The state's surgeon general grants parents permission to send unvaccinated children to school during a measles outbreak, risking their health and that of others.
With a brief memo, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has subverted a public health standard that's long kept measles outbreaks under control.
On Feb. 20, as measles spread through Manatee Bay Elementary in South Florida, Ladapo sent parents a letter granting them permission to send unvaccinated children to school amid the outbreak.
The Department of Health "is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance," wrote Ladapo, who was appointed to head the agency by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose name is listed above Ladapo's in the letterhead.
Ladapo's move contradicts advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"This is not a parental rights issue," said Scott Rivkees, Florida's former surgeon general who is now a professor at Brown University. "It's about protecting fellow classmates, teachers, and members of the community against measles, which is a very serious and very transmissible illness."
If an unvaccinated person enters a room where a person with measles had been an hour previously, there's a 90% chance the unvaccinated person gets infected. It's crazy.
Imagine wishing death on innocent children while being convinced you still somehow have any kind of moral high ground over anti-vaxxers (or anyone, for that matter)..
This feels like culling the herd with extra steps. Like... Someone smart was like... Hey, we need to get rid of dumb people. How do we do that? Oh, I know... Make a place where the dumb people really want to go by relaxing laws that protect people from being dumb. Then, we'll make the dummies believe they're the smart and patriotic ones for moving there. When they all wind up in this insane distopia, let's just... Infect them with measles and tell them it's fine! As long as Facebook and a bunch of weirdo authority figures reinforce their dumb feelings of being smart, in the end, we won't even need a genocidal dictator or gas chambers! The dummies will do the job for us!
I mean... it's just a thought. That's not really what's happening...