Meanwhile, in Florida...

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rainbow
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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by rainbow » Fri Sep 24, 2021 9:20 am

Scot Dutchy wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 7:39 am
rainbow wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 11:03 pm
Scot Dutchy wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 12:56 pm
JimC wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 2:36 am
In future, the consensus among health experts is that ventilation regimes in schools, hotels, offices, shops etc. need dramatic improvement...
This has been the policy here for the last six months. Advice is to air your house at least half an hour a day. Schools have had to install new ventilation this summer holidays to be able to open.
Dutch Fascism is the best Fascism.
Unsupported claims once again by the guy with massive chips on his shoulders who also claims to be a millionaire.

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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by Scot Dutchy » Fri Sep 24, 2021 10:23 am

Not up to date are we. Losing it some what?
"Wat is het een gezellig boel hier".

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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by pErvinalia » Fri Sep 24, 2021 10:27 am

Dutch losers are the best losers.
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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by Scot Dutchy » Fri Sep 24, 2021 10:30 am

Again an unsupported claim.
"Wat is het een gezellig boel hier".

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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by pErvinalia » Fri Sep 24, 2021 11:00 am

Actually it's amply demonstrated by you. :hehe:
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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by rainbow » Fri Sep 24, 2021 12:41 pm

pErvinalia wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 10:27 am
Dutch losers are the best losers.
Absolute data.
I call bullshit - Alfred E Einstein
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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by laklak » Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:46 pm

L'Emmerdeur wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 4:00 pm
This fellow (DeSantis) stands a fair chance of becoming the next president of the US. Fun times.
Oh fuck I hope so.
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Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by Scot Dutchy » Fri Sep 24, 2021 9:52 pm

rainbow wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 12:41 pm
pErvinalia wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 10:27 am
Dutch losers are the best losers.
Absolute data.
Unsupported claim once again.
"Wat is het een gezellig boel hier".

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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by Seabass » Sat Sep 25, 2021 4:00 am

Gov. Ron DeSantis further embraces the Great Barrington Declaration by appointing Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida Surgeon General

Yesterday, Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Dr. Joseph Ladapo, an apostle of the Great Barrington Declaration’s eugenics lite “focused protection” approach to COVID-19, as Florida Surgeon General. If you want to see the harm caused by the GBD and crank “COVID contrarian” physicians, look no further.


I’ve written several times about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), a statement released by three COVID-19-minimizing scientists, Dr. Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford), Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University) and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University). Named after the Massachusetts town where the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER, the libertarian “free market” think tank that birthed the declaration) is based, the Great Barrington Declaration, which, it should be noted, was published two months before any COVID-19 vaccines received emergency use authorizations (EUAs) from the FDA, advocated basically letting COVID-19 rip through the “healthy population” to achieve “natural herd immunity” while using “focused protection” to keep those at high risk of severe disease and death from the virus (e.g., the elderly and those with chronic health conditions that put them at high risk) safe from COVID-19. Unfortunately, what was meant by “focused protection” was never really defined, and the GBD totally ignored the impossibility of “focused protection” of those at high risk from an infectious disease that was spreading unchecked through the rest of the population. As I said at the time, the entire idea struck me as not-so-thinly disguised eugenics that would let the “unhealthy” suffer and die in the name of getting the business of business rolling again, while the AIER’s likening GBD adherents to abolitionists was risible in the extreme. All of this is simply a lead-up, however, to a story from yesterday, in which Governor Ron DeSantis announced that Dr. Joseph Ladapo would be Florida’s new Surgeon General and Secretary of the Florida Department of Health:
"Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a UCLA researcher who expressed skepticism that vaccines could help end the pandemic, said Tuesday that he would “reject fear” as a public health strategy."

— uché blackstock, md (@uche_blackstock) September 21, 2021
That is, of course, a common talking point among antimaskers, those opposing “lockdowns” of even the most mild variety, and in general other science-based interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19 and thereby mitigate its damage to public health and save lives. Unfortunately, it’s a message that seems to resonate, as it portrays those opposed to public health interventions as “courageous,” as opposed to those advocating for a more science-based approach, who are portrayed as cowering in irrational fear of the virus rather than wanting to rationally devise a strategy that slows the spread of the virus and prevents as many people as possible from becoming critically ill and dying while minimizing social and economic disruption as much as feasible. Of course, one can’t help but note the hypocrisy, given how often antimaskers, antivaxxers, and those opposed to other public health interventions love to try to spread fear of their own. It’s just fear of things other than the virus, mainly bogus fears of adverse health effects of masks and, of course, “tyranny” from public health officials.

