In what has become a pattern of spreading vaccine misinformation, the Florida health department is telling older Floridians and others at highest risk from covid-19 to avoid most booster shots, saying they are potentially dangerous.
Clinicians and scientists denounced the message as politically fueled scaremongering that also weakens efforts to protect against diseases like measles and whooping cough.
A prominent Florida doctor expressed dismay that medical leaders in the state, leery of angering Gov. Ron DeSantis, have been slow to counter anti-vaccine messages from Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, including the latest covid bulletin. Ladapo is a DeSantis appointee and the top official at the state health department.
The bulletin makes a number of false or unproven claims about the efficacy and safety of mRNA-based covid vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, including that they could threaten “the integrity of the human genome.” Florida’s guidance generally regurgitates ideas from anti-vaccine websites, said John Moore, a professor of microbiology at Weill Cornell Medicine.
I cannot wait until my state gets its head out of its collective ass. I’d like to think DeSantis and his band of clowns are willfully acting this way as a way to turn the state from right to left as some sort of embedded counter-operatives, but if that was the case, they are doing worse than poorly and actually driving it into idiocy because the trashass tools are eating this shit up. I’m almost hoping for climate change to start taking some of us out so I have an excuse to get the fuck out of here.