The Guardian reports:
Shortly before Joseph Ladapo was sworn in as Florida’s surgeon general in 2022, the New Yorker ran a short column welcoming the vaccine-skeptic doctor to his new role, and highlighting his advocacy for the use of leeches in public health.
It was satire of course, a teasing of the Harvard-educated physician for his unorthodox medical views, which include a steadfast belief that life-saving Covid shots are the work of the devil, and that opening a window is the preferred treatment for the inhalation of toxic fumes from gas stoves.
But now, with 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, 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.
“The surgeon general is Ron DeSantis’s lapdog, and says whatever DeSantis wants him to say,” said Dr Robert Speth, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at south Florida’s Nova Southeastern University with more than four decades of research experience.
“His statements are more political than medical and that’s a horrible disservice to the citizens of Florida. He’s somebody whose job is to protect public health, and he’s doing the exact opposite.”
Ladapo’s advice deferring to parents or guardians 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 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.
Meanwhile, with measles having been eradicated in the US since 2000, the disease’s resurgence, paired with Ladapo’s latest misadventure, has prompted a new round of mocking commentary. Florida: Come for the Sunshine, Leave With the Measles, opined the Orlando Sentinel; “Measles? So On-brand for Florida’s Descent Into the 1950s”, was the take of the Tampa Bay Times.
Are people ok with their kids getting measles? Maybe. I don’t know why. I had them as a kid and I still remember it. It’s awful. There’s absolutely no reason to put your child through it or anyone else for that matter, when we have a safe and effective vaccine that’s been around for 60 years!!!
The backlash prompted the Florida department of health to publish “clarifying information” this week, in which it insisted that the stay-at-home recommendation had in fact been given to parents at Manatee Bay elementary school, and attempted to blame the media for “reporting false information and politicizing this outbreak”.
Department officials repeated the claim in a subsequent statement.
“The media has continued to peddle the narrative that Dr Ladapo has defied science in his recent letter. In reality, he has used available data and immunity rates to drive policy decisions impacting Manatee Bay Elementary,” the deputy press secretary Grant Kemp said.
“97% of students at Manatee Bay Elementary have received at least one dose of the MMR immunization. Outbreaks are occurring in multiple states, and the national immunization rate for measles is less than 92%.”
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.
To Speth, and numerous other medical experts, Ladapo’s risky succession of positions denying even the most obvious benefits of immunization and vaccination is a symptom of a wider political assault by the right wing, which carries deadly potential.
Its origins, Speth believes, lie in a long-discredited study by the disgraced British former doctor Andrew Wakefield falsely tying the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, but which was enthusiastically embraced by anti-vaxxers and other extremists in the US.
“The Wakefield study was a gross fraud, yet today up to 25% of our population believes it, and opportunistic politicians seize on the sentiment to tell people what they want to hear about the danger of vaccines,” he said.
“Republicans are at war with medical science, and that’s a horrible tragedy. But I feel like Cassandra, talking about the public health threat. We’re going to start seeing a lot more children die of infectious diseases that could be prevented if they were vaccinated.”
[…]
“What’s so sad about it is it’s completely preventable,” said state senator Tina Polsky, who has been one of Ladapo’s staunchest critics…
“To pretend that the vaccine is unnecessary to eradicate measles is completely illogical, because that’s the reason it’s been gone from our country. It will have some devastating outcomes, it’s going to scare a lot of people, and kids are going to be out of school, which has its own negative outcomes.”
Honestly, these people won’t be happy until they bring back polio so they can say the vaccine didn’t work.
My question remains: what the hell is up with DeSantis? He’s an educated man. And yes, he was running for president on the “woke” platform but come on, that’s over now and he’ll have some repair work to do if he wants to run in 2025, his biggest problem being that people think he’s a robot. Does this nonsense really help him with that?
Maybe it’s just stubbornness or … maybe he’s a true believer in which case he’s even more dangerous than Trump who is just an opportunistic ignoramus.
Meanwhile, you might want to think twice about that Florida vacation.