Here’s a list of organizations you must not ever trust:
- Children’s Health Defense
- Informed Consent Action Network
- Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance
- America’s Frontline Doctors
Look at those names! How can you not support them? Those titles are all lies, though — these are fronts for quacks and medicine denialists that are raking in millions of dollars promoting anti-vaccine bullshit. They are busily undermining health care in this country, and somehow they avoid the criminal charges they deserve. They’re big money sinks used to spread misinformation, and perhaps the only salvation we have is that they’re all run by venal grifters who siphon off much of their money to pay themselves overblown salaries.
One of the most prominent grifters is Joseph Ladapo, the stunningly incompetent Florida Surgeon General. Florida is experiencing a measles outbreak — a serious, potentially disfiguring and even fatal disease that is extremely contagious — and Ladapo is basically doing nothing.
Amid an outbreak of measles at a Florida elementary school, the state’s surgeon general has defied federal health guidance and told parents it’s up to them whether they want to keep their unvaccinated child home to avoid infection.
In a letter to parents of children attending Manatee Bay Elementary school in Weston, where six cases of measles have already been reported, Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo said the state health department “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”
That advice runs counter to what Ladapo acknowledged in his letter was the “normal” recommendation that parents keep unvaccinated children home for up to 21 days — the incubation period for measles.
This is not the first time that Ladapo has challenged health recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Last month, he called for halting the use of COVID vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna.
Ladapo is supported by Republican conservatives who fast-tracked him into his current position, and…he has an MD and PhD from Harvard! Harvard seems to be losing what reputation they had as a prestigious university, and are fast becoming the MAGA equivalent of a diploma mill.
What’s the SSPE rate, on the order of 1 in 10,000 cases or so? Given that measles has an R₀ of 15 ± 3, that is unacceptably high, ignoring all the other unpleasant effects of measles.
I do not understand how antivaxxers exist, aside from, in the reactionary case, them essentially just engaging in a knee-jerk quasi-oppositional–defiant “You can’t tell me what to do!”
It is higher than that.
The CDC has it at, “SSPE occurs in ≈1 of every 5,000 reported measles cases;”
SSPE isn’t the main way that measles kills though.
The death rate from measles is around 2 per 1000.
Wikipedia: In children one to three cases out of every 1,000 die in the United States (0.1–0.2%). In populations with high levels of malnutrition and a lack of adequate healthcare, mortality can be as high as 10%.
Children who don’t die from measles can be permanently harmed by…Possible consequences of measles virus infection include laryngotracheobronchitis, sensorineural hearing loss,[49].
SSPE= Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a progressive neurological disorder of children and young adults that affects the central nervous system (CNS).
SSPE is caused by the measles virus years after the infection and is invariably fatal in a few months.
It is a terrible disease, striking children and slowly killing them.
It’s makes me angry.
Bile chanting anybody? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WTB2I5Flqw At least the side effects are minimal.
raven @ 2
So, twice as bad as I’d thought.
Fair point. It’s horrific any way you slice it.
It’s the Robbers Cave experiment writ large. Two groups in competition will invent ways to differentiate themselves. When liberals came out in favor of disease prevention, conservatives had no choice but to promote epidemics and pandemics.
Despite all you hear about antivaxxers, there aren’t all that many of them.
Right now they are running about 16% of the population.
This is at the level of the crazification factor, the percent of people who will believe anything, no matter how stupid it is.
The antivaxxers are running below the Geocentrists (20%) who believe the sun orbits the earth but ahead of the Flat Earthers at 10%.
Which means that DeSantis and the GOP are pandering to a small minority of the population.
The vaccination rate for the US population for Covid-19 virus ended up at 80%.
In reading about medicine during the Civil War , it shows that disease such as measles killed many more than died in combat.This is what we would be looking at if these people got their way. There is good reason why the military first thing on induction of new recruits is line them up and vaccinates them to protect from getting infected by those who have never been exposed to said diseases.
If you have kids in Florida schools and you value their lives, you should pull them out. Not just from school, but from the entire state!
Ladapo receives about a quarter-million dollars per year from the University of Florida as a (very) fast-tracked tenure professor.
He has, reportedly, been to Gainesville (home of UF) … twice!
I haven’t commented here in forever but I had to figure out my login for this one.
I went to high school with Joe Ladapo. He was widely regarded as a dumbass even then.
(Tennessee state legislator) Republican warns of vaccines being slipped into vegetables: ‘A polio vaccine in there’
Spreading vaccine cooties.
While I hate G00GLE, this great image (I think PZ will love it) was posted on all-hat-no-cattle.blogspotDOTcom
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlGGxu59BI5IeJu6EYbRZv257axWJRO82VH6aQPZOy2sG0Ls_r3_un1VDqXOTWBDt4CXy1UI91Brp0xAIDOVIaoeWojS7tgz5Jl_hLETNw_xmFP-r3HA2s_KduR8uhZHrD4oNPlkcC4Dise7xELQ1ODhsGOe69sxZWj5ZOLw7leMGSSaK4uLEnsYRIu6c-/s640/GG5ncafWoAE69ZY.jpeg
cross-posted on Infinite thread
Raven @6
Considering most childhood vaccines require coverage of over 90% to protect the population that 16% is pretty concerning. I know they tend to cluster as at the school with the measles outbreak, but they still go places the rest of us use, and measles can be caught well after an infected person has left a room. Plus there is good evidence that getting measles wipes the immune system clean, so you’ll get any other diseases you had previously and were immune to all over again – so much for “natural” (ie disease derived) immunity being better eh?
I’m old enough to have gone to school with people who lost some of their hearing to measles, and to have had it myself. I do not have fond memories of any of the “childhood infections” I had, partly because of fever hallucinations, but mostly because being that ill hurts, you can’t get comfortable and you can’t do anything.
This is code for “rich parents can keep their kids safe but the poor can’t get time off or any help”.
My much older cousin was crippled by measles .
When I was a kid I thought she’d had caught polio but it was measles. For a medical doctor in his position to be this blatantly, ignorantly stupid about an extremely contagious, dangerous, disease….
@shermanj, love that !
Does the second amendment actually go as far as permitting everyone to carry biological weapons?
If not, then maybe parents of unvaccinated kids who spread preventable, potentially-fatal diseases need to be prosecuted for (attempted) homicide.