Anti-vaccine Florida surgeon general confirmed for second term. Concerns about what’s next

Von Sellers, a transgender college student in Miami, was planning to have surgery this summer in the next stage of her transition schedule. But the operation has been canceled, unless she can find another doctor willing to perform it and $50,000 to pay for it.

Her life, the one she has desired since she was “born into the wrong body,” is on hold, perhaps permanently now that a ban on gender-affirming treatment for minors designed by Florida’s surgeon general was passed Thursday by state legislators and is likely to be signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“Our state’s public health policies have sent the LGBTQ community into a panic,” Sellers said. “They are trying to erase us. We’re scared of genocide and suicide. I’m scared of walking down the street. Will I be shot, or arrested? And I’m scared of never being allowed to grow into the person I am.”

Fear is one word often cited by patients, doctors, public health experts, vaccine advocates and abortion providers when asked about the prospects of the second term of Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who was hand-picked by DeSantis 19 months ago during a coronavirus pandemic wave and reconfirmed Thursday by the state Senate in a 27-12 vote along party lines.

Yet Ladapo’s mantra is “freedom from fear in the free state of Florida.” His memoir, “Transcend Fear,” is endorsed by anti-vaccination activists Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Simone Gold. In it he writes about an abusive childhood and how he and his wife’s profound experiences with healers just before the pandemic — she was also abused as a child — shaped his anti-mainstream views on COVID and health issues.

In a premature Tweet last week that was subsequently deleted, Florida Department of Health spokesperson Nikki Whiting announced that Ladapo had been “officially reconfirmed by the Florida Senate and will continue to lead @HealthyFla by making decisions rooted in facts, not fear.”

The Tweet included a montage of video clips from Ladapo’s first term: Standing at podiums labeled “Let Them Choose” and “Prescribe Freedom,” Ladapo said vaccines and lockdowns didn’t save lives, accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of lying, told Tucker Carlson he wouldn’t “stay silent” about “harmful” federal health recommendations, and dangled a mask from his left hand, chuckling with DeSantis as he said, “It’s hard to find these in Florida.”

Ladapo, who declined an interview request from the Herald, is concluding a first term during which he and DeSantis took actions contrary to standard public health guidance and defied recommendations from national and international agencies. They prohibited COVID mask mandates in schools and discouraged COVID vaccines as dangerous, especially for young children and young men. Ladapo directed the state’s medical boards to ban established treatment for transgender minors not already under care and deny state funding for trans patients. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration reprimanded him for fanning vaccine hesitancy. His study of COVID vaccine heart-related death risk was debunked by his peers, who denounced him for violating research ethics rules by removing data.

University of Florida faculty committee members who said Ladapo was given “preferential treatment on the basis of his political opinions” when he was hired by DeSantis-appointed trustees as a tenured medical school professor, and who blasted his COVID research as “careless” are concerned about the consequences of his reconfirmation. They expect more public health threats in the future and question how he will confront them.

“What’s dangerous about Dr. Ladapo is, he is violating his Hippocratic Oath,” said Dr. Michael Haller, a UF pediatric endocrinologist who specializes in diabetes but also treats kids with gender dysphoria. “He will continue to cause harm as long as our state leadership wants to win the presidency.”

During his first term, Ladapo promoted his and DeSantis’ policies by appearing on Fox News and the platforms of anti-vaccination activists such as Cleveland osteopath Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, who claims COVID shots “interface” with cell phone towers and make recipients magnetic. Ohio’s medical board is trying to suspend her license.

“Vaccines are one of the greatest achievements in history, so what happens when their value is undermined by an expert?” said Richard Carpiano, a public health scientist at the University of California-Riverside who has studied the anti-vaccination movement and how doctors touting unorthodox theories become celebrity pundits. “He’s poisoning the well of settled science. Will we see vaccination rates decrease for all diseases?”

Florida’s COVID vaccine rates are among the worst in the country. As of April 26, only 44 percent of Florida’s vaccine-eligible population — aged 5 and up — had completed a two-shot or single-shot vaccine and booster, ranking the state 45th out of 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington D.C., according to CDC data.