Worse, in addition to parroting antimask tropes about public health interventions to combat COVID-19, Dr. Ladapo appears to be flirting with “soft” antivaccinationism:
When asked whether FL should be promoting vaccines, he replied that too much emphasis had been placed on that approach.“The state should be promoting good health, and vaccination isn’t the only path for that. It’s been treated almost like a religion, and that’s just senseless.”

— uché blackstock, md (@uche_blackstock) September 21, 2021
Whenever you hear someone compare vaccination to a religion, you’re hearing an antivaccine message, whether the one making the comparison realizes it or not. One might wonder whether Dr. Ladapo does realize that he is promoting an antivaccine message or not (I suspect that he knows exactly what he is doing by parroting that message, just as Gov. DeSantis does), but he is. Antivaxxers love to harp on the false notion that vaccine advocates are irrational zealots and bullies regarding vaccination—and, of course, cowering in fear of disease—and that “belief” in vaccination is more akin to religion (and that vaccine advocates also engage in “vaccine exceptionalism“) than anything else.

The other part of Dr. Ladapo’s statement, in which he says that the “state should be promoting good health” and that “vaccination isn’t the only path for that,” is a message right out of the quack playbook that echoes what I like to call the central dogma of alternative medicine. That dogma is basically The Secret: Wishing for healing heals. Alternatively, it can be stated somewhat more accurately as: You attract health to yourself. Note that this is just like The Secret, only for health. The central dogma of many, if not most (if not all) alternative medical systems seems to be that, if you wish for healing hard enough, your mind/spirit/energy can heal you of almost anything, just as, according to the Law of Attraction from The Secret, you “attract” things to you from the universe according to your thoughts, intents, and desires.

What Dr. Ladapo is saying is, at its core, very similar to what quacks say about COVID-19 in order to minimize the severity and effect of the disease and attack public health interventions, including vaccines, as strategies to combat it, namely that if you make yourself “healthy enough” you will be less likely to get really sick from the virus or even die. Of course, it is trivially true and has been known since early in the pandemic that those with chronic health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and chronic lung disease, are more likely to land in an ICU or even die if they contracts COVID-19, but is the converse true? If you, for instance, lose a lot of weight, exercise, and improve your diet, will it make you less likely to die of COVID-19. That’s what Dr. Ladapo was clearly implying, if not outright arguing, yesterday when you put him in context:
In the press conference Tuesday, Ladapo declined to say that he would promote vaccines and downplayed their role in helping bring an end to the pandemic.

“The state should be promoting good health, and vaccination isn’t the only path to that,” Ladapo said. “It’s been treated almost like a religion, and that’s just senseless. There’s a lot of good pathways to health, and vaccination is not the only one. So, we support measures for good health—that’s vaccination, losing weight, it’s exercising more, it’s eating more fruits and vegetables, everything. We support it all.”

To be clear, while losing weight, exercising, and eating fruits and vegetables are generally good for health, they will not prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection or transmission.
I left that last paragraph in the quote intentionally, because it’s spot on correct. To it I would also add that it’s not at all clear that adopting a healthy lifestyle will dramatically lower your risk of dying from COVID-19, but let’s for the moment consider the possibility that it might. Arguing that we should not be prioritizing vaccination as much as we do and instead should be increasing emphasis on lifestyle changes that lead to better health is folly in the middle of a pandemic. Why do I say that? Because, in the middle of a pandemic, lifestyle changes, even if they do work as Dr. Ladapo implies, take too much time.

continued:
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/09 ... n-general/
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire
"They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." —Sebastian Gorka

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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by Seabass » Sat Sep 25, 2021 4:04 am

Florida Sen. Manny Diaz wants to “review” all vaccine mandates

Florida State Senator Manny Diaz wants to “review” all vaccine mandates in Florida, not just COVID-19 mandates. This was always the endgame for the antivaccine movement, and COVID-19 might just make it happen in some states, thanks to the embrace of antivaccine and antimask “freedumb” by Republican politicians


