The Florida Department of Health will recommend against administering COVID-19 vaccines for “healthy children,” the state’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said on Monday. This guidance will put the state at odds with guidance from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The announcement from Lapado came at the end of a 90-minute roundtable discussion hosted in West Palm Beach by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to discuss the state’s response to the pandemic. The roundtable included several physicians who discussed the failures of lockdowns, mandates, and “lockdown politicians.”
During the discussion, local outlet WPTV reported that Ladapo cited a study from the New York State Department of Health that “looked at Pfizer's coronavirus shot and found the vaccine's effectiveness against hospitalizations in children ages 5 to 11 dropped from 100% to 48% over the course of about six weeks between Dec. 13 through Jan. 24.” The study also found that during the same time, “the vaccine's effectiveness at preventing COVID-19 infections in children plummeted from 68% to 12%.”
“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Ladapo said in his remarks. He did not specify who would qualify as a “healthy child.”
Guidance from the CDC recommends that children ages 5 and up get vaccinated against coronavirus. So far, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is the only coronavirus vaccine approved for children. Children ages 4 and under are currently unable to get vaccinated.
Earlier this year, Ladapo appeared in a Fox News interview where he said that “vaccine passports” and mandatory testing were the wrong course of action to stop the spread of COVID-19.
“This idea that you could stop this [COVID-19] with vaccines was unrealistic,” he said in the interview. “There's a mismatch between the policies and reality, and more people need to wake up to that, I think, and stop participating in this really dystopian view of public health. It’s totally unhealthy. It’s unhealthy. It’s divisive. It’s political. It’s unpleasant. I understand why people are coming to Florida.”