MIAMI – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned on Wednesday against the “proliferation of misinformation and disinformation” that lowers the use of vaccines against COVID-19.
The FDA released a statement reporting the disagreement with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on the safety of the over a billion doses of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccines that have been administered.
While Ladapo was concerned about DNA contaminants, the FDA warned that “perpetuating references to information about residual DNA in COVID-19 vaccines without placing it within the context of the manufacturing process and the known benefits of the vaccine is misleading.”
In a previous Dec. 14 letter to Ladapo, Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, reported that a DNA virus was not present in the vaccines and that studies found no evidence of the genotoxicity raised as a theoretical issue.
Marks was responding to Ladapo’s Dec. 6 letter reporting his “concern that SV40 promoter/enhancer DNA is present in these vaccines” and wrote that “no SV40 proteins are encoded for or are present in the vaccines” and there is “no evidence for genotoxicity from the vaccine.”
Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease expert at Florida International University, said it was a “valid thing” for the Florida Department of Health to investigate the quality of a vaccine. She said most of the information in question is based on a pre-print article that has not been accepted for publication.
“What is there is not really alarming,” Marty said also adding that “the efficacy is very high for all of the vaccines.”