READ MORE: As COVID begins its fourth year, here’s how Florida fared in cases, deaths and vaccines

Ladapo’s reconfirmation by the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee sailed through 6-3 along party lines as it did in the full state Senate. Sen. Tina Polsky, D-Boca Raton, opposed Ladapo during the April 24 hearing, asserting he lacks public health expertise, disseminates “false” anti-vaccine evidence and advances DeSantis’ political ideology.

“It was chosen for us that we would have a politician in this position and that, to me, is what he has become,” she said. Polsky recalled how Ladapo refused to wear a mask during a 2021 meeting with her while she was undergoing radiation treatment for breast cancer that lowered her immunity. If she had caught COVID, her treatments would have been suspended.

“So I’m scared for my life and getting the right treatment,’’she said during the hearing. “This is the top doctor in our state. The way he treated me is so symbolic of who he is and how he treats all of our public health crises. God forbid we have another pandemic or another situation when he is there. I do not believe that he will take our health into consideration over politics or just being contrary.”

Republican senators at the hearing praised and thanked Ladapo.

“I can’t think of anything more cruel than masking little kids,” said Sen. Jonathan Martin of Lee County. “There are many people who have suffered tremendously because of arbitrary and frankly ridiculous rules that were put in place by what we call public-health professionals.”

Admonished by CDC/FDA

What can Floridians expect during Ladapo’s second term?

He earns $437,000 in his dual roles as surgeon general and UF professor of internal medicine.

He hasn’t laid out his plans, but his critics worry he will broaden restrictive policies working with the Republican-controlled Legislature and health boards at a time when DeSantis accelerates his anticipated campaign for president.

As Arcturus, the latest COVID subvariant considered more infectious than Omicron spreads across the country, Floridians might be wondering what Ladapo recommends as as chief of an agency with 17,000 employees. The Department of Health oversees everything from immunizations to drinking water quality to tattoo parlors. It issues birth, death, marriage and divorce certificates, regulates pharmacies and pain clinics, and provides services to substance abusers, rural residents, disabled people, pregnant women and hungry children.

The CDC and FDA urged Ladapo in their March 10 letter to stop giving the public misleading information about isolated adverse reactions to COVID vaccines and acknowledge that 13 billion doses have been administered throughout the world “with little evidence of harm.”

READ MORE: Florida surgeon general slammed for ‘fueling vaccine hesitancy.’ It’s not the first time

“It is the job of public health officials around the country to protect the lives of the populations they serve, particularly the vulnerable,” the two agency heads wrote, chastising Ladapo for using a data reporting system incorrectly and for being derelict in his duty to Floridians, especially the elderly. “Fueling vaccine hesitancy undermines this effort .... This has led to unnecessary death, severe illness and hospitalization.”

Research debunked

Ladapo staked much of his anti-vaccination argument on his Department of Health study of myocarditis risk in men aged 18-39. His study was first discredited by Matt Hitchings, a UF epidemiologist and assistant professor of biostatistics, and three of his colleagues, then by a nine-member University of Florida faculty task force that said Ladapo relied on a small sample and cherry-picked data to produce a report of “highly questionable merit.”

Politico and the Tampa Bay Times examined Ladapo’s revisions — or “Dr. L’s Edits” as a document reads — showing he took out language stating there was no significant risk of death from COVID vaccines and replaced it with language declaring a high risk.

“We can see what Dr. Ladapo removed, without explanation, so we’re left to guess at why he did it — that it did not fit his narrative,” Hitchings told the Herald. “There is no way this analysis would have been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal. We’re all trained how to do this properly and ethically, but he’s working counter to the spirit of science, coming in from the back end to manipulate data to fit anti-vaccine — I don’t want to say propaganda — but a political agenda.”

Because Ladapo is in a position of medical authority, he poses “the danger of lending legitimacy to the idea that vaccines kill people,” Hitchings said. “What’s that going to do to the next 5-10 years of policy, or when another virus hits?”

