Maverick proclamations
[W]ith an entirely preventable outbreak of measles spreading across Florida, medical experts are questioning if quackery really has become official health policy in the nation’s third most-populous state.
As the highly contagious disease raged in a Broward county elementary school, [Florida Surgeon General Joseph] Ladapo, a politically appointed acolyte of Florida’s far-right governor Ron DeSantis, wrote to parents telling them it was perfectly fine for parents to continue to send in their unvaccinated children.
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Ladapo’s advice deferring to parents or guardians [on] a decision about school attendance directly contradicts the official recommendation of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which calls for a 21-day period of quarantine for anybody without a history of prior infection or immunization.
It’s not a situation in which the glories of free choice should trump medical expertise. Choice is a good thing, ceteris paribus, but avoiding a dangerous disease is an even better thing.
It is also in keeping with Ladapo’s previous maverick proclamations about vaccines that health professionals say pose an unacceptable danger to the health of Florida residents. They include official guidance to shun mRNA Covid-19 boosters based on easily disprovable conspiracy theories that the shots alter human DNA and can potentially cause cancer – “scientific nonsense” in the view of Dr Ashish Jha, a former White House Covid response coordinator.
Yes but you see they’re all in on the plot. Just ask Naomi Wolff.
Reporting false information, incidentally, is something Ladapo is familiar with himself. He was found to have personally manipulated data in a 2022 study of Covid-19 vaccines to wrongly assert they posed an elevated risk of cardiac illness or death in young men.
Shouldn’t that get him disqualified? At a bare minimum?
Ladapo has been hailed a “superstar” by DeSantis, who sidelined then dumped his predecessor Scott Rivkees for contradicting the governor’s position on social distancing and face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ladapo became a vocal cheerleader of the governor’s anti-mask, vaccine and lockdown decrees; and was a prominent member of Frontline Doctors of America, a fringe cluster of radical physicians that pushed ineffective medicines such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.
Oh well. It’s not the most populous state in the country. Texas and California have more.
Further on the subject of Wolff, I recall somewhere (can’t remember if here or elsewhere) someone pointing out that Wolff destroyed her reputation as an academic, researcher, and serious writer so badly that there was literally nowhere for her to turn to earn money other than the fringe. They mentioned several other examples of the same phenomenon. Some were clearly grifters, while others seemed to actually become radicalised and loopy as a result. -maybe a reaction to the rejection they had (quite rightly) experienced.
Well, there you go, forcing your colonialist oppression on free people by insisting that the health of the children is necessarily good. How ableist of you, and hateful towards the liberty of children to get permanent effects of encephalitis, or to die, if they want to!
I wonder what Ladapo and DeSantis think about Trump, anthropogenic global warming, climate change, and the variation in governments’ response.to Covid-19. Could be a tough call.
If the measles epidemic is allowed to run its full course freely, Florida may well become a somewhat less populous state.
A significant number of antivaxxers think it’s a Good Thing to have their kids “naturally” exposed to measles – e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie%27s_Marvelous_Measles, which was written
Those diseases are quite benign – until they kill someone. But what do they think is the reason they are benign in industrialized countries? A lot of it IS vaccines.
Also, I suspect many of BigPharma would prefer not spending a lot of time on vaccines; they are not big money makers. They would rather deal with treating diseases like diabetes, AIDS, heart diseases, or asthma, all of which tons of people have and need medications to stay alive another day.
Perhaps if the anti-vaxxers would do a little more research instead of just passing on polemics from their internet bubble, they might learn a thing…or two.
Sadly, many of my colleagues in my Environmental Science doctorate were anti-vaxxers. The young ones, though, not the older students, which made up a substantial percentage of the student population. The youngsters were almost routinely anti-vax (and loved RFK Jr). The older students, like me, all remembered a world where polio and other not so grand diseases rammed through their schools.