Florida is getting rid of some of its vaccination requirements, and the governor is asking the legislature to abolish all of them. If the measles and polio vaccines are no longer required, more people will die of measles, and polio might conceivably make a comeback.
“Measles vaccination has saved 94 million lives globally since 1974. Of those, 92 million were children,” reports Our World in Data. But measles vaccination rates have fallen in the U.S., and as a result, an unvaccinated child died this year in Texas.
NPR reports:
Florida’s governor said he’ll be asking the state legislature to repeal a statute that requires children to receive vaccines for polio, diphtheria, measles and mumps before entering school. If it passes, Florida will be the first in the nation to eliminate all vaccine mandates for children and adults.
Other vaccines, including those for chickenpox, hepatitis B and strep infections, are mandated by the state health department, as opposed to Florida’s legislature. The state’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo [pictured above] said his department will soon issue rules repealing those requirements.
“People have a right to make their own decisions,” said Ladapo, who joined Gov. Ron DeSantis for the announcement on Wednesday. “If you don’t want to put whatever vaccines in your body, God bless you. And I hope you make an informed decision. And that’s how it should be.”… In announcing the plan to end all vaccine requirements in Florida, he said: “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
Public health and child health professionals condemned the move. Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease expert at Florida International University said, “This will cause havoc.”
“It will cause problems for funding free vaccines for the impoverished and issues with vaccines to the rest of us due to insurance-related issues,” Marty said. “It is clearly against empirical evidence of what is safest for individual children.”
After vaccination rates fell, whooping cough cases jumped 14-fold in Michigan, resulting in a few deaths. Many more people are getting the disease, which makes you feel awful, as if you are coughing your lungs out. For babies, the disease can be deadly. “Cases of pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough, have jumped 14-fold since 2023, alarming state health officials. As of Dec. 8, there were 1,578 confirmed cases of pertussis in Michigan, compared to 110 for the full year of 2023,” notes Scott Gottlieb, who served as FDA Commissioner in the first Trump administration.
Florida officials opposed to vaccination requirements aren’t making the false claim that vaccines cause autism. Vaccines do not cause autism. “Vaccination in general, the MMR vaccine specifically, thimerosal in vaccines, mercury in vaccines—none of it is associated with autism across cohort studies,” notes a science writer, attaching a helpful summary of studies about this, “Across Cohort Studies, Vaccination is Unrelated To Autism.”
“Vaccines are completely, utterly, totally, and entirely unrelated to the development of autism,” notes Steve Stewart-Williams, who writes about psychology and science. Stewart-Williams cites research such as the scholarly article, “Vaccines are not associated with autism: An evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies.” As that article notes, a large amount of research refutes the false claim that vaccines cause autism.
Ladapo’s claim that vaccine requirements are “slavery” is stupid hyperbolic nonsense. All states currently have vaccine requirements, even states that rank highly on indexes of economic and social freedom, such as New Hampshire, Arizona, and Nevada. Requiring people to get vaccinated is less a restriction on their freedom than other societal requirements, like paying taxes or having to shovel your sidewalk after a snowstorm. Getting vaccinated takes less time than getting and renewing your driver’s license and motor vehicle registration.
Getting vaccinated not only protects the person vaccinated against the disease, but keeps the disease from spreading to vulnerable people who can’t get vaccinated because they have allergies or are immunocompromised. It also protects infants who haven’t been vaccinated yet.
When vaccination rates fall, a deadly disease like polio can make a comeback and kill or paralyze many people. Lower vaccination rates can destroy the herd immunity that protects the community as a whole.