Ladapo did not present a defense of his conclusion that young men should not get vaccinated. Instead, he posted this response to the Politico story on Twitter: “PhD-trained physician revises report based on his scientific expertise = ‘scandalous altering of result.’ Fauci enthusiasts are terrified and will do anything to divert attention from the risks of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines— especially cardiac deaths. Truth will prevail.”

READ NEXT: Florida’s surgeon general is no stranger to controversy and clashes. A second term is imminent

Ladapo scares many doctors, said Haller, who led the faculty investigation of Ladapo’s study and found “his intentional omissions were highly disturbing and behavior that no one would expect of a tenured professor or surgeon general.”

Ladapo is not only having a “chilling effect” on treatment for certain patients but on hiring at the state’s medical schools and teaching hospitals, Haller said: “He’s hurting recruiting of the top pediatric trainees. They see the persecution of our patients and providers. They see how the state took over New College. They are choosing to go elsewhere.”

Haller said doctors fearful for their jobs have stopped speaking out.

“If we treat transgender kids now we can lose our licenses, but no doubt it will become a crime and we could go to jail, and the same thing will happen with abortions,” he said, referring to Florida’s new law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, one of the most restrictive in the country. “Clinics have shut down. Transgender refugees are going to other states for treatment. We see harm to mental health. We will see more suicides.”

Memoir sheds light

How did Ladapo, a Harvard-educated M.D. with a Harvard Ph. D. in health policy who has held professorships at the New York University and UCLA medical schools become an anti-vaxxer?

Ladapo, 44, was born in Nigeria. At age 5, he moved to North Carolina, where his father, a microbiologist, taught at North Carolina Central University.

Ladapo and wife Brianna have three sons. She earned her master’s in English at Harvard, according to her Facebook account. She describes herself as an intuitive spiritual healer, movement therapist, teacher and author who has studied shamanism, herbal medicine and naturopathy.

Like Ladapo, Brianna has written a memoir, entitled “Emerging from Darkness,” in which she says she grew up in a religious family “who believed her extraordinary intuitive gifts to be the work of the devil.” She suffered from depression, migraines, a near-fatal illness, “dark visions of tragedies she could not prevent, and countless sexual traumas and abuses.” A healer “reawakened her gifts and taught her her how to truly free herself from her trauma.”

Ladapo wrote about his wife’s illnesses and their struggle to find adequate care in a 2016 column for The Washington Post.

A description of Ladapo’s book on Amazon says that after being abused as a child, he was “incapable of connecting emotionally with other people. He was dissociated from virtually everything in his life and numbly powered through college, medical school, and residency to become a doctor and professor. It wasn’t until he fell in love with his wife that he was forced to come face-to-face with the enormous emotional and spiritual disruption caused by his deeply buried trauma.

“Just before the pandemic, Dr. Ladapo worked with a former Navy Seal who used a mix of ancient disciplines and modern techniques to help free him from this trauma—and subsequently, his fear.”

Ladapo writes that his “emotional clarity” enabled him to approach the pandemic differently than most health professionals and see that it was too late for vaccines, masks and lockdowns to stop the spread. While hospital care was critical for the most vulnerable, herd immunity was the ultimate solution.

Ladapo gained national attention in July 2020 when he spoke on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court as a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, a group sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots and organized by Gold, a physician from Beverly Hills who called the COVID vaccine “an experimental biological agent.”

A dozen doctors wearing white coats — most of whom had not treated patients on the front lines of the pandemic; one was an unlicensed ophthalmologist — spoke about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin cures and their anti-vaccine, anti-mask philosophy. Dr. Stella Immanuel, who runs a strip-mall clinic in Houston and has preached about body-invading “spirit wives and husbands,” mocked the “foolishness” of vaccines and pushed zinc and Zithromax. A video went viral when President Donald Trump Tweeted it. Then Twitter and Facebook took it down, calling it misinformation.