Of all the cesspits of anti-science and antivaccine nuttery in the US, Florida has a strong claim to being the most anti-science and nuttiest. First, it has Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose embrace of Great Barrington Declaration-style, “don’t worry, be happy,” “let COVID-19 rip” policies recently led to his appointment of an utter crank to head up the entire medical and public health bureaucracy of the state. This crank, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, was a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, the same group that was pushing hydroxychloroquine a year ago (and is pushing ivermectin now and antivaccine misinformation now) as a miracle cure for COVID-19 and counts among its members a grifting quack and a physician who thinks that demon sperm from sex with demons is responsible for a number of gynecological maladies and was a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, which basically advocated letting COVID-19 infect the “healthy” population and using “focused protection” to keep the elderly and others at high risk of serious disease and death safe, neglecting the impossibility of protecting high risk people if the virus is ripping through the population. Unfortunately, Dr. Lapado is not the only crank in charge. Enter Florida State Senator Manny Diaz, whose recent bloviations are remarkable mainly for being utterly honest about what the endgame always was for those resisting COVID-19 mandates:
Florida’s ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to be a major focus during the 2022 Legislative Session for Sen. Manny Diaz, the top Republican shaping health care policy in the upper chamber.

His work could include revisiting existing vaccine requirements long in place in schools, a response to the debate about whether COVID-19 vaccines should also be required.

Diaz, who came down with COVID-19 last winter, said he wants to review the state’s vaccination efforts as well as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ work on getting monoclonal antibody treatments to those who test positive for COVID-19.

The Senator, who acknowledges he hasn’t gotten a COVID-19 vaccine, says he’s firmly against vaccine mandates. At the urging of the Governor, the Legislature earlier this year passed a bill that would prevent private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from their customers. But the bill did not ban employers from requiring their employees to be vaccinated.
Before I go on to discuss this further, note that this is not just some random back bencher, some irrelevant crank. (Sen. Diaz is a crank all right, but by virtue of his position he is unfortunately far from irrelevant.) Between politicians like Gov. DeSantis and Sen. Diaz plus COVID-19 crank physicians like Dr. Ladapo, it’s almost as though Florida is trying to let as many people as possible die. After all, remember how Dr. Ladapo said that he thought that vaccination against COVID-19 was being overemphasized, even going so far as to say that the vaccines have “been treated almost like a religion, and that’s just senseless”? As I pointed out before, whenever someone likens vaccination to a religion, he is, knowingly or unknowingly, parroting a common antivaccine talking point.

Tommy Beer at Forbes provides some key background about Florida:
The Florida Department of Health has long required the following vaccines to be administered before children may enroll and attend childcare or school in the state: diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis, inactivated polio vaccine, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), varicella (chickenpox), Haemophilus influenzae type b, pneumococcal conjugate, and Hepatitis B. Under Florida law, only parents who declare such immunizations conflict with their religious tenets can exempt their children from vaccination requirements. Some GOP lawmakers in Florida have been criticized for taking a stance against Covid-19 vaccines while not previously, or currently, fighting against other state-mandated inoculations. Earlier this year, the Republican-led Florida Legislature passed a bill that banned businesses, governments and schools from requiring “vaccine passports.”
It is true that Sen. Diaz qualifies his statement (apparently in order to seem reasonable) by saying that MMR, polio vaccine, and all the others have a long history of safety and efficacy, in contrast to the COVID-19 vaccine, but the fact that he would even propose reviewing school vaccine mandates gives away his game and is a dangerous development. Florida’s school vaccine mandate is actually pretty much in line with most other states. It’s even slightly more rigorous than some in that the only nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates that it allows are religious exemptions. It does not all “personal belief” exemptions, which includes, in essence, any reason for not vaccinating based on “personal belief.” Of course, I also oppose religious exemptions to school vaccine mandates (or any vaccine mandate), and antivaxxers have long abused religious exemptions, claiming fake religious exemptions, going all the way back to before I had even started paying attention to the antivaccine movement and predictably continuing right up through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior to around a decade ago, school vaccine mandates had long enjoyed a status that was as close to apolitical as any policy has ever enjoyed in the United States. At the very least, they enjoyed broad and strong bipartisan support and were relatively uncontroversial for decades, representing a reasonable compromise between public health and freedom. There was no compulsory vaccination, but if parents refused vaccines for their children there were consequences in terms of not being able to access public schools and daycare facilities. Because of the privileged position religion has always had in the US as a belief system, there were always religious exemptions. Then, more and more states started allowing nonreligious “personal belief” exemptions, which then led to problems with low vaccine uptake in a number of states, which led states to start trying to make such exemptions harder to obtain or banning them altogether.

