Since Ron DeSantis chose Dr. Joseph Ladapo to be Florida Surgeon General in September 2021, we’ve been treated to an endless parade of stories about what an absolute ass the state’s top medical official is. His chief qualification seems to have been that, like DeSantis, Ladapo constantly downplayed the seriousness of COVID-19 and opposed the vaccine on political grounds. Ladapo was a member of the crazy anti-science group “America’s Frontline Doctors,” which promoted the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for COVID (it is not), and he stubbornly refused to wear a mask while meeting with a state legislator who told him her immune system was compromised while she was undergoing cancer treatment. He advised young men to avoid the COVID vaccine — and then later the booster. Then we found out that his first recommendation against the vaccine was based on data that he had “personally altered” in an already-dubious study.
Quite a doctor, yes indeed; he even allegedly doctored research.
Yesterday, Politico — which broke the story of Ladapo’s surgery on the vaccine study earlier this year — reported on the turmoil Ladapo has wrought at the University of Florida, where he was rushed into a tenured professorship at the university’s medical school while he was also being confirmed as surgeon general. It seems that granting him tenure in just three weeks, without undergoing the usual reviews that are needed to get tenure, led the university to overlook a few problems in his academic qualifications, if you can imagine that.
On paper, the story notes, Ladapo looked like a real catch, with his medical degree from Harvard and research appointments at New York University and UCLA.
Professors had anticipated Ladapo would bring at least $600,000 in grant funding to his new appointment from his previous job at UCLA. That didn’t happen. They expected he would conduct research on internal medicine, as directed by his job letter. Instead, he edited science research manuscripts, gave a guest lecture for grad students and wrote a memoir about his vaccine skepticism.
The story is full of fun quotes from anonymous UF professors who were surprised, disappointed, annoyed, and otherwise unhappy to see the university went along with giving Ladapo a $260,000 per annum tenured position that doesn’t appear to involve doing much work — on top of his $250,000 salary as surgeon general. Why, it’s almost as if Florida under DeSantis is becoming some kind of republic in which bananas are grown and patronage jobs are distributed to the leader’s pals.
One prof who spoke out of school said that “a lot of people” thought Ladapo “had been vetted by the College of Medicine like anyone who goes through the tenure process,” and that as a result, the University missed “a lot of red flags.” Another said Ladapo “has undoubtedly sullied the academic reputation of the University,” which the prof said detracts from the “incredible science and outstanding clinical work being done by real UF scientists and clinicians.”
Dr. Meera Sitharam, a computer science prof who’s president of the union that represents UF faculty, said she’s still wondering why Ladapo’s messing around with that COVID study data hasn’t resulted in a formal investigation, but has some suspicions:
“For some reason the medical and public health communities aren’t outright investigating him … probably because he isn’t operating as a scientist or a faculty member,” Sitharam said in an email. “He is operating in the murky world where public health is held hostage to political fortunes, which is in part because public trust in health related institutions has been deeply eroded.”
State Sen. Tina Polsky (D-Boca Raton) was among the few people who went on the record with Politico, largely because her job doesn’t depend on smiling nicely for the DeSantis mob. (Yes, she’s the state senator who couldn’t persuade Ladapo to wear a mask, just because she was undergoing chemo. So selfish of her.) She noted that during Ladapo’s confirmation hearings, he’d been pretty cagey about his work at UF, even when she asked follow-up questions:
“You know he never taught a class per se, and it was just his typical word salad answers for everything,” Polsky said. “It’s really frustrating.” […]
“It was very par for the course,” Polsky said. “This guy is a charlatan, he’s not looking out for anyone’s health and he’s going to campaign with DeSantis.”
It sure seems like nice not-work, if you can get it. Politico notes that Ladapo was initially supposed to be teaching classes and doing research in the medical school’s internal medicine division, but that
His most recent quarterly effort report from spring of this year, however, shows he now spends most of his time in an undefined administrative role.
“I don’t know what he is doing but it definitely isn’t research,” said a separate College of Medicine professor not authorized to speak.
He is nonetheless a very busy guy, working on a memoir about why he doesn’t trust vaccines and proposing a “series of seminars on the critical evaluation of scientific evidence,” which we assume means “finding bogus reasons to ignore science.” Nothing has yet come of that proposal. Plus, he’s given two entire guest lectures this year (one in January, another in July), and even showed up on campus to do that, so honestly, what more can anyone ask of him?
Besides, he’s been on Fox News a whole bunch of times this year, including multiple appearances in September and October where he urged viewers to avoid the latest COVID vaccine booster, even proclaiming in October that he wouldn’t “feel comfortable … recommending [the vaccine] to any living being on this planet.”
So that seems pretty educational, all right.
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