Gold, who has a law degree from Stanford, influenced Ladapo with her belief that lockdowns cause collateral physical, mental and economic damage. Gold was later arrested, pleaded guilty and served 60 days last summer in Miami’s Federal Detention Center for trespassing at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

She’s since left “the communist nation of California,” got her medical license in Florida and opened GoldCare Health and Wellness, which promotes “medical freedom” without interference from the government or insurance companies. Private memberships are available for a fee.

“I searched the nation for ethical and honorable physicians to tell the American people the real public health truth,” Gold says in her endorsement of his book. “Dr. Ladapo was different because he refused to delegate his personal responsibility to think critically—even in the face of overwhelming pressure to follow the herd.”

Ladapo wrote op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. His profile rose on social media and podcasts. He caught DeSantis’ eye.

“I remember thinking that COVID would suck the life out of anti-vaxxers but instead Republicans built a politicized partnership with them and blew it wide open,” Carpiano said. “They wear the white coat that gives them cred, and opportunistically play to public sentiment, build a name, build a brand, and then they’re writing books, hosting shows, selling products, running for office.”

Concerns over his influence

Carpiano, who serves on the Lancet’s Commission on Vaccine Refusal, Acceptance and Denial, said the repercussions of Ladapo’s growing influence are troubling: “Will more parents seek vaccination exemptions for their school-age kids? Hepatitis? Polio? Then we’ll see measles outbreaks. Vaccination rates are the canary in the coalmine for major health threats.”

DeSantis appointed Ladapo as surgeon general in September 2021 despite a negative reference from his UCLA supervisor Dr. Carol Mangione, who wrote in a background check to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement: “In my opinion the people of Florida would be better served by a surgeon general who grounds his policy decisions and recommendations in the best scientific evidence rather than opinions.” Ladapo’s views “caused concern among a large number of his research and clinical colleagues and subordinates who felt that his opinions violated the Hippocratic Oath and caused stress and acrimony among co-workers and supervisors.”

When Ladapo was first confirmed in February 2022, he recommended people stop “living one’s life around testing” and discouraged boosters. U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz told Florida senators to reject him. “The governor hired a quack,” said the Broward Democrat.

About 1.1 million Americans and 87,100 Floridians have died of COVID, and are still dying — 1,052 Americans died in the week ending April 26, according to The New York Times tracker. But while fear of COVID has subsided, it’s been replaced by other fears, said Scott Galvin, who works with LGBTQ youth as executive director of Safe Schools South Florida.

“Kids are freaking out and so are their parents,” Galvin said. “They’ve been under steady assault by one new law after another as our state government tries to rewind the clock and make all minorities disappear.”

One of Ladapo’s initiatives has been to deconstruct the American Academy of Pediatrics’ longstanding standard of care for children with gender dysphoria and implement a separate one for Florida, arguing children aren’t mature enough to know their identity and could suffer irreparable bodily damage by taking puberty blockers or hormones or having surgeries.

Nor should counselors or psychiatrists encourage kids to change their names, pronouns or clothing under Ladapo’s guidelines approved last year by the Florida Board of Medicine, whose 14 members are appointed by DeSantis.

Ladapo’s positions contradict those of the pediatric academy, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, which have supported gender-affirming treatment for years.

“The AMA opposes the dangerous intrusion of government into the practice of medicine and the criminalization of health care decision-making,” AMA board member Dr. Michael Suk said in a 2021 statement. “Gender-affirming care is medically-necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people.”

Seven Florida parents filed a complaint in U.S. district court last week, asserting they have the right to choose what is best for their trans children and asking a judge to halt the ban on care because their children’s medical treatments are being canceled abruptly.

Von Sellers, 20, the Miami college student studying social work, is scared. Her surgery and recovery plan have been canceled since Florida now bars Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, instituted under Ladapo. She is confounded by the Department of Health’s mission: To protect, promote and improve the health of all people in Florida.

“This is the state that promotes guns and bans pride parades,” Sellers said. “This is the state of hate.”