Science

Column: Meet the most dangerous quack in America

Published

2 years ago

January 9, 2024

Column: Meet the most dangerous quack in America

It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.

That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.

This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”

Scaring people unnecessarily like this has been hard to watch. … It is hard to believe that Dr. Ladapo actually issued that statement.

— Vaccine authority Paul Offit

For several reasons, this advisory ranks as the single most dangerous statement by a government health agency since the start of the pandemic, if not for all time.

First and foremost, it’s based on a claim in a paper co-authored by known anti-vaccine activists that was almost instantaneously debunked upon its publication in October.

Then there’s the public health context: As COVID infections have been surging coast to coast, advisories from public health authorities to resume masking and take other protective measures, such as making sure you’re up to date on vaccinations, are almost invisible.

Even more worrisome, the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases may be rising. As many as nine cases of measles have been reported in Philadelphia, some associated with an infection started at a daycare center with a family that violated quarantine rules.

Among the victims, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, are “an infant who was too young to get vaccinated, an unvaccinated older child and the older child’s unvaccinated parent.”

Nine cases may not sound like a lot — 41 were reported nationwide in 2023 — but they could be a harbinger of worse to come, in clusters in which anti-vaccine propaganda has taken hold.

Finally, one must consider the source. Despite his state post and a tenured position as a professor of medicine at the University of Florida — courtesy of his patron Ron DeSantis, the extremist anti-vaccine Republican governor — Ladapo has zero credibility within the medical establishment. Taking medical advice from Ladapo makes about as much sense as taking investment advice from Sam Bankman-Fried or your view of academic integrity from Christopher Rufo.

Ladapo has become a card-carrying member of the anti-vaccine mafia. Just before Christmas, he appeared on a podcast hosted by anti-vax agitator Del Bigtree, who stirs up his audiences with hysterical rants against vaccines and who was recently appointed communications director for the presidential campaign of notorious anti-vax figure Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Last January, a faculty committee at the University of Florida medical school found that Ladapo engaged in “careless, irregular and contentious” research practices that may have violated university rules. The committee referred its findings to the university’s research integrity officer, but that officer ruled that since the behavior at issue was performed in Ladapo’s role as surgeon general, not as a UF professor, he had no grounds to take action.

The accusations pertained to Ladapo’s recommendation that males aged 18 to 39 avoid the mRNA vaccines. He claimed that research indicated that for men in that age group, the vaccines presented a heightened risk of cardiac-related death.

In fact, the research indicated no such thing; rather, it showed that the risk of cardiac death from the vaccines was statistically nonexistent and, in any case, was lower than the risk of cardiac death resulting from catching COVID-19. In fact, Ladapo had personally edited the state-sponsored analysis he cited in his recommendation to remove language in earlier drafts stating that there was “little suggestion of any [cardiac] effect immediately following vaccination.”

The Food and Drug Administration has been pushing back against Ladapo’s fire hose of misinformation and disinformation for the better part of a year. Last March, the agency informed him by letter that “overstating the risks, or emphasizing the risks without acknowledging the overwhelming benefits” of the vaccines — as Ladapo had done in his cardiac death warning — “puts people at risk of death or serious illness that could have been prevented by timely vaccination.”

That brings us to Ladapo’s latest adventure in medical quackery, his claim that no one should take the mRNA vaccines. Let’s take a look.

Ladapo’s advice is based on what he says is research that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID vaccines contain fragments of DNA that are injected into human cells, which they can contaminate and turn into cancer cells.

In a Dec. 6 letter to the FDA and in the Florida Department of Health advisory, Ladapo raised “concerns regarding nucleic acid contaminants in the approved … vaccines, particularly in the presence of lipid nanoparticle complexes, and Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA. … The presence of SV40 promoter/enhancer DNA may also pose a unique and heightened risk of DNA integration into human cells.”

Followers of anti-vaccine propaganda will find familiar features in this statement. For one thing, it sounds science-y as hell, filled to bursting with abstruse terms and jargon. One would have to be an expert in the field to identify it as total balderdash. The statement also bristles with scary references to DNA contamination and cancer and to “billions of fragments [of DNA] per dose.”

The same goes for Ladapo’s hand-wringing in his statements about the FDA’s 2007 standards for DNA in vaccines and his implication that the COVID vaccines violate those standards.

