“These vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings,” Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said of the vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech in an official bulletin on Wednesday, which called the Food and Drug Administration’s assessment of the shots “inadequate.” 

Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s center for biologics evaluation and research, cited animal studies with mRNA technology over the last decade that he said show no evidence of genotoxicity, which damages genetic information in a cell and causes cell mutations. He also cited ongoing surveillance of more than 1 billion doses of mRNA coronavirus vaccines that have been administered to humans globally, with “nothing to indicate harm to the genome, such as increased rates of cancers.”