Florida COVID-19 committee members emphasize restoring public trust in vaccines

In response to Gov. Ron DeSantis creating a new Public Health Integrity Committee and filing a petition for a statewide grand jury to investigate potential crimes related to the COVID-19 vaccine, seven doctors on the committee expressed their support for the only governor in America taking such a stand.

The members of the new committee include Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, Martin Kuldorff, PhD, Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD, Joseph Fraiman, MD, Christine Stabell Benn, MD, PhD, Bret Weinstein, PhD, and Steven Templeton, PhD.

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo is overseeing the committee tasked with assessing “federal public health recommendations and guidance to ensure that Florida’s public health policies are tailored for Florida’s communities and priorities.”

“The Biden Administration and pharmaceutical corporations continue to push widespread distribution of mRNA vaccines on the public, including children as young as 6 months old, through relentless propaganda while ignoring real-life adverse events,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said. At a roundtable earlier this month, he met with health experts who discussed data covering serious adverse events from the COVID-19 mNRA drug, including “coagulation disorders, acute cardiac injuries, Bell's palsy, encephalitis, appendicitis, and shingles.”

"Health care professionals should always communicate the risks of a medical intervention to their patients in a manner that is clinically appropriate and meets standards of ethical practice,” Ladapo said. “President Biden and Big Pharma have completely prevented that from happening – it is wrong. With these new actions, we will shed light on the forces that have obscured truthful communication about the COVID-19 vaccines."

Ladapo also said the Florida Department of Health and University of Florida will conduct research to assess sudden deaths of Floridians who were in good health prior to receiving a COVID-19 vaccine and use disease surveillance and vital statistics to assess their deaths.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of Health Policy at Stanford University Medical School, said it was “time to start taking stock of what went wrong and make reforms so this doesn’t happen again,” referring in part to widespread censorship of “qualified people from expressing their thinking.” Censorhip, he said, resulted in “absolutely abysmal” “decision making at the top of the country” and essentially created “a social credit system demeaning people who disagree with the CDC,” resulting in “bad decisions that don’t get checked.”

Bret Weinstein, former Evergreen State College professor of Evolutionary Biology, also addressed the issue of censorship, saying, “The decision making surrounding COVID amounts to the largest blunder in human history.”

Ongoing censorship, he said, “is creating a phony sense that there is agreement amongst all of the responsible doctors about what to do and the few doctors who say otherwise are fringe cranks and this couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

“The message that was given to us from public health authorities was not just inept,” he added. “It actually went well beyond that. It was really the inverse of everything we should have done. Because it was forced on us with this strong form of coercion, it was widely accepted because people didn’t have a choice."

Others raised concerns about the vaccine research process.

Dr. Christine Benn, chair of Health Sciences, Department of Clinical Research at the University of Southern Denmark, said her group’s “research has revealed that vaccines can affect the risk of non-targeted infections,” and the “new COVID-19 vaccines have not yet been investigated for their potential effects on the risk of other infections.”

Dr. Joseph Fraiman, Emergency Medicine Physician at Thibodaux Regional Medical Center, said “our study took a magnifying glass to the original Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials that got the vaccines on the market in late 2020. In the original trials, mRNA vaccines increased serious adverse events at a rate considerably higher than initially realized. Our peer-reviewed study – which was published this August in one of the field’s leading journals – indicates that the mRNA COVID vaccines should be urgently re-evaluated.”

He also said “unless further studies can clearly demonstrate a favorable harm benefit profile, mRNA vaccine use should not be recommended in healthy adults and children” and an ethical duty exists “to inform the public of these results to allow for informed consent from those who chose to take COVID vaccines.”

Dr. Tracey Høeg , Physician Epidemiologist and Clinical Researcher at the University of California San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, also addressed the issue of risks, transparency and mandates.

"It is clear we urgently need updated and fully transparent vaccines risk-benefit analyses for all age groups for physicians to make informed recommendations and patients to make informed decisions,” Høeg said. “Blanket mandates or requirements for COVID-19 vaccines are both unscientific and unethical given the vaccines' ineffectiveness at providing lasting protection from infection or transmission and the uncertainty surrounding the current vaccines' benefits and risks."

"It is always important to balance benefits and risks,” Dr. Martin Kulldorf, Scientific Director at the Brownstone Institute, said. “For children, young adults and those who have had COVID, the risk of dying from COVID is miniscule, so even a small risk of a serious vaccine adverse reaction, such as myocarditis, will tip the balance against the vaccine."

Steve Templeton, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine-Terre Haute, said he hoped they could restore trust in the public health system. The loss of trust, he said, wasn’t just among “anti-vaxx people” but among “people who have really lost trust in the system.”