Giving Kids Measles to Own the Libs
Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, announced on Wednesday that Florida plans to end all vaccine mandates in the state, including those that require children be vaccinated in order to attend public schools. Ladapo added, “Every last [vaccine mandate] is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. […] Who am I, or anyone else, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?”
Who is he? I dunno, the goddam Surgeon General? The highest-ranking public health official in the state? I feel like he has at least a little authority in persuading people in their personal health choices. But obviously that’s not what this is about. You can tell by the applause in the video that there are a lot of people who really hate vaccine mandates. And judging by their enthusiasm for ending them, I suspect it’s not because they have objections about government authority or the sanctity of the individual or whatever else — it’s because they have fallen prey to quackery around vaccines and don’t want to have to vaccinate their children; and they’re excited because now they don’t have to and they’re not gonna. That’s it.
It’s lunacy.
A quick google informs me that there are between three and four million school-age children in Florida, and the vaccination rate for the previous school year was around 95%. That’s an important number because the so-called herd immunity threshold — that is, the percentage of a population that needs to be immune to a disease in order to prevent the disease from having enough viable hosts to spread — for diseases like measles and whooping cough are around ninety percent. Which is to say, both the measles and whooping cough are extremely contagious, such that if fewer than 90 percent of a population is immune to them, outbreaks can spread. What percentage of Florida’s school children are now going to go unvaccinated? If it’s less than 90, and we have every reason to believe it will be, we’re going to see outbreaks of diseases that were heretofore virtually eliminated. In which case, some non-zero number of children in Florida are going to contract these easily-preventable diseases, and some percentage of those — likely those who have preexisting conditions that weaken their immune systems — are going to die. And for what?
There’s always been an undercurrent of anti-establishment sentiment and elite skepticism in American culture, but something has happened in the last few years that has really put that phenomenon on steroids; sort of like how the runoff from fighting wildfires fertilizes the nearby water and leads to massive algae blooms that then choke off marine life. We’ve been unwittingly cultivating this malignant ignorance and now it’s taking over the levers of government and choking out responsible leaders.
This phenomenon has been festering for more than a decade, but it really only broke through to the surface [like an inflamed pimple] around 2020. I hate to even bring it up because it was a time of both national and global trauma, but a whole bunch of people in 2020 simply lost their gat-danged minds. Even allowing for the George Carlin formulation that anyone more skeptical than me is a maniac and anyone less skeptical than me is an idiot, I feel confident in saying that something cracked in 2020 and now we have an entire generation of adults, some of whom who now hold positions of power, whose brains have been broken by oppositional defiant disorder.
Which is to say, a significant percentage of the electorate is of the mind that, if “the establishment” or “the elites” — or, God forbid, “the left” or “liberals” — assert[s] something, it must be opposed — even if it’s something as simple as “school children should get vaccines if they wish to attend public school.”
I understand that trust in public health officials is currently lower than it should be, because in 2020 many public health officials said some admittedly silly things. Schools were closed, but bars were open. You had to wear a mask while walking through a restaurant, but not while engaged in the act of eating or drinking. Playgrounds were closed, but it was fine to protest outside because racism is a public health issue. I get that. But what I don’t get is why, simply because some public health official said that racism is a public health issue, or because there was a question about whether the COVID vaccine actually prevented transmission of the disease rather than only mitigating severity, that an entire swath of the electorate has taken that as license to go completely insane. It is a long way from “it’s dumb to say that racism is a public health issue” to “I’m not vaccinating my children against measles because something something autism.” And for government officials to be encouraging this attitude in parents in nothing short of shameful.
Brief aside: As I find myself thinking a lot lately, I don’t understand how the people who voted for this aren’t embarrassed by it. I don’t mean the people that were always vaccine cranks — they wouldn’t be embarrassed by this; they think it’s great. I’m talking about the people who voted for this, presumably for other issues. Like the economy, or immigration, or DEI in schools, or whatever the hell. Congratulations, you got DEI out of schools and all it required was adopting 19th century public health policies. What a bargain.
Now, I don’t think I’m a hardliner on this issue. I think children should be vaccinated [not to go out on too thin of a limb!] and I think school systems should [and are within their right to] mandate vaccination as a condition to attend public school. But if some percentage of parents are willing to forego public education in order to avoid vaccinating their children, I don’t think that those children, say, should be held down by an agent of the state and vaccinated against the will of the parents. [Though I do think any parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, absent some legitimate medical reason, are engaging in a form of neglect and are failing as parents. If that makes me judgey, well, sorry. Not sorry.]