Fortunately, scientific and medical professionals have weighed in. One is Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit explains that it’s true that “small amounts of fragmented DNA” are injected into the body with the vaccines.

It’s also irrelevant. For those fragments to affect your DNA, he explains, “things would have to occur, all of which are for the most part impossible.”

The human cell has a panoply of mechanisms to destroy foreign DNA. Even if the fragments managed to penetrate the cell nucleus, which can’t happen, they would have to cut up the existing DNA, which would require a mechanism the fragments don’t have.

“So the chance that DNA could affect your DNA is zero,” Offit said in a video interview with Medpage Today.

As for the Florida statement’s scary references to DNA contamination and cancer and to “billions of fragments [of DNA] per dose,” the vaccines don’t contaminate patients’ DNA, the fragments have no cancer-causing abilities, and that “billions” is, in the context of the vaccines, an incredibly tiny number.

The research paper on which Ladapo based his intimation that the vaccines breach the FDA’s DNA contamination standard is self-refuting. The paper, which was based on an analysis of 24 vials of the mRNA vaccines, actually found that in all cases the fragments were well below the concentration limits set by the FDA.

The FDA, in responding to Ladapo’s Dec. 6 letter, told him that studies of the vaccines showed “no evidence” that the shots damaged recipients’ DNA and that the experience of “hundreds of millions of individuals” who received the vaccines “indicate no evidence indicative of genotoxicity.”

On the other hand, “the challenge we continue to face is the ongoing proliferation of misinformation and disinformation about these vaccines which results in vaccine hesitancy that lowers vaccine uptake,” the FDA lectured Ladapo. “Given the dramatic reduction in the risk of death, hospitalization and serious illness afforded by the vaccines, lower vaccine uptake is contributing to the continued death and serious illness toll of COVID-19.”

In the words of the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski, disinformation like Ladapo’s output is “not about science. It’s about fear-mongering about vaccines.”

Ladapo’s words and actions have surely contributed to his state’s pathetic performance in getting its citizens vaccinated against COVID. With 11.6% of its population fully vaccinated with a booster as of last May, Florida had a rate among the lowest in the nation. (California’s rate was 20.6%.) Among those 65 and older — purportedly the population that Florida strives to protect — only 31.2% were fully vaccinated. (California: 48.3%.)

Florida’s death rate from COVID of 375 per 100,000 people is among the worst in the country. (California: 283.) You can ignore the defense that the difference is due to Florida’s relatively older population; states with even older median ages have done much better: Vermont (170), New Hampshire (245) and Maine (252). The difference is the indifference of Ladapo and DeSantis to their own residents’ health.

Ladapo’s colleagues in science and medicine face the challenge of understanding what drives someone with Ladapo’s credentials — a Harvard education and a stint on the medical faculty at UCLA — to descend so deeply into professional irresponsibility.

“It is hard to believe that Dr. Ladapo actually issued that statement,” Offit said of Ladapo’s advice to avoid the vaccines. “Scaring people unnecessarily like this has been hard to watch.”

Science

After Artemis II, here’s what’s next for NASA’s return to the moon

Published

3 hours ago

April 13, 2026

Press Room

After Artemis II, here’s what’s next for NASA’s return to the moon

NASA’s 10-day Artemis II mission to fly around the moon safely splashed down off the San Diego coast Friday, marking the end of humanity’s first flight to the moon in over 50 years.

The new NASA administrator, born over a decade after the last Apollo mission, immediately made it clear he intends the gap between Artemis II and the agency’s next moon mission to be much, much shorter.

“You hear sometimes around here, ‘this is a once in a lifetime’ — no its not,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said aboard a recovery vessel out in the Pacific, moments after the crew splashed down. “This is just the beginning, we are going to get back into doing on this with frequency, sending missions to the moon until we land on it in 2028 and start building our base.”

Here’s how the U.S. space agency hopes to do it.

NASA’s vision for the moon

A week before Artemis II launched, NASA outlined its ambitious new plan for creating a sustained presence on the moon, which can serve as a testing ground for eventual missions to Mars.

Most notably, the agency scrapped long-standing plans to build a space station orbiting the moon, called Gateway. Instead, it would focus on building a base on the lunar surface.

“I think we’d rather be on the surface where a lot of the learning’s going to take place, where we can … build the skills, test the technology, the capabilities we’re going to need some day if we actually go to Mars and want to bring our astronauts home to talk about it,” Isaacman said in an interview with the publication NASASpaceflight.

