Joe.My.God. LGBT News
Florida Politics reports:
Twitter temporarily took down a post by Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on guidance against COVID-19 vaccines for those under 40. The move comes as medical experts and scientists criticize the Florida Department of Health recommendations for being based on weak data that never saw peer review.
Ladapo on Friday issued new guidance recommending against mRNA vaccinations for COVID-19. “Studying the safety and efficacy of any medications, including vaccines, is an important component of public health,” Ladapo said.
“Far less attention has been paid to safety and the concerns of many individuals have been dismissed – these are important findings that should be communicated to Floridians.”
Read the full article. Ladapo, you will recall, has appeared with America’s Frontline Doctors, the anti-vax QAnon group made infamous by Dr. Demon Semen. Earlier this year the group’s co-founder was sentenced to prison for her role in the attack on the Capitol.
Florida just announced the results of an analysis that they performed, saying the results show “an increased risk of cardiac-related death among men 18-39” for the mRNA vaccines, and recommend this group not receive these vaccines.
Is this justified? Let’s look at the data… pic.twitter.com/hfHrg6CMNb
— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
The link to the analysis takes you here, not a published study, but a pdf of a word document: https://t.co/yZc9gJlJBX
A few notes off the bat:
1. this analysis is not published and is not peer reviewed.
2. there are no authors listed, which is a bit odd. pic.twitter.com/MNhb3UqNC1— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
First, how did they assess cardiac-related deaths?
They looked at death certificates, and any death that had an ICD 10 code under “Other forms of heart disease” (ICD I30-I52) was included. pic.twitter.com/HhSPpyzyjI
— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
A couple things to note about this methodology:
1. ICD-10 codes are not necessarily accurate or specific.
2. There isn’t a clear rationale why they included these specific ICD-10 codes vs other cardiac-related codes (i.e. ischemic heart disease is not included?) pic.twitter.com/YqkOKioexX— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
3. “Cardiac arrest” is included, which simply means “the heart stopped” and can be the terminal event for many different diseases, not just cardiac issues.
Overall, it is a somewhat random list defined not by a hypothesis, but by the arbitrary structure of hospital billing.
— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
In short, this list is too broad to be meaningful, excludes some cardiac issues but not others, and most of the diagnoses are far more likely to be caused by other ongoing disease processes rather than vaccination.
— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
To get around this limitation, did they dig through medical records and confirm that 1. the ICD-10 codes were accurate and 2. there wasn’t another obvious cause leading to that diagnosis and death (someone who died from bacterial endocarditis, for example)?
No, they didn’t.
— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
Finally, it should be noted that whenever you perform a risk assessment of vaccination, you compare the risks of the vaccine vs the disease it protects against. This analysis failed to do that, as it did not include any information on the risk of COVID for this age group.
— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
Given the arbitrary selection of cardiac outcomes, the lack of validation, the small sample size, and the failure to control for COVID infection as a confounding variable, overall these results are largely unreliable, and personally I would not base any decisions on them.
— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
And while we can’t say for sure, this whole analysis smells of p-hacking, which occurs when people slice and dice the data a whole bunch of ways until they find a result they like.
— Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (@kmpanthagani) October 9, 2022
Sources we spoke with do not agree with Joseph Ladapo’s assertion that he took care of Covid patients at UCLA’s flagship hospital in March of 2020. pic.twitter.com/DdmezHbtzF
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) November 9, 2021