Florida’s controversial surgeon general is drawing criticism for his handling of an elementary school’s measles outbreak, telling parents of unvaccinated children it is their choice whether their students attend class — a contravention of federal guidelines calling for their mandatory exclusion.
Dr. Joseph Ladapo, nationally known for his outspoken skepticism toward the COVID-19 vaccine, sent a letter this week to parents at Manatee Bay Elementary School near Fort Lauderdale after six students contracted the highly contagious and potentially deadly virus. Such outbreaks are rare in the United States, though reported cases have spiked from 58 for all of 2023 to 35 already this year.
The letter notes that when a school has a measles outbreak, it is “normally recommended” that unvaccinated students who haven’t previously had the disease be kept home for three weeks “because of the high likelihood” they will be infected.
You are right that the antivaxxers are just fucking around and finding out, but for scientists learning about how such people react to finding out will be really interesting when the disease inevitably sweeps through Florida schools. Also it’ll be a good model for the loss of herd immunity.
I’m not opitimistic that Floridians will change, but what I’m really curious about is if their government will decide to do anything when the worst happens. It reminds me about how people were big into crypto and NFTs and stuff because they are unregulated, only to slowly learn that we have regulations for a reason. How many children (who would likely become their own constituents) are Florida republicans willing to sacrifice to earn some political points with crazy people?
Except Florida will fudge the numbers, and nobody will even know anything beyond “excess deaths”, unless they take to hiding even those. Also, I still think “experiment” bespeaks of some intentionality, while simply being watchful and mindful of one’s surroundings does not raise to that high bar. But you are correct: mindful people can learn from just about anything (“the sun has risen today, again, mark that on the recordings please, that is one more day in which that observation has occurred”).
Anyway, I am giving you a hard time, but yeah I see what you mean: they wanted to lose herd immunity, so here goes nothing…
And no, I doubt the Florida government is willing to do much of anything at all, and the federal government is incapable. The Supreme Court is distracted, the upcoming Democrat Presidential candidate won’t win Florida no matter what and the Republican Presidential one is likely to just egg the situation on further, and Congress hasn’t even passed a budget yet, almost into the third month of calendar year 2024, but remember that this is the sixth month into the fiscal one - that’s right, HALF THE YEAR HAS PASSED already without one yet, and they STILL are threatening another showdown when they come back from their weeks-long vacation. And even with such gridlock on all sides, the state government of Florida that is not struggling with a 2-party system at all still cannot hold a candle to the high level of functioning that even our entirely inept and broken (and corrupt) national government ends up having to do (see e.g. the Disney situation, making the state lose out on a BILLION dollars, and that is only one of the various ENORMOUS disasters that is just CURRENTLY going on in that state - the migrant worker crisis is another ofc, and there are far more besides).
This is why I say that this “experiment” of seeing whether and how democracy itself will work as a viable government strategy is currently underway. And so far the grim reaper seems to be winning:-(.