Florida’s idiotic and politically motivated move to eliminate inoculation requirements for all the state’s schoolchildren will kill kids there and elsewhere. What’s next for the Sunshine State, getting rid of a clean public water supply?
The rejection of modern and accepted science and medicine comes from the surgeon general of a state likening vaccine requirements to slavery. That was the scene in Florida this week as Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced he wants to scrap the shots for measles, mumps, and rubella and everything else: “All of them. All of them. Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
Florida is the first (and hopefully only) state in the Union to move away from this simple and lifesaving policy.
Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis and his minions has certainly made plenty of bizarre policy choices that have taken direct aim at the state’s own quality of life and economic standing, but at least many of those have been mostly confined to the state itself. When it undertook efforts to unilaterally criminalize immigrants and punish both workers and those who hired them last year, it quickly torpedoed parts of its own farm and construction sectors in ways that could be pretty lasting, for example.
Unfortunately, Florida’s horrible decisions when it comes to public health and vaccinations will not be confined only to that state. Large populations of unvaccinated children congregating in school settings is practically the perfect vector for infections like measles — which is incredibly contagious, to the point of being multiple times more contagious than something like COVID — to both spread unchecked and eventually evolve into new variants for which we all might have more limited immunity, even those who have been vaccinated.
Getting rid of vaccination requirements that have been standard around the country for decades is a grave error whose effects Florida will undoubtedly export to the rest of the country.
This is the kind of moment where the federal government would step in to ensure that the nation’s public health as a whole is being safeguarded. Unfortunately, the current federal government and the public health bureaucracy specifically, has no interest in meeting this crucial mandate, and in fact has operated effectively as if it were on the side not of the public, but the pathogens that it has been created to combat.
That was only reaffirmed yesterday as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccination opponent, went before the Senate Finance Committee and defended his choice to jettison the science, force out the CDC director, shift the agency’s guidance and otherwise go to bat for his dangerous conspiratorial beliefs.
Both RFK and Ladapo tend to couch their ideological crusade in the language of providing choice, with individuals having the ultimate say on what happens with their bodies and parents on what goes in their children. Setting aside the irony of that rationalization in a state with a near-total abortion ban, what this movement really is about is taking choice away.
People who want to get the vaccine will be hard-pressed to do so under current guidance; parents who want to have their kids grow up in an environment where they’re at lower risk of infectious disease will be forced to send them to schools where others are unvaccinated.
This will cause children to die unnessrlaary. And they will die in ways that are not just theoretically preventable, but that we have managed to actively prevent almost entirely for decades now in the case of diseases like measles, polio, whooping cough, and others. That will be on RFK and Ladapo.
