South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Ex-boss who called Ladapo unfit ID’d
UCLA supervisor who lauded doctor later opposed him becoming state surgeon general, records released by FDLE show
The same UCLA supervisor who gave her “enthusiastic support” to Dr. Joseph Ladapo when he applied for a professorship at the University of Florida College of Medicine last year also refused to recommend him for surgeon general three months later, public records show.
Documents released by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement four months after a public records request disclosed that Dr. Carol Mangione was the previously unnamed supervisor interviewed by state agents as part of Ladapo’s background check for his Senate confirmation hearings.
Mangione, chief of the division of general internal medicine and health services research at UCLA’s department of medicine, penned a two-page letter of recommendation in September for Ladapo. She noted his “outstanding research and clinical teaching accomplishments,” which led to his promotion to a tenured associate professorship in 2020 for his distinguished contributions to the division.
“In summary, Dr. Ladapo is an outstanding clinician scientist who is building a reputation as a nationally known researcher conducting important work in the area of evaluation of cardiovascular technologies and related areas of outcomes research for underserved populations,” Mangione wrote to the UF selection committee.
Her recommendation was reported publicly at the time of his confirmation hearings before the state Senate.
But when asked by FDLE agents in November and December if she would recommend Ladapo for surgeon general, the newly released records revealed that it was Mangione who told them: “No. In my opinion, the people of Florida would be better served by a Surgeon General who grounds his policy decisions and recommendations in the best scientific evidence rather than opinions.”
Ladapo was a controversial choice for Florida’s top health official because of his outspoken views on what he called “COVID mania” and COVID-19 prevention strategies that run contrary to the mainstream scientific and medical communities. His anti-lockdown, anti-mask and vaccine-skeptical opinions were published in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
Mangione said Ladapo’s opinions about COVID19 had upset his research and clinical colleagues and subordinates who believed they were “contrary to the best scientific evidence available” about the pandemic. She said they felt his views “violated the Hippocratic oath that physicians do no harm.”
Ladapo’s opinions “created stress and acrimony” among his co-workers and supervisors during the last year and a half of his employment, she said.
But, Mangione added that he “met all his contractual obligations for the position that he was hired to perform” and that forms the basis of her “otherwise satisfactory evaluation.”
She did not respond to requests for comment from the Orlando Sentinel.
Her views were taken into consideration along with her “enthusiastic” recommendation to UF when the Senate interviewed Ladapo in February before voting to confirm his nomination by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who himself has embraced some marginal views about COVID -19, masks and vaccines.
DeSantis has said he regretted not speaking out in 2020 against then-President Donald Trump’s temporary stay-at-home guidance to “stop the spread,” praised Sweden for keeping its country open, fought a federal vaccine mandate by President Joe Biden and opposed quarantining asymptomatic students.
Wh i l e Re p u b l i c a n s praised Ladapo, Democrats said he was unfit to serve in office, even walking out of one committee hearing in protest when he refused to give straight answers when questioned about whether he was vaccinated or believed vaccines were effective.
Ladapo’s dual roles
Ladapo serves dual roles as surgeon general, which includes running the Department of Health, and UF professor of medicine, with a combined state-paid salary of $437,000 a year. The Department of Health pays $250,000 toward that salary.
But it’s unclear whether he’s actually begun working at UF or begun his clinical research. The arrangement requires him to spend 80% of his time as surgeon general and 20% at UF.
Public records show Ladapo lives in a rental property in Clearwater Beach and is registered to vote in Pinellas County.
Questions about how he divides his time between Tallahassee and Gainesville, and how he manages to commute between those places and his home in Clearwater Beach were posed to both the Department of Health and UF Health, neither of which provided answers by the agreed upon deadline.
When contacted at the beginning of the year, UF Health officials said they were still involved in the “onboarding process.” As of April, a news report said he had not yet begun teaching or doing clinical rotations. By the time this story went to press, UF officials had no response.