It just makes me angry that we’re probably going to see a large uptick in preventable diseases because some statistically-significant percentage of Florida parents are gullible rubes. But a part of me — a much less charitable part, I admit — is willing to see these people reap the consequences of their choices. “Experience is the school of mankind and he will not learn at any other,” and all that. If we’re going to be acting purely in self interest and with no regard for the broader responsibilities of citizenship, my kids are vaccinated and to the best of my knowledge aren’t immunocompromised. We also don’t spend a lot of time in or around Florida, so if they wanna have a giant measles party, part of me hopes they all go around spitting in each other’s mouths — after all, the establishment says such behavior spreads germs, but the establishment isn’t the boss of you!
Personally, I don’t need to see a bunch of kids get sick in order to appreciate the modern miracle that is vaccination. I’m willing to take the doctor’s word for it, y’know? But if some people need a reminder of why old cemeteries have a bunch of headstones with single digits on ‘em, I guess we should get on with it. We can postpone our trip to Disney World while it gets sorted out.
Not For Nothin’
I heard this point made on a podcast recently and I’ve been trying to work it into an newsletter, but I can’t seem to find a way to shoehorn it in, so I’m just going to talk about it on its own. Namely, entirely too many people seem to be of the belief that “the truth will offend people, so if I’m offending people, that is proof that what I’m saying is true.”
I think there’s a lot of that going on these days. I agree that some people might find the truth offensive — as in, for example, “vaccinating your children is worthwhile and if you don’t do it because of something you saw on the internet, you’re both an idiot and a bad parent.” I’m sure that offends some people, especially because I said it like an abrasive asshole. But people often mistake abrasive assholery for truth-telling, and then take the offense it generates in people as evidence of their correctness. But they are simply not correlated. Sometimes people are just abrasive assholes to no point or purpose, but are nevertheless convinced of their own righteousness based on nothing more than the fact that people find them insufferable.
I’m a Raging Hypocrite
Health and Human Services Secretary [and genuine insane person] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before a Senate committee yesterday. You can easily find explanations elsewhere as to why everything he said was untrue, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time doing that. [Although I will admit that I laughed out loud when I saw the clip of him saying that he fired the CDC Director because she told him that she was untrustworthy. Like, literally. He said he asked her if she was a trustworthy person, and then claimed she said “no.” That simply did not happen, I’m sorry.]
But what I noticed while watching the coverage of his testimony is that I simply cannot stand listening to RFK Jr. speak. I find it deeply unpleasant. For those of you who aren’t aware, RFK Jr. suffers from what is called spasmodic dysphonia, which is a neurological condition in which the vocal cords [or vocal folds, if you prefer] spasm and tighten, which leads to the person’s voice sounding strained and/or breathy.
So I asked a friend of mine, who also stutters, does it make me a raging hypocrite to find RFK Jr.’s voice so unpleasant? And his response was basically…yeah kinda.
Fair enough, I guess. We both suffer from neurological speech conditions that can make speaking a rather public struggle, so presumably it makes me a schmuck to find his so distressing but mine to be…fine?
But it got me thinking. What if it’s not the speech, but the content? I know many people who stutter, and some who struggle and avoid words in such a way that makes them difficult to understand. And while I can sometimes feel second-hand embarrassment in those situations, I never find it unpleasant. [Also, is it really second-hand embarrassment when it’s from first-hand experience? As in, I know how I feel when I struggle publicly, so I feel the same way for them? I dunno.]
And I don’t think it’s strictly about politics, either, though I’m sure it doesn’t help. I often got the urge to fistfight people who made fun of Joe Biden for stuttering, and I don’t much care for Joe Biden. But I think it’s the fact that I have such contempt for what Kennedy actually says that it manifests itself in discomfort with his manner of physically speaking. I don’t think I would be especially bothered if, say, Paul Ryan had spasmodic dysphonia.
But I’m not nearly as bothered by people mocking RFK Jr.’s voice than I would be if someone mocked Joe Biden’s, and maybe that’s wrong. I contain multitudes, I guess.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Space Exploration
Clue: After its July 4, 1997 landing on Mars, this lander was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.
Pathfinder
Today’s clue:
Category: Comic Book Villains
Clue: Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, and Lee Meriwether all played this villain on screen, though not at the same time.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My younger daughter is learning about the concept of measurement this week, so they were using things around the room to measure themselves and she apparently learned that she’s “10 crayons” tall. It made me laugh because all I could think about was that meme like “Americans will use literally any unit of measurement except for the metric system.” And, I mean, fair enough. Who wouldn’t want to be 10 crayons instead of 89 centimeters?