Another little change in national health policy has occurred.
States will no longer be required to report how many children they vaccinate to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), according to a December 30 letter to state health officials.
Maybe if we pretend that infectious disease no longer exists, it will stop happening. Crawl under your bed, close your eyes, and the horrible monster will disappear.
This is just the first phase, though. Over a year ago, Florida was pioneering the way forward.
As Florida moves to become the first in the United States to drop all childhood vaccine requirements, critics have warned of the plan’s potentially deadly public health consequences.
The move would scrap all required vaccine mandates for children, including those required for school attendance, such as polio, diphtheria, rubeola, rubella, pertussis, mumps and tetanus.
The state’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic, on Wednesday compared school vaccine mandates to slavery, calling them “immoral” intrusions on parents’ rights.
“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God,” he said.
Children won’t be dying, if we stop reporting on it. Brilliant.
On a related note, I just saw this comment from Gwen Pearson that fits perfectly.
If you have ever dealt with lice, you know that they’re terribly difficult to get rid of, especially if one of the kids’ playmates is constantly recontaminating your family with the problem — if it’s happening at school, everyone in the classroom must take steps to eradicate the nits and lice. It’s the same story with measles, or whooping cough, or polio. Awareness is key, and our government wants to blind us.
The correct answer is: A doctor who has graduated from medical school and achieved all certifications in relevant fields and kept up on the literature.” If he can’t answer that properly, may be he should get out of the way and make room for someone who is qualified.
Unfortunately, Doctor Ladapo is university educated (Harvard) and board certified. Andrew Wakefield, who might have started the modern anti-vax craze, was also a board certified medical doctor, tho the Brits eventually revoked that. So, while I don’t disagree with your point that a doctor should advise you about vaccines for your child, you have to exercise some caution about that. Clearly money can override science, much less common sense, with the snap of two fingers.
It is surprising the number of well-educated and generally intelligent people who are vaccine skeptics. I had a person, who is a physical therapist, tell me the other day that she doesn’t “believe in vaccines” because they make her body feel weird. I didn’t know what to say except that “belief” isn’t a particularly useful approach.
Measles, whooping cough, and polio sound so nasty.
In light of dropping vaccination requirements, let’s call ’em “freedom diseases”.
“Make Polio Great Again”
The United States has descended into full-blown comedy.
I posted some amplification on this at https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/01/05/its-a-pit-of-disease-as-well-as-ignorance/
just before PZ posted this
This country is becoming a ‘center for disease’ not ‘control’ of!
Because they’re always whining about wanting to return to old timey ‘murica, I always figured it was that the wanted to return to the days of dirty air and water, no taxes on vast fortunes, no safety rules on businesses, the ability to rape and pillage public lands, extracting the valuable materials for themselves and leaving the devastation to the public, and the rights to marginalize those with dark skin.
I honestly never thought it would also include reintroducing potentially lethal diseases to children.
A better question.
“Who am I to let you kill and maim your kids?”
Trolls: A random poster on the internet. The governor of Florida. An MD who is often wrong about everything.
“Who am I to let my kids get sick and spread potentially lethal infectious diseases to the surrounding community?”
An irresponsible, potentially homicidal idiot.
There is no doubt that children will die from this.
So far the current North American measles outbreak has killed three people.
The current pertussis/whooping cough outbreaks have killed…”As of late December 2025, there have been at least 13 reported pertussis (whooping cough) deaths in the United States for 2025, primarily among unvaccinated infants under one year old..”
We had a local pertussis outbreak a few years ago in the elementary and middle schools.
Some adults caught it.
Then some babies too young to be vaccinated caught it and ended up in the hospital.
No one died but there were some close calls.
At that point, the school district had had enough.
They sent all the unvaccinated kids home and told the parents to use the distance learning internet course work.
Most of those kids ended up getting vaccinated and went back to school.
It turned out the parents both worked and they didn’t want their kids home all day anyway.
there were kids in my school in full polio regalia – leg braces and crutches. they were the lucky ones. the unlucky ones spent their lives in iron lungs.
Willful ignorance and willful stupidity should be declared as sins against God. But they’re both doing fine in Amerika.
weylguy @ 10
The entire GOP operates exactly because of those two traits. Its the primary reason that they loathe public schools and higher education and embrace evangelical xinanity. Keep them dumb and stupid and feed them circuses in the form of trump and kennedy, and they’ll vote for you even at the expense of their own well-being.
robro @2
If I get a vaccination and I don’t have a reaction of some kind, I worry that it didn’t work
If the government can’t tell people what to put into their body, then I assume all the restrictions on what people can buy with food stamps are morally wrong, as are all drug laws. (/s)
tedw @13
It goes further than that. Not only can’t the gubmint dictate what can or can’t put IN their bodies, it can’t dictate what can or can’t be removed. Yes?
“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God,” he said.
Weird how that doesn’t follow when it comes to transitioning or abortions.