During his Senate confirmation hearings, Ladapo said, “I couldn’t answer in terms of how much time I spend” at UF, and instead talked about how much time he spends raising his three sons, trying to be a good husband, conducting research and running the Department of Health. “I don’t get a lot of sleep as a result.”
Concerns about Ladapo grew after reports that he joined a group of other contrarian physicians calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building in the summer of 2020.
The group has peddled misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines, and several members have made millions selling hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug also used for some autoimmune diseases, and ivermectin, an anti-parasitic, to patients as a treatment against COVID, as reported by several media outlets.
Neither drug has been approved for use by the FDA against infection from COVID, and tests have proven hydroxychloroquine to have no therapeutic benefits against the disease.
Several UCLA professors opined on Twitter at the time. Dr. Russell Glenn Buhr, a pulmonary and critical care physician with UCLA Health and an assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine, criticized Ladapo’s “libertarian approach to public health for a communicable infectious disease” as a bad choice.
“Dr. Ladapo insists that public health leadership has been conflating science with politics but he’s the one ignoring best practices on infection control to please the governor,” Buhr wrote.
Recruitment by DeSantis
Harvard-educated Ladapo was making $319,000 a year as a tenured associate research professor at UCLA when he was approached by the governor’s office last summer after Surgeon General Scott Rivkees submitted his resignation.
Adrian Lukis, then the governor’s chief of staff, reached out to Ladapo via email on Aug. 24, a month before he was simultaneously appointed as surgeon general and hired by UF as a fully tenured professor, emails obtained by a public records request show.
In one text message, Ladapo pressed the governor’s office to act fast. “If you guys want me to join, then it would be extremely valuable to me for us to move quickly. I’ve got kids and they are about to start school here but no point doing that if we are going to be moving.”
Ladapo’s installation as surgeon general and recruitment by UF were both fast-tracked with the help of the governor’s staff, Mori Hosseini, a millionaire Volusia County developer and chair of the UF board of trustees, who is a major supporter of DeSantis, and UF Health officials.
UF administrators cut corners to make sure he got tenure upon being hired, a UF Senate investigative committee reported in March.
The committee found “irregularities” that “appeared to violate ... UF hiring regulations and procedures, particularly in the vital role faculty play in evaluating the qualifications of their peers.”
Since he was appointed surgeon general, Ladapo has pushed back against COVID -19 protection measures accepted by the scientific community and recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also instituted anti-mask rules, downplayed the importance of vaccines and testing and further restricted pandemic data to the public.
He’s had little to say outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, and when he was questioned during Senate confirmation hearings, he couldn’t answer non-COVID questions about other programs run by the Health Department, health care disparities among lower-income communities, HIV in Florida, hepatitis, and lack of health care access for the uninsured.
For the first several months on the job, Ladapo appeared with DeSantis at several news conferences to talk about easing COVID-19 restrictions and promoting monoclonal antibody treatment centers, but his public appearances have tapered
off dramatically in recent months.
On his second day as surgeon general, Ladapo issued a rule that took away schools’ authority to require masks or quarantine students exposed to COVID-19, leaving those decisions up to the parents. Under the rule, parents can send their kids to school “without restrictions or disparate treatment, so long as the student remains asymptomatic.”
And when Florida was experiencing another surge in COVID infections, Ladapo recommended less testing, especially for asymptomatic people.
“It’s really time for people to be living,” he continued. “To make the decisions they want regarding vaccination and to enjoy the fact that many people have natural immunity and to unwind this preoccupation with only COVID as determining the boundaries and constraints and possibilities of life.”
Since the start of the pandemic, 6.15 million Floridians have been infected with COVID-19, and 74,500 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University. According to the New York Times, cases in Florida have increased by 35% in the past two weeks while deaths have gone up 34%.
“In my opinion, the people of Florida would be better served by a Surgeon General who grounds his policy decisions and recommendations in the best scientific evidence rather than opinions.”
— Dr. Carol Mangione, who was Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s supervisor at UCLA, on why she would not recommend him for state surgeon general