“It’s not like you’re just going to be on Gateway looking down,” he added. “You’re going to probably be looking down on another country’s astronauts.”

The space agency’s Artemis program is designed to make the moon base vision a reality.

The next Artemis missions

The next Artemis mission is slated for 2027. Artemis III will stick in near-Earth orbit — closer to where the International Space Station sits as opposed to traveling into deep space like Artemis II.

Around Earth, the agency plans to test docking procedures between its Orion spacecraft and the lunar landers that will carry astronauts from the moon’s orbit down to its surface. To build these landers, it tapped the private space companies Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk.

Then, in early 2028, it intends to launch Artemis IV. The Orion spacecraft will carry astronauts to the moon’s orbit, and a lunar lander will take two of them down to the moon’s south pole, where they will spend a week conducting science.

Artemis V and beyond will aim to accelerate the cadence of lunar landings to one every six months and continue to test technology to make lunar landings easier and cheaper.

Lessons from Artemis II

Artemis II focused on putting the Orion spacecraft through its paces — primarily by testing its life support systems and piloting the spacecraft for the first time. For example, the crew dealt with multiple issues with their space toilet.

NASA also used the mission as an opportunity to study Orion’s troubled heat shield, which unexpectedly chipped in more than 100 spots on the uncrewed Artemis I test mission in 2022. By using a new reentry trajectory, Isaacman said that “no unexpected conditions were observed” in initial assessments.

However, the Orion spacecraft experienced issues with helium valves on Orion’s propulsion system, which helps the crew navigate in space. Ahead of launch, NASA noticed helium leaking in the system but determined, since Artemis II has a much simpler trajectory than future missions, the leaking wouldn’t significantly affect the mission.

In space, the leaking worsened, ultimately convincing NASA it would have to redesign the system for future missions.

Beyond the technical objectives of Artemis II, NASA officials were particularly pleased with the public response to the mission and the astronauts’ ability to connect with the public.

The lunar flyby is already NASA’s most viewed live broadcast on YouTube with more than 27 million views. Artemis II’s launch and splashdown are also within the top five most viewed broadcasts.

In space, the astronauts spoke eloquently of the surreal sights of the moon and their deep love for our home planet.

“I would suggest to you that when you look up here, you’re not looking at us,” said Canadian Space Agency astronaut and Artemis II mission specialist astronaut Jeremy Hansen, back in Houston Saturday. “We are a mirror reflecting you. And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.”

The hurdles to Artemis III

NASA is already building its next high-power rocket to launch the Artemis III Orion spacecraft. The agency plans to ship the massive orange core stage for the rocket from New Orleans to Florida this month. The Orion spacecraft’s main two sections are already at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center along the Florida coast.

A redesigned heat shield, aimed at addressing the root cause of the unexpected damage during Artemis I, is already built. However, the agency is not yet sure whether it will be able to fix the faulty Orion propulsion system, built in Germany by the European Space Agency, in Florida or if NASA will have to ship it back across the Atlantic.

And neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin have tested their landers in space yet. A NASA audit last month found that “both SpaceX and Blue Origin have experienced schedule delays and face technical and integration challenges that have the potential to further impact lander costs and delivery schedules.”

Yet, NASA remains steadfast on its 2027 launch timeline. The agency promised to announce the Artemis III crew “soon.”

Science

Video: NASA’s Artemis II Crew Returns to Houston After Lunar Mission

Published

13 hours ago

April 12, 2026

Press Room

Video: NASA’s Artemis II Crew Returns to Houston After Lunar Mission

new video loaded: NASA’s Artemis II Crew Returns to Houston After Lunar Mission

transcript

NASA’s Artemis II Crew Returns to Houston After Lunar Mission

After splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, the Artemis II crew members reunited with their friends, families and fellow NASA astronauts in Houston on Saturday. Their voyage was the first trip by humans into deep space in more than half a century.

: “Your Artemis II crew.” “I have not processed what we just did, and I’m afraid to start even trying. The gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did and being with who I was with, it’s too big to just be in one body.” “Before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth. And when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.” “When we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe.” “Splashdown! Sending post landing command now.” “Splashdown confirmed.” “When you look up here, you’re not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you. And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.”
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After splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, the Artemis II crew members reunited with their friends, families and fellow NASA astronauts in Houston on Saturday. Their voyage was the first trip by humans into deep space in more than half a century.

