CDC in May to share concerns about the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 jabs, particularly in the context of their accelerated approval. He said he has not received a response to his inquiry.
In his December 6 letter to the FDA, the Sunshine State’s surgeon general wrote to share his concern about “the recent discovery of host cell DNA fragments within the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. This raises concerns regarding the presence of nucleic acid contaminants in the approved Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”
As LifeSiteNews reported in October, a new preprint study claimed to have discovered “significant levels” of “plasmid DNA” in expired COVID-19 vaccines, impurities the researchers say may be linked to adverse events. The study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, calls for “further investigation” to corroborate the findings.
Authors David J. Speicher, Jessica Rose, L. Maria Gutschi, David M. Wiseman, Ph.D., and Kevin McKernan said in the 31-page study they had found “billions to hundreds of billions of DNA molecules per dose” that they gathered from “[e]xpired unopened vials of Pfizer-BioNTech [shots] … and Moderna Spikevax mRNA” jabs “obtained from various pharmacies in Ontario, Canada.”
According to the researchers, the “preliminary evidence … warrant[s] confirmation and further investigation.”
An earlier preprint in June published by McKernan and his fellow researchers alleged that a fragment of a “monkey virus” genome, SV40, had been discovered in the COVID-19 jabs. The study noted that SV40 had previously been discovered in polio vaccines in the 1950s and 1960s and was linked to cancer. However, Health Feedback has noted that the DNA found in the COVID jabs was only a “fragment” of that genome, and that it’s unclear whether SV40 causes cancer in humans (current research only supports risk of cancer in certain animals), LifeSiteNews previously reported.
Moreover, the polio jabs became contaminated due to the use of monkey kidney cells to grow the virus, per Health Feedback. Those cell cultures were not used in the making of the COVID shots, making it unclear how the SV40 contaminants got into the injections to begin with.
In Ladapo’s letter to the FDA, he cited 2007 guidance from the FDA itself that, he stated, raised the possibility that “DNA integration could theoretically impact a human’s oncogenes – the genes which can transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell,” and could therefore “result in chromosomal instability.”
“The Guidance for Industry discusses biodistribution of DNA vaccines and how such integration could affect unintended parts of the body including blood, heart, brain, liver, kidney, bone marrow, ovaries/testes, lung, draining lymph nodes, spleen, the site of administration and subcutis at injection site,” he summarized.
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After laying out the guidance from the FDA on the potential risks of DNA contamination, Ladapo asked the agency to answer whether manufacturers of the drugs have “evaluated the risk of human genome integration or mutagenesis of residual DNA contaminants from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines alongside the additional risk of DNA integration from the lipid nanoparticle delivery system and SV40 promoter/enhancer?”
“Has [the] FDA inquired any information from the drug manufacturers to investigate such risk?” he asked.
Ladapo also asked whether “FDA standards for acceptable and safe quantity of residual DNA (present as known contaminants in biological therapies) consider the lipid nanoparticle delivery system for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines?” Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 jabs contain lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), which are “tiny balls of fat” that act as delivery mechanisms for the mRNA vaccine.
Florida’s surgeon general further inquired whether, given “the potentially wide biodistribution of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and DNA contaminants beyond the local injection site,” the FDA has “evaluated the risk of DNA integration in reproductive cells with respect to the lipid nanoparticle delivery system?”
Citing “the urgency of these questions due to the mass administration of these vaccines and currently unavailable data surrounding possible genomic effects,” Ladapo closed his letter by asking the FDA to respond to his questions in one week’s time (December 13) by sending a written response to both his “previous letter and the concerns I have outlined above.”
Dr. Ladapo, who earned his MD from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. from Harvard University, was appointed to lead Florida’s health department by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021. He quickly made a name for himself as something of a maverick among state health department officials for his resistance to the prevailing COVID-19 narrative, and he has consistently and publicly spoken out against COVID-19 jabs, lockdowns, and mask mandates.