I like you, but you said this, "Her retarded family is from Indiana." That's ragging on a family who just lost a child, and I'm not supporting that.
This is the problem with having a Republican president or Governor who's anti vaccines
So far, the measles outbreak in Florida is small, but state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo isn't bothering with the science that would keep it that way.
www.latimes.com
Before the measles vaccine was developed in 1963, outbreaks that occurred every two to three years were
killing 2.6 million people worldwide a year, most of them children. Others developed pneumonia, or suffered brain injury and deafness from
measles-associated encephalitis.
So it’s especially disheartening to observe the new
measles cases in Florida —
eight and growing at last count. It’s not the biggest measles outbreak in recent years, but the ho-hum attitude of the state’s top public health official, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, is deeply troubling.
The problem in quelling this outbreak, though, is the lackadaisical attitude of Ladapo, who has earned notoriety by promoting COVID-19 vaccine skepticism. Last month, he called for a
halt to using mRNA vaccines to fight COVID-19. Still it was shocking that in the midst of the outbreak, he ignored the public health standard set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which calls for isolating unvaccinated people for 21 days after possible exposure, and is allowing parents to decide whether to send their unvaccinated kids to school. He didn’t even encourage parents of unvaccinated children to get a quick, preventive dose.
It’s a reprehensible endangerment of students at the affected school and the broader community, including babies too young to have been vaccinated. Children with compromised immune systems are at particular risk because they cannot safely be vaccinated.
A vaccine effectiveness rate of 96% is superb, but it still means that about 4% of children don’t get immunity from their shots. That’s why public health officials rely on
“herd immunity,” meaning enough members of a community have been vaccinated to keep measles at bay. The reason more unvaccinated children haven’t been sickened in this country is because there are enough parents who do the right thing, vaccinate their kids and thus protect the other kids around them. But that may not be the case for long. Vaccine skeptics like Ladapo have been chipping away at Americans’ confidence in vaccines in recent years.
Outbreaks can happen even in a community with high vaccination rates — which is the case in this Florida school. But widespread vaccination — and proper isolation protocols — keep them small. Measles is not a minor inconvenience of childhood, and Ladapo’s let’s-downplay-the-science approach is not the way to protect the health of Florida’s children.