19 Facts About Joseph Ladapo

Joseph Abiodun Ladapo was born on December 16,1978 and is a Nigerian-American doctor serving as the surgeon general of Florida since 2021.

Joseph Ladapo is best known for his opposition to COVID-19 mitigation measures, and promotion of COVID-19 misinformation, for which he has been rebuked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Joseph Ladapo served as a professor of medicine at New York University before being tenured at the University of California, Los Angeles, prior to his appointment to his current position by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Joseph Ladapo has opposed gender-affirming care and counseling for transgender and nonbinary minors.

Joseph Ladapo was born in Nigeria, the son of a microbiologist.

Joseph Ladapo immigrated to the United States at age five with his family.

Joseph Ladapo earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry from Wake Forest University in 2000, and was a varsity track athlete.

Joseph Ladapo completed clinical training in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.

Joseph Ladapo received tenure at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he was a researcher, seeing patients about one day per week.

Around early 2020, Joseph Ladapo began to write op-eds for The Wall Street Journal on the emerging COVID-19 pandemic, notwithstanding a lack of specialization in infectious diseases, and gained prominence as a skeptic of mainstream consensus on prevention and treatment.

Later that year, Joseph Ladapo signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for reaching COVID-19 herd immunity by the fringe notion of "focused protection", where the less vulnerable people were allowed to be infected.

Joseph Ladapo's op-eds caught the interest of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Joseph Ladapo repealed quarantine rules for schoolchildren exposed to COVID-19 as his first executive action.

In March 2022, Joseph Ladapo recommended that healthy children in Florida not be vaccinated against COVID-19; thus, Florida became the first state to contradict relevant guidelines by the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Experts cited by Joseph Ladapo disagreed with his stance and accused him of cherry-picking their work.

On March 10,2023, Joseph Ladapo was publicly rebuked by the CDC and FDA for disseminating vaccine misinformation in response to a letter he wrote to the agencies that had misinterpreted data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

Since 2022, Joseph Ladapo has focused on opposing transgender health care, accusing professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society of being politically motivated to support such causes.

Joseph Ladapo opposes gender-affirming care and counseling, hormonal therapies, related medications for transgender and nonbinary children and teenagers, and social-transition tools such as pronoun and name changes.

When Joseph Ladapo was being considered at the University of Florida for tenure, he indicated that he would bring in grants, initiate new research, as well teaching.