I’m old enough to remember those childhood diseases. I survived the misery of measles, mumps and chicken pox and probably rubella. Fortunately mass vaccination for polio arrived by the time I was 4 and I still remember the acrid smell of antiseptic mixed with fear as small family groups waited in dimly lit corridors for their life-saving shots.
I was taught by a teacher who had survived polio with damage to his limbs and worked alongside a colleague who made up for the weakness in one arm by phenomenal strength and dexterity in the other. Later I was learned of John “Jess” Johnson through my interest in fossil brachiopods. Jess was headed for a stellar career in structural geology until polio took his legs from him. He settled for an equally stellar career in palaeontology where the geology could come to him where he was able to work in his laboratory thanks to a portable iron lung.
Those childhood diseases returned as an adult. Chicken pox on the form of shingles. Aside from the excruciating pain it was like threatening. Getting it in the mouth not only meant the left side of my jaw felt like it had an abscess in every tooth, my tongue swelled to the point where I couldn’t close my mouth properly and it interfered with my breathing. The hospital took it so seriously that I was placed in isolation in a neurology ward for two weeks and the staff attending to me had to wear PPE.
About a year ago I suffered through the misery of whooping cough and I fully understand how it can kill young children. Again it was taken so seriously that I was in a part of the ward modified to treat Covid patients where entry to my room was via an airlock. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, (except maybe for Trump and his minions).
These wilfully ignorant idiots are criminals and should be tried for every life lost of an unvaccinated child.
@16 garydargan
Hear hear. I’d start the bidding right now at wilful endangerment of a child (forgive my lack of terminology) x 1M (or whatever it is) counts right now.
@8
There’s no shortage of parents who knowingly sent their kids to school with Covid 19, because they didn’t want their kids at home all day.
Frankly, I’m wondering why these assholes ever had kids in the first place.
If you aren’t going to get your kid vaccinated & give them appropriate medical care, why bother in the first place? Is this some kind of deranged Munschausen’s by proxy…?
@16
I am old enough to remember the misery of chicken pox and getting the smallpox vaccination scar. (I’m currently trying to finesse the timing on the shingles vaccination, because you can apparently only get it once [yes, I realize that it’s a two part vaccination] and apparently it’s only effective for 11 years. AND there’s currently no protocol to give it a second time, even though everybody in the vaccination business knows that the vaccination is only good for about 11 years. WTF.)
We drove smallpox from the face of the earth. Fucking nut up, get vaccinated and take one for the team. Measles would have been driven from the face of the earth by this time if it wasn’t for antivaxxers.
I wonder how the kids of these stupid selfish assholes are going to feel when they realize that they didn’t have to go blind, deaf or sterile if their parents hadn’t been total assholes? The ones that survive anyway.
Plenty of kids are seeking to quietly get vaccinated without their (stupid) parents’ knowledge. Because the kids want to live.
For the antivaxxer idiots, just remember that the kids you caused to unnecessarily suffer through entirely preventable childhood diseases are the ones who are going to be picking out your nursing homes. And frankly, I hope they pick out some crappy third rate places that get very little sunlight.
I suffered through the new variant whooping cough a little over 20 years ago, when it first emerged in the USA. I couldn’t keep any food down for a couple of weeks, the coughing was so bad. Some people break ribs from the coughing, because it is so severe. The coughing lasted about 2 months but I was sick and week for another 5-6 months after that. I too can now understand why it’s a killer of the very young and the very old. I was fully vaccinated for DTP but the new variant blew right through the old vaccination (as it did with many people) but the whole reason the new variant existed was because the antivaxxer morons provided a reservoir for pertussis to continue to exist and mutate. Which is what it did.
Who are you? As others have pointed out, you’re a DOCTOR, that’s who! You swore an oath to do no harm. NOT advising parents of the best ways to protect their children from harm is a dereliction of that DUTY. That’s right, it’s a duty not a right and one in which you are derelict, And the office of Surgeon-General is not a pulpit from which to preach your particular brand of antivax crankery; it SHOULD be a source of medical advice that is best supported by the available evidence.
Maybe this is what RFK really meant by “We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/rfk-jr-comes-home-anti-vaccine-group-commits-break-us-infectious-disea-rcna123551
raven @7:
It’s hard to overstate how much at this point the anti-vax movement is basically part of the ‘health/parental freedom!’ movement. It’s ‘don’t tell me what to do’ taken to pathological levels.
There is a significant overlap between the modern anti-vax parent and the reasons why the U.S. has still not actually ratified the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child: there are far too many people who consider their children personal property to do with what they like, and they get upset if anybody even suggests that maybe beating your child is a bad thing. Unsurprisingly, anti-trans attitudes are also connected to this mindset; just like with the original linking of vaccines with autism, it’s all about ‘this isn’t really the perfect baby I had, somebody else must have done something to change them against my wishes!’