Vaccines are the “new coke”? What???
Dr. Joseph Ladopo has an MD/PhD from Harvard. Harvard! And here he is yesterday taking over as Florida’s new surgeon general and offering his best medical advice to the great and wise people of the Sunshine State:
This is one of those cases where the context makes it worse. Ladopo—sorry, Doctor Ladopo—is expressly talking about vaccination when he tells the general public that their “intuition and sensibilities” are the best guide for understanding complex health decisions.
And he does this after a mini-rant in which he tries to cast doubt on the safety of vaccines by saying, hey, we don’t know everything about them yet.
Which is true! We don’t know everything about anything yet. That’s the thing about human knowledge: It is always expanding! Total certainty is an unobtainable philosophical construct.
I do not know totally, completely, for certain that the world won’t be invaded by aliens tomorrow at noon, eastern time. But I’m sure enough that it that I’m not heading to Vegas tonight to blow my life savings at the Rhino.
For a man of science to say that individual intuition matters more than data is ridiculous. For a doctor to talk this way about the COVID vaccines while 1,600 Americans are dying every day is unethical. For a doctor holding a public health position to do so for the benefit of his patron’s political aspirations borders on the criminal.
I suspect we’ve always been this crazy but we weren’t able to see the evidence of it every single day before so it spreads like wildfire. Combined with the overweening egotism that leads right wingers to believe they are the smartest people in the world, it’s deadly.
Update: Oh my God, he is a monster!
Florida’s top public health official was asked to leave a state Senator’s office this week after refusing to don a mask in her office.
Sen. Tina Polsky, who was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in August, asked state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and his two legislative aides to leave her office after Ladapo refused to comply with her request to put on a mask.
“I told him I had a serious medical condition,” said Polsky, who will begin radiation therapy treatment for cancer next week.
Polsky said that Ladapo had requested to meet with her in Tallahassee this week; he was making the rounds visiting several Senators who will be asked in the upcoming Session to confirm him.
Polsky said he offered to go outside when she asked him to put the mask on, but she declined.
“I don’t want to go outside,” Polsky said she told Ladapo after he made the offer. “I want you to sit in my office and talk to you.”
Polsky said there was a brief back-and-forth, and then she finally asked whether there was a reason he couldn’t wear a mask.
“He just smiles and doesn’t answer. He’s very smug,” Polsky recalled. “And I told him several times, `I have this very serious medical condition.’ And he said, ‘That’s OK,’ like it basically has nothing to do with what we are talking about.”
Eventually, Polsky said she asked Ladapo to leave her office, which he agreed to do, she said. But the Senator said before going, Ladapo remarked, “Sometimes I try to reason with unreasonable people for fun.”
Weesam Khoury, a Department of Health spokesperson, confirmed Ladapo’s comment, but said it was not directed to the Senator.
“Dr. Ladapo is committed to meeting with members of the Legislature regardless of their party affiliation to discuss policy, even when they do not agree on the subject at hand,” Khoury said in an email. “Meetings between highly regarded and intelligent, elected and appointed officials happen all the time, and it is disappointing you don’t hear about them more — but it is probably because the only time they get reported is when a genuine meeting turns into a media headline expected from a gossip column.”
Khoury added, misspelling Polsky’s name, that she and Ladapo “are saddened to hear about Sen. Polsky’s recent diagnosis and wish her well.”
Polsky said she is taking all precautions she can to protect herself from getting infected with COVID-19. A positive test means a delay in her treatment, and she doesn’t want to take any risks.