Florida’s surgeon general did no research before moving to nix vaccine mandates as cases of preventable diseases rise across the state.
“Before you made this decision to try to lift vaccine mandates for Florida, did your department do any data analysis of how many new cases of these diseases there will be with no vaccine mandates?” CNN host Jake Tapper asked Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, noting that case or Hepatitis A, whooping cough, and chickenpox are on the rise in Florida
“Absolutely not,” Ladapo proudly shot back. “There’s this conflation of the science, and what is the right and wrong thing to do.”
On Wednesday, Ladapo and Governor Ron DeSantis announced plans to repeal every law requiring mandatory vaccinations, which Ladapo has described as akin to “slavery.” In addition to previously calling COVID shots “the Antichrist,” Ladapo said growing doubts against vaccines are “reflections of God’s light against the darkness of tyranny and oppression.”
Florida would be the first state to eliminate vaccine mandates.
In addition to bypassing science altogether, Ladapo has a history of cooking the books to make vaccines look dangerous. Ladapo was found guilty in 2023 of altering study data to make COVID-19 vaccinations appear dangerous to young men.
During his CNN appearance Saturday, he further defended this week’s move by citing whooping cough, claiming “that’s an example of a vaccine that’s ineffective” and that “the data show that it’s ineffective at preventing transmission.”
Otherwise known as pertussis, whooping cough is a highly contagious respiratory tract infection that can be deadly among children. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the vaccine fully protects 98 percent of kids within a year of receiving the jab, and around 71 percent within five years.
The World Health Organization reports a 90 percent reduction in whooping cough cases and mortality across the industrialized world following the vaccine’s introduction in the 1950s and 1960s.
“In terms of analysis—ultimately, this is an issue, very clearly, of parents’ rights,” Ladapo said. “Do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what goes into their children’s bodies? I don’t need to do an analysis on that.”
Tapper then pressed Ladapo again, saying that dropping the mandates “goes against what’s recommended by every top medical organization.”
“No, that’s what you said. What I’m saying is that it’s an issue of right and wrong,” Ladapo shot back. “We do have outbreaks in Florida, just like every state, and we manage those, so there are no special procedures that need to be made.”
Tapper in the interview later returned to Ladapo’s comments about not gathering data before scrapping the vaccine mandates.
“I have to say just, I’m very … I’m kind of shocked that you have not done any sort of projection or data analysis of what this is actually going to going to literally mean for kids in Florida,” Tapper said
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