Editorial: Florida is promoting dangerous policy to please anti-vaxxers

President Donald Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be health and human services secretary to shake up the country’s public health status quo. Shake it up he has, putting vaccine skepticism at the helm of life-changing decisions and placing chosen outcomes ahead of data.

Florida is proving to be a testing ground for this new anti-science experiment, which risks setting us back to a time when people, in particular children, died of preventable diseases.

On Wednesday, the state surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, announced plans to end all vaccine mandates for children to attend schools, a move Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed. That means parents will be allowed to send kids to school without being immunized for measles, mumps, polio, chicken pox and hepatitis B.

This is the same Ladapo who’s pushed widely debunked claims that the mRNA vaccines contaminate a person’s DNA.

School vaccine requirements have been a longstanding practice in all states, with varying exemptions (Florida, for example, has a religious exemption). But anything that’s been longstanding public-health practice has now been upended by the Trump administration under the guise of fighting the medical and scientific establishment. And we probably won’t know the consequences of this setback until the next measles outbreak or the next pandemic.

Undermining vaccination and its effectiveness might help DeSantis remain relevant with Trump’s Republican base as he considers his next political move. As for Trump, who put together Operation Warp Speed to develop a coronavirus vaccine early in the pandemic, he now has to court anti-vaxxers who helped elect him.

Meanwhile, public health systems will pay the price for political expediency.

As reported by several outlets last week, chaos among the federal government’s shifting vaccine policies have made it harder for people to get the covid-19 shots that were once widely available at the country’s largest pharmacy chains.

CVS said last Thursday the vaccine was not available at pharmacies in 16 states because of “the current regulatory environment.”

The day after, the company said it would administer the shots in Florida and another 12 states, plus the District of Columbia, but only to people who have a prescription, which severely restricts access to those who can visit a doctor. In Massachusetts, Nevada and New Mexico, CVS still cannot provide the shots at all, the New York Times reported.

In Pennsylvania, the shots would only be available by prescription, it was reported Tuesday. That changed Wednesday when the state Board of Pharmacy weighed in on Pennsylvania law.

This is confusing, and it shouldn’t be. The country should be ramping up its immunization efforts ahead of the fall and winter, when cases of respiratory viral infections tend to spike.

Instead, we’re seeing upheaval at the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention that risks turning the country’s top health agency into a body that merely rubber-stamps what Kennedy wants.

Trump last week fired agency director Susan Monarez, who maintains she lost her job because she refused to sign off on reckless orders. NBC News reported her departure was triggered by Kennedy’s interference in the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an influential panel that makes vaccine recommendations. Kennedy has fired the committee’s members and appointed new ones. Among them: vaccine skeptics.

In several states, pharmacies will not administer vaccines without a recommendation from the committee, which isn’t expected to meet until later this month or perhaps even later. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana doctor who helped confirm Kennedy as health secretary despite concern about his vaccine skepticism, asked the committee meeting be “indefinitely” postponed after several top health officials resigned to protest Monarez’s firing.

That means access to the COVID-19 shots could be restricted into the fall. And there’s also the strong possibility that the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will recommend against the vaccines.

Kennedy, Ladapo, DeSantis and Trump act as if they are restoring faith in public-health guidance. But what they are doing is exactly the opposite. They are leaving Americans who don’t buy into the anti-vaccine movement with nowhere to turn for sound guidance. And they are putting the health of the people at risk.

— Miami Herald