Enter the Disneyland measles outbreak during the 2014 Christmas holiday season, which was due to low MMR vaccine uptake and galvanized California state lawmakers. In 2015, they passed SB 277, a law that, for all intents and purposes, eliminated nonmedical religious and “personal belief” exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Unsurprisingly, the antivaccine movement strongly opposed passage of the law and during the battle over SB 277 figured out that framing resistance to school vaccine mandates as a matter of “freedom” and “parental rights” could attract the support of right wing groups opposed to government regulation. Within a couple of years, the issue of school vaccine mandates had become hopelessly politicized, with right wingers and Republicans coming down on the side of making exemptions easier to obtain and weakening school vaccine mandates.

In the process, Republicans started backing all sorts of bills to make measles great again and becoming more and more opposed to public health interventions of any kind intended to control infectious diseases, justifying their opposition with bromides like “freedom” and “personal responsibility.” This led to attempts to pass laws like the one in Michigan that would have make personal belief exemptions easy to obtain and even restricted public health officials from being able to bar unvaccinated children from school in the middle of an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease. Although fortunately this bill never became law, it’s hard not to see it as a precursor to the many bills proposed by Republicans this year that would strip authority to issue emergency public health orders from governors (not coincidentally nearly all Democratic governors) and state and local public health authorities.

Meanwhile, a veritable ecosystem of disinformation and astroturf grew and grew to feed the conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and misinformation behind antivaccine and antimask propaganda. As a result of this and its having played footsie with the devil for political power, over the last six years, Republicans have gone from just pandering to antivaxxers without really having their hearts in it because right wing activist groups were opposed to vaccine mandates to many of them openly expressing antivaccine conspiracy theories themselves. For example, in 2018 one of the Republican candidates held an antivaccine—excuse me, “vaccine choice”—roundtable in my very own congressional district, chock full of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and other nonsense promoted by a local antivaccine group called Michigan for Vaccine Choice. I documented it all by attending as a mole. Elsewhere, a number of statehouses have a large contingent of antivaccine legislators (or those willing to play ball with them, like Sen. Diaz). Yes, I’m talking to you, Ohio and Oregon (where, although Democrats control the legislature, Republicans were able to block a bill to strengthen school vaccine mandates by refusing to come to work and denying the bill a quorum). Truly, as Sen. Diaz demonstrates, the Republican Party has gone from just pandering to antivaxxers in 2015 to inarguably being the party of antivaxxers, and this process was nearly complete before the pandemic.
continued:
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/09 ... -mandates/
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire
"They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." —Sebastian Gorka

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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Sat Sep 25, 2021 5:11 pm

Freedumb!!

'New Florida Surgeon General's First Act: Allowing Students Exposed to COVID to Attend School With No Restrictions'
He hasn’t even been confirmed yet by the Florida state Senate but Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Governor Ron DeSantis‘s new Surgeon General, on Wednesday signed an executive order that changes state policy on school attendance for students who have been exposed to COVID-19.

The order, which replaces an August 6 order by Dr. Ladapo’s predecessor, declares that students who have been exposed to COVID-19 can continue attending school in-person, as long as they are asymptomatic. It also repeatedly states that parents have sole discretion on how children are educated – in person or virtually – and on masks, effectively eliminating any locally-ordered mask mandates.

“The school boards in Miami-Dade, Broward, Orange, Alachua and Leon counties [had] challenged the Aug. 6 rule, which did not include the new provision about parents or legal guardians having ‘sole discretion’ about opting out of school mask requirements,” the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper reports.

Those lawsuits are now effectively null and void because of the new order.

Dr. Ladapo, who opposes mask and vaccine mandates, has likened the focus on getting Americans vaccinated to a religious obsession, and supports treatment of COVID-19 with drugs that are neither approved for use against the coronavirus nor have been proven to be effective – namely the livestock-dewormer Ivermectin and the malaria-drug hydroxychloroquine. He also appeared in the infamous viral video with a discredited doctor mocked as the “Demon Sperm” physician.

