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As an elementary school in Florida, roughly 20 miles west of Fort Lauderdale, deals with several measles cases, common sense suggests the state’s surgeon general would take the opportunity to urge families to vaccinate their children.
As the NBC affiliate in Miami reported, that’s not quite what’s happening.
The Florida Department of Health released a letter Tuesday from Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo emphasizing how contagious measles is and how effective the MMR vaccine is in preventing the disease, but Ladapo did not urge parents to immunize their children.
The letter did note the protections that come with vaccinations, but it didn't take the obvious, affirmative step of actually pushing local families to do the responsible thing.
Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease expert at Florida International University, referencing Ladapo’s statement, told the local NBC outlet, “The letter doesn’t explicitly say we need to get more people vaccinated, and that is a key point that families need to know.”
Others in the field were also critical. [Update: Ben Hoffman, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told The Washington Post Florida’s guidance "flies in the face of long-standing and widely accepted public health guidance for measles, which can result in severe complications, including death."]
What’s more, as a Mother Jones report noted, because of the extreme contagiousness of measles and its potential health effects in the case of a school outbreak, the CDC recommends that “unvaccinated children, including those who have a medical or other exemption to vaccination, must be excluded from school through 21 days after their most recent exposure.”
Ladapo’s statement, however, appears to go in a different direction. “[D]ue to the high immunity rate in the community, as well as the burden on families and educational cost of healthy children missing school, [the Florida Department of Health] is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”
All of this comes just a month after The Washington Post reported on Ladapo calling for a halt to using mRNA coronavirus vaccines, “contending that the shots could contaminate patients’ DNA — a claim that has been roundly debunked by public health experts, federal officials and the vaccine companies.”
Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s public health school and the expert who led the Biden White House’s national coronavirus response team, told the Post, “We’ve seen this pattern from Dr. Ladapo that every few months he raises some new concern and it quickly gets debunked. This idea of DNA fragments — it’s scientific nonsense.”
Making matters worse is the frequency with which “scientific nonsense” has become the norm in Florida’s surgeon general’s office. Revisiting our earlier coverage, Ladapo has rejected vaccination guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and faced accusations about misleading the public. He’s embarrassed professional colleagues with his antics and urged the public not to trust scientists, physicians, and other public health officials.
Despite the seriousness of the pandemic, Ladapo also questioned the efficacy of Covid vaccines, denounced vaccine requirements, referenced unsubstantiated conspiracy theories to argue against the vaccines, and encouraged Floridians to “stick with their intuition,” as opposed to following the guidance of those who actually know what they’re talking about.
We’re occasionally reminded, however, that his misjudgments are not limited to Covid.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.