By Jorge Mitssunaga

April 12, 2026

Science

How to watch NASA’s moon mission splash down off San Diego today

Published

15 hours ago

April 12, 2026

Press Room

How to watch NASA’s moon mission splash down off San Diego today

Four days after astronauts flew around the moon for the first time in a half-century, ground crews across Southern California are making final preparations for their high-energy reentry and splashdown off the coast of San Diego, expected around 5 p.m. Pacific time Friday.

Southern Californians likely won’t be able to see reentry or splashdown in person, NASA officials said. However, NASA will livestream the event. Here’s what you should know:

The four members of the Artemis II crew will rip through the atmosphere at roughly 24,000 mph — over 30 times the speed of sound — agitating the air around the capsule into a fireball roughly half as hot as the surface of the sun.

NASA will use a new, more direct reentry technique, after the heat shield for the 2022 Artemis I test mission, which had no one aboard, unexpectedly chipped in more than 100 spots.

Artemis II pilot and SoCal native Victor Glover has been thinking about reentry since he was assigned the mission in 2023. When Glover, still in space, was asked Wednesday evening about the moments from this mission he’ll carry with him for the rest of his life, he joked: “We’ve still got two more days, and riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well.”

How to watch

“The path we’re coming in, I don’t expect it to be visible for folks in California,” Artemis II Lead Flight Director Jeff Radigan said at a news conference Thursday.

Nonetheless, San Diegans hoping to catch a glimpse can look west over the Pacific around 5 p.m. for the best chance to see the Orion capsule, which would appear as a fast and bright streak low in the sky.

For anyone hoping to get a closer view via boat, “I would caution folks, please avoid the area,” Radigan said. “There’s a lot of debris that comes down, and we work with our recovery forces in order to ensure that it doesn’t hit them. But of course we don’t want it to hit anyone else.”

The last time NASA astronauts splashed down in a brand-new vehicle, lookie-loos caused some serious safety concerns, including potentially exposing boaters to toxic chemicals and delaying the recovery of astronauts if there was an emergency.

For the best, up-close views, NASA is livestreaming reentry and splashdown on YouTube, Netflix and HBO Max. The Times will also carry live views of the dynamic return to Earth on latimes.com.

The San Diego Air & Space Museum will also host a family-friendly viewing party.

The plan for reentry

NASA expects reentry to begin at approximately 4:53 p.m. Pacific time. (Yes, NASA “approximations” are that precise.)

When it does, the agency expects to lose communication for about six minutes as the Orion capsule holding the astronauts is enveloped in a fireball.

During all this, a team of NASA and Department of Defense test pilots will chase the capsule in airplanes as researchers in the back point telescopes and sensors at its heat shield. NASA hopes to use this data to better understand how that protection holds up under the agency’s new reentry technique.

Around 5:03 p.m., two small parachutes will deploy, slowing the craft down to about 300 mph. A minute later, much larger chutes will deploy, slowing the capsule to about 17 mph. Three minutes later, around 5:07 p.m., the capsule will splash down in the Pacific Ocean.

A team of Navy divers will then help the astronauts out of the capsule, and Navy helicopters will swoop in to recover them.

The helicopters will take the astronauts to the U.S.S. John P. Murtha, a 680-foot-long, 25,000-ton Navy transport dock warship, for an immediate medical evaluation. Navy divers will then secure the capsule and guide it to the Murtha’s deck.

Then they’ll bring the astronauts back ashore as the Murtha slowly returns to San Diego. The astronauts will fly to Houston to NASA’s Johnson Space Center to reunite with their families.

Boots on the moon and someday Mars

The Artemis program ultimately aims to land humans back on the moon. NASA eventually hopes to establish a lunar base that will serve as the testing grounds for future missions to Mars.

This mission primarily aimed to test the capsule’s life support systems to help create a smoother ride for future crews that will have to deal with the headaches of actually landing on the moon. This included troubleshooting the capsule’s space toilet (multiple times), piloting the spacecraft by hand, and testing procedures such as sheltering from solar radiation in the cargo locker.

NASA plans to launch Artemis III, a mission in Earth’s orbit to test docking the Orion spacecraft with SpaceX’s and Blue Origin’s lunar landers, in 2027. It aspires to launch Artemis IV, which would put humans on the surface of the moon, in 2028.