In my time on this Earth, I have learned a few lessons. One is that even if you’re the smartest or the best at what you do, that doesn’t guarantee that you will get the best job or make the most money. Sometimes, it goes to the stupidest, the most craven, the person most willing to kiss ass.
How else to explain Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s criminally negligent surgeon general? Now, I’m sure he would want to be referred to as “Dr.” Joseph Ladapo, but you have to earn that. He needs to take his sorry butt back to Grenada or whatever Caribbean speck of dirt he went to and paid $47 (American) to purchase a medical degree.
Ladapo is part of an incredible medical phenomenon. Through willful ignorance, outright lying, and political pandering in a situation that could lead to the unnecessary death of many children, he’s helping to bring back a disease that had been completely eradicated in the United States. Not only had nobody died from this disease in the past 20 years; nobody had even gotten the disease.
I don’t want to hear that there isn’t a clear medical consensus on vaccinations, because there is. Vaccines work and they work incredibly well. The only people who will argue otherwise are the political nutjobs who play to the Incel/4Chan/Q-Anon crowd. And Robert Kennedy Jr.
You don’t get to call yourself a doctor and then question proven, life-saving science just because your loser of a boss wants to score political points with his brain-dead electorate.
A nuclear engineer couldn’t walk into a meeting of the Union of Concerned Scientists and say, “Y’know, all this fission stuff is open to debate.”
They would beat his ass with slide rules and tell him to go get his money back from whatever “college” he went to in Grenada.
Ladapo, like way too many other idiots, ascribes to the 1998 study by a former British physician named Andrew Wakefield who used a combination of fraudulent data to concoct the preposterous claim that the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) is linked to autism.
That’s 100% false. It was debunked almost immediately and has been constantly debunked over the past quarter-century, but there are people out there who read just enough stuff on the internet to make them stupid. (See: Robert Kennedy Jr. voters.) Oh yeah, the reason Wakefield is a former doctor is that they took away his medical license because of what he did.
In most states, it’s legal for a parent to deny his/her child potential life-saving vaccines. There are lots and lots of dumb things that are legal. This is America. Parents can risk their kids’ lives as they worship at the Altar of Morons. But the key here is that they have zero right to risk the health of other people’s kids.
But that’s what Ladapo is doing. He’s telling parents that it’s their choice if they want to send their unvaccinated kids to school. In a letter, he wrote that it is “normally recommended” that infected children stay home until the end of the incubation period, which he arbitrarily pegged as March 7. Then he spun out of whole cloth this: “Due to the high immunity rate in our community, as well as the burden on families and educational cost of healthy children missing school,” he had decided that it’s OK for parents to send their unvaccinated kids to school.
Real doctors all over Florida and the country, as a whole, are stunned by that decision. Measles is so contagious that nine out of every 10 unvaccinated people who come in contact with it are going to contract the illness. One of every five who get measles will be hospitalized. One in 20 will develop pneumonia. (The children who die from measles generally die due to the pneumonia.) Some people will suffer encephalitis, a swelling of the brain that can lead to permanent brain damage.
But that’s OK, send your kid to school. We don’t want to inconvenience you with scientific facts and questions of parental responsibility.
Ladapo actually comes close to the truth with one of his assertions, but it’s just close enough to be deadly. It’s rather impressive that, in a state that is backward enough to elect Ron DeSantis and house Donald Trump, the immunization rate for measles is almost 90%.
However, with something as virulent and spreadable as measles, real doctors will tell you that it should be 95% or higher to cut down the risk of an outbreak.
Unfortunately, there are some like-minded (non-)thinkers like that Arizona and there have recently been cases of measles reported in Maricopa County. Look, we’re all going to die, but how tragic would it be for a kid to die from something that is 100% preventable?
I’m tired of MAGA people and their government sycophants trying to pass off the shunning of societal responsibility as some sort of personal liberty. You want to live off the grid, eschew vaccinations, live free or die? Go out in the desert, try to live off the land, and teach your kids that Jesus had blond hair and blue eyes. Then starve to death like that family in Colorado did a couple months ago. Mathematically speaking, that would add to the herd immunity.
