FLORIDA – The former Florida surgeon general said the state will be vulnerable to preventable diseases if the vaccine mandate ends.
Dr. Scott Rivkees, who served from 2019 to 2021 during the pandemic, said there could be an outbreak of preventable diseases like measles and chickenpox if vaccine mandates are scrapped.
Current Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said even though the Florida Department of Health hasn’t conducted any data analysis or projection about the potential health impact, the ban on vaccine mandates is all about Floridians’ personal rights.
Both men said they are protecting Floridians, but in two very different ways.
“We’re not taking vaccines from anyone. We’re saying if you want them, God bless you, you can have as many as you want and if you don’t want them, then you should have the ability and power to decide what goes into their children’s bodies. It’s that simple,” Ladapo said.
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Ladapo said he’s working to protect Florida families’ freedom, and Rivkees said he wants to protect Floridians’ health.
“These diseases that we once saw, diseases which really have horrific consequences, we will see these again, and that’s what breaks my heart. It’s not fair to children to have to endure these horrible illnesses,” Ladapo said.
Rivkees, who is now an epidemiologist at Brown University calls Ladapo’s recent messaging dangerous and said Ladapo wants to undermine vaccines.
“Twenty-one percent of the population is 65 years of age and older, and then there are another 4 million people with underlying medical conditions. So in addition to falling vaccination rates that will affect children, you’ll see spillover into the community. And so what this means is that individuals who may be immunocompromised, individuals who are older, they will be,” Rivkees said.
He warned that turning away from vaccine mandates could reverse decades of progress and said Floridians are already seeing early warning signs, preventable sicknesses.
“Before we had the measles vaccine, there were 500,000 cases a year of measles in the US, and you figure 8% of those would be in Florida, extraordinarily contagious chicken pox. 4 million cases of chicken pox a year before we had the chicken pox vaccine. So these will be, these are the most among the more contagious of the vaccine-preventable infections. So we will start seeing those first. So we’re also starting to see cases of pertussis, and we start seeing, you know, we’re seeing evidence of this happening nationally,” Rivkees said.
Rivkees points out that children with several illnesses like encephalitis from chickenpox and meningitis, could lead to Floridians suffering unnecessarily. We reached out to Dr. Ladapo and the Florida Department of Health for comment on this story. We’ll let you know when we hear back.