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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by Hermit » Sat Sep 25, 2021 5:41 pm

Florida got the government 4,076,186 Floridians voted for.
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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by laklak » Sat Sep 25, 2021 6:07 pm

FPTP. Probably not the best way to do things, but it is what it is.

Could have been worse, the methhead could have won.
Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by Brian Peacock » Sat Sep 25, 2021 7:12 pm

Seabass wrote:
Florida Sen. Manny Diaz wants to “review” all vaccine mandates

Florida State Senator Manny Diaz wants to “review” all vaccine mandates in Florida, not just COVID-19 mandates. This was always the endgame for the antivaccine movement, and COVID-19 might just make it happen in some states, thanks to the embrace of antivaccine and antimask “freedumb” by Republican politicians


Of all the cesspits of anti-science and antivaccine nuttery in the US, Florida has a strong claim to being the most anti-science and nuttiest. First, it has Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose embrace of Great Barrington Declaration-style, “don’t worry, be happy,” “let COVID-19 rip” policies recently led to his appointment of an utter crank to head up the entire medical and public health bureaucracy of the state. This crank, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, was a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, the same group that was pushing hydroxychloroquine a year ago (and is pushing ivermectin now and antivaccine misinformation now) as a miracle cure for COVID-19 and counts among its members a grifting quack and a physician who thinks that demon sperm from sex with demons is responsible for a number of gynecological maladies and was a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, which basically advocated letting COVID-19 infect the “healthy” population and using “focused protection” to keep the elderly and others at high risk of serious disease and death safe, neglecting the impossibility of protecting high risk people if the virus is ripping through the population. Unfortunately, Dr. Lapado is not the only crank in charge. Enter Florida State Senator Manny Diaz, whose recent bloviations are remarkable mainly for being utterly honest about what the endgame always was for those resisting COVID-19 mandates:
Florida’s ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to be a major focus during the 2022 Legislative Session for Sen. Manny Diaz, the top Republican shaping health care policy in the upper chamber.

His work could include revisiting existing vaccine requirements long in place in schools, a response to the debate about whether COVID-19 vaccines should also be required.

Diaz, who came down with COVID-19 last winter, said he wants to review the state’s vaccination efforts as well as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ work on getting monoclonal antibody treatments to those who test positive for COVID-19.

The Senator, who acknowledges he hasn’t gotten a COVID-19 vaccine, says he’s firmly against vaccine mandates. At the urging of the Governor, the Legislature earlier this year passed a bill that would prevent private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from their customers. But the bill did not ban employers from requiring their employees to be vaccinated.
Before I go on to discuss this further, note that this is not just some random back bencher, some irrelevant crank. (Sen. Diaz is a crank all right, but by virtue of his position he is unfortunately far from irrelevant.) Between politicians like Gov. DeSantis and Sen. Diaz plus COVID-19 crank physicians like Dr. Ladapo, it’s almost as though Florida is trying to let as many people as possible die. After all, remember how Dr. Ladapo said that he thought that vaccination against COVID-19 was being overemphasized, even going so far as to say that the vaccines have “been treated almost like a religion, and that’s just senseless”? As I pointed out before, whenever someone likens vaccination to a religion, he is, knowingly or unknowingly, parroting a common antivaccine talking point.

