Florida warns young men on Covid boosters

The state’s health department said the benefit of Covid-19 boosters for young men didn’t exceed the rare risk of heart damage.

The Florida health department has warned 18 to 39 year old men against seeking Covid-19 vaccinations that use mRNA technology. Picture: istock

Florida, the third most populous US state, has warned young men they face a greater risk of dying after receiving Covid-19 vaccines manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna, as the US government forks out billions of dollars on a new (third) round of Covid-19 boosters.

The Florida health department on Friday (Saturday AEDT) specifically warned 18 to 39 year old men against seeking Covid-19 vaccinations that use mRNA technology, citing new research that found this group had an 84 per cent higher chance of cardiac-related death within 28 days of vaccination.

“With a high level of global immunity to COVID-19, the benefit of vaccination is likely outweighed by this abnormally high risk of cardiac-related death among men in this age group,” the state’s health department said in a statement.

However the baseline chance of a heart attack among young adults was miniscule according to a 2020 Norwegian study of around 33,000 people: 2.1 per 100,000 people for those aged 20-29 and 16.9 for those aged between 30 and 39.

The warning comes amid growing debate in the US over the wisdom of mandating Covid-19 vaccines — which critics say failed to prevent transmission, illness or death — and waning interest among parents in vaccinating their children.

“Studying the safety and efficacy of any medications, including vaccines, is an important component of public health,” said Florida’s Surgeon General Dr Joseph Ladapo.

“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.”

Separate figures from the US Centre for Disease Control, released a day earlier, indicated 11.5m Americans had received one of the new ‘bivalent’ boosters so far, or around 5.3 per cent of the 212 million Americans who were eligible to receive the shots.

The US government in July contracted to pay Pfizer and Moderna around US$4.9bn for 171 million bivalent booster shots.

Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, said complaints that the new shots, which are meant to protect against all the Sars-Cov2 variants including Omicron, weren’t working were misleading.

“We‘ll likely see more of these. It doesn’t mean vaccines failed. The primary goal of vaccination – to reduce severity of illness – has not changed,” she said on social media on Friday.

Florida’s move to restrict Covid-19 vaccine coverage came after similar moves by jurisdictions in Europe, where Covid-19 boosters are no longer offered to healthy individuals under 65 and 50 in Norway and Denmark, respectively.

In the US, the CDC recommends a primary series of Covid-19 vaccination for everyone aged six months and up, boosters for those aged 12 and over.

Before the bivalent booster rollout began on 4th September, after the two shots received “emergency use authorisation” from the Food and Drug Administration, fewer than half of eligible Americans had received their first booster.

The Supreme Court in January overturned a Biden administration directive to compel all workers to receive the Covid-19 vaccines, reflecting efforts throughout the world to link Covid-19 vaccination to employment, education, in-person commerce, and freedom of movement.

Elite US universities, including Harvard and Stanford, and some healthcare settings have kept booster mandates for students, including the latest bivalent booster, a source of ongoing legal action and debate.

“Hey university presidents and trustees — how many cardiac deaths are acceptable as collateral damage?”, asked Todd Zywicki, as law professor at George Mason university, on social media soon after the Florida research was released.

Florida, which has a population around 21.5 million, stood out among US states in its response to Covid-19, ending lockdowns and mandates in early 2020, and last year banning ‘vaccine passports’, which were widely used across the US, throughout the state, to protect the unvaccinated against discrimination.

A federal appeals court upheld the state’s vaccine passport ban on Friday after a challenge by Norwegian cruise lines, based in Miami, which had sought to enforce vaccination among passengers.