Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced Wednesday that the state would soon remove all vaccine mandates, including ones for schoolchildren. This is a wild development in the vaccination story and one I certainly did not see coming. I figured we would see an end to the covid mandates but not in my wildest dreams did I imagine a state would remove all mandates across the board.
This is a tricky situation because we are putting all vaccines in a bucket and saying that if one does something good or bad, then they must all be good or bad. Trump’s reaction was to say “I think we have to be careful. You have some vaccines that are so amazing. The Polio vaccine I think is amazing.” and I think he’s right. The Polio vaccine is amazing in that if you get Polio, that has a life long damaging result to your health. I remember my parents talking about friends that ended up in iron lungs because of the disease.
But we are also vaccinating against chicken pox, a disease that makes you stay home from school for 3 days watching Green Acres and Hogan’s Heroes. (At least that was my experience) We are also vaccinating against Hep B in infants, a sexually transmitted disease that as long as the mother is tested for it, the baby has no chance of contracting.
When I first went to school almost 50 years ago, I was fully vaccinated with 6 shots. Today, if you follow the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule, your kid will get a whopping 72 vaccines in their first 18 years of life with roughly half of those in the first 18 months.
In my opinion, vaccines are a product and should be treated like any other product in the marketplace but vaccines are different. The companies that make vaccines are protected against lawsuits for damages caused by their product so there is no incentive to make sure vaccines aren’t causing long term damage. I can’t say for sure that vaccines are causing damage to our children but what I can say for sure is as the recommended number of vaccines have increased, the amount of chronic diseases in our children like autism, asthma, ADD, and others has gone up. Maybe that’s a correlation without causation, but maybe it isn’t.
States have always been the “Laboratories of Liberty” where each state can set different rules and then the rest of us can watch and see what happens. I think Florida is about to embark on a massive study that in a decade or 2, we are going to be able to look and see what happens. I wish them well.