Tommy Beer at Forbes provides some key background about Florida:
The Florida Department of Health has long required the following vaccines to be administered before children may enroll and attend childcare or school in the state: diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis, inactivated polio vaccine, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), varicella (chickenpox), Haemophilus influenzae type b, pneumococcal conjugate, and Hepatitis B. Under Florida law, only parents who declare such immunizations conflict with their religious tenets can exempt their children from vaccination requirements. Some GOP lawmakers in Florida have been criticized for taking a stance against Covid-19 vaccines while not previously, or currently, fighting against other state-mandated inoculations. Earlier this year, the Republican-led Florida Legislature passed a bill that banned businesses, governments and schools from requiring “vaccine passports.”
It is true that Sen. Diaz qualifies his statement (apparently in order to seem reasonable) by saying that MMR, polio vaccine, and all the others have a long history of safety and efficacy, in contrast to the COVID-19 vaccine, but the fact that he would even propose reviewing school vaccine mandates gives away his game and is a dangerous development. Florida’s school vaccine mandate is actually pretty much in line with most other states. It’s even slightly more rigorous than some in that the only nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates that it allows are religious exemptions. It does not all “personal belief” exemptions, which includes, in essence, any reason for not vaccinating based on “personal belief.” Of course, I also oppose religious exemptions to school vaccine mandates (or any vaccine mandate), and antivaxxers have long abused religious exemptions, claiming fake religious exemptions, going all the way back to before I had even started paying attention to the antivaccine movement and predictably continuing right up through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior to around a decade ago, school vaccine mandates had long enjoyed a status that was as close to apolitical as any policy has ever enjoyed in the United States. At the very least, they enjoyed broad and strong bipartisan support and were relatively uncontroversial for decades, representing a reasonable compromise between public health and freedom. There was no compulsory vaccination, but if parents refused vaccines for their children there were consequences in terms of not being able to access public schools and daycare facilities. Because of the privileged position religion has always had in the US as a belief system, there were always religious exemptions. Then, more and more states started allowing nonreligious “personal belief” exemptions, which then led to problems with low vaccine uptake in a number of states, which led states to start trying to make such exemptions harder to obtain or banning them altogether.

Enter the Disneyland measles outbreak during the 2014 Christmas holiday season, which was due to low MMR vaccine uptake and galvanized California state lawmakers. In 2015, they passed SB 277, a law that, for all intents and purposes, eliminated nonmedical religious and “personal belief” exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Unsurprisingly, the antivaccine movement strongly opposed passage of the law and during the battle over SB 277 figured out that framing resistance to school vaccine mandates as a matter of “freedom” and “parental rights” could attract the support of right wing groups opposed to government regulation. Within a couple of years, the issue of school vaccine mandates had become hopelessly politicized, with right wingers and Republicans coming down on the side of making exemptions easier to obtain and weakening school vaccine mandates.

In the process, Republicans started backing all sorts of bills to make measles great again and becoming more and more opposed to public health interventions of any kind intended to control infectious diseases, justifying their opposition with bromides like “freedom” and “personal responsibility.” This led to attempts to pass laws like the one in Michigan that would have make personal belief exemptions easy to obtain and even restricted public health officials from being able to bar unvaccinated children from school in the middle of an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease. Although fortunately this bill never became law, it’s hard not to see it as a precursor to the many bills proposed by Republicans this year that would strip authority to issue emergency public health orders from governors (not coincidentally nearly all Democratic governors) and state and local public health authorities.

Meanwhile, a veritable ecosystem of disinformation and astroturf grew and grew to feed the conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and misinformation behind antivaccine and antimask propaganda. As a result of this and its having played footsie with the devil for political power, over the last six years, Republicans have gone from just pandering to antivaxxers without really having their hearts in it because right wing activist groups were opposed to vaccine mandates to many of them openly expressing antivaccine conspiracy theories themselves. For example, in 2018 one of the Republican candidates held an antivaccine—excuse me, “vaccine choice”—roundtable in my very own congressional district, chock full of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and other nonsense promoted by a local antivaccine group called Michigan for Vaccine Choice. I documented it all by attending as a mole. Elsewhere, a number of statehouses have a large contingent of antivaccine legislators (or those willing to play ball with them, like Sen. Diaz). Yes, I’m talking to you, Ohio and Oregon (where, although Democrats control the legislature, Republicans were able to block a bill to strengthen school vaccine mandates by refusing to come to work and denying the bill a quorum). Truly, as Sen. Diaz demonstrates, the Republican Party has gone from just pandering to antivaxxers in 2015 to inarguably being the party of antivaxxers, and this process was nearly complete before the pandemic.
continued:
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/09 ... -mandates/
They're just concerned constitutionally-minded individuals who want the freedom to let their children suffer or die from meningitis, tuberculosis, measles, diptheria, rubella, mumps, yellow fever, beriberi, or the human papillomavirus. The gummermin gots no bisnis interferin in God's plan.
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Seabass
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Re: Meanwhile, in Florida...

Post by Seabass » Tue Sep 28, 2021 6:09 am

How does someone think they're going to get away with this?

Florida man tries to trade in vehicle he stole from same dealership, police say
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire
"They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." —Sebastian Gorka

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