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Florida to end all school vaccine requirements
- bdhe 1y agoHow are others processing this horrific backsliding in scientific trust, literacy, and straight up lack of compassion for the most vulnerable in the US? Folks can surely see the connection between dropping vaccination rates and the rise of measles in Texas for example. Why aren't more people outraged and how are they allowing unprincipled politicians to impact their lives so drastically in pursuit of power?
- pstuart 1y agoThis will be a classic case of FAFO (Fuck Around and Find Out). It's a pity that innocent children will likely bear the brunt of the finding out.
- throwawayqqq11 1y ago[flagged]
- iLoveOncall 1y ago[flagged]
- JohnFen 1y ago> being dead is better than being wrong. Literally. Yes. The real tragedy isn't that, though, it's that endangering and killing others is better than being wrong for them. It's pure sociopathy. Like that father.
- tstrimple 1y agoSome of these folks are willing to kill themselves as well if they think the alternative is some minority receiving benefits. See Dying of Whiteness. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jonathan-m-metzl-dying-whiteness/ https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jonathan-m-metzl-dying... > Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor was not angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. “I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained: “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.” > At the most basic level, Trevor died of the toxic effects of liver damage caused by hepatitis C. Yet Trevor’s deteriorating condition resulted also from the toxic effects of dogma. Dogma that told him that governmental assistance in any form was evil and not to be trusted, even when the assistance came in the form of federal contracts with private health insurance or pharmaceutical companies, or from expanded communal safety nets. Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and nonwhite others. Dogma suggesting to Trevor that minority groups received lavish benefits from the state, even though he himself lived and died on a low-income budget with state assistance. Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.
- nerdjon 1y ago[flagged]
- atomicnumber3 1y agoDecades of disinformation and partisan politics being brought to its ultimate conclusion.
- throwawayqqq11 1y agoI wonder if the less manipulated have lasting moments of "what if they called us dipshits for a reason". We only see the extremes here. I wish those more reasonably right leaning internet victims would speak up as loud and as long as they could.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dogleash 1y ago> How are others processing this horrific backsliding in scientific trust Tragic, but we sleepwalked into this state of affairs by downplaying the severity of epistemic failures in academia and science communication. Oh it's just a little publish or perish here, replication crisis there. Nobody really believes the clickbait headline. Overall we're on a solid foundation. Science means rigor, right? So the word science means rigor was done. Getting mad at someone for over-correcting won't make them feel more righteous. We have failed our fellow countrymen.
- krapp 1y agoThis seems like a bit of a retrofiction. People weren't pushing the anti-vaccine narratives because of the replication crisis, rather they used the replication crisis to justify their pre-existing mistrust of vaccines. The science around vaccines is actually sound, there's was no "replication crisis" or failure of rigor in that regard. Yes, even the covid vaccine was tested and went through clinical trials.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- watwut 1y agoNo, this is result of intentionally and well paid propaganda. It has nothing to do with failure of science or academy. Even less with publish or perish. This is happening because some rich people radical right on republican side wanted to happen. Smart conservatives worked for this for years. They knew they are lying, but it did not mattered to them. Blaming others is just another round of enabling. Blame shifting away from who intentionally caused this wont help anyone and does not reflect the truth. Also, publish or perish thing is literally something the same people actively worked for.
- tpm 1y agoThis has nothing at all to do with academia and science.
- aredox 1y ago
- cosmicgadget 1y agoIt's quicksand. The more you tell people RFK is a quack, they more they'll believe him and that you are working for 'them'.
- Dig1t 1y agoI am surrounded by people in my daily life who are celebrating this change, I can tell you exactly why. The establishment has done very little to try and address concerns from vaccine skeptics. Their response is mostly one of condescension and derision. Rather than using kindness and education, many establishment folks simply refuse to meet these people where they are and instead continue to act as though it’s completely insane to question the things that are being injected into their children. There are completely valid questions for normal people to ask that don’t receive much of a response often, things like “why are vaccines immune from lawsuits?” and “why has the standard vaccine schedule increased so much?”. Instead of providing good clear answers to these questions, skeptics are marginalized. How can this behavior not create distrust in scientific experts? The more you talk down to people, the less likely they are to trust you. Note: I myself am not a vaccine skeptic, but I know many and I hear their reasoning often.
- fzeroracer 1y ago> The establishment has done very little to try and address concerns from vaccine skeptics. For decades, the argument against anti-vaccination skeptics was to try and educate them. We've put them on TV, thrown our most well-reasoned arguments against them, showed them the data and proved to them multiple times over that their arguments are wrong. We argued over and over and over again that Andrew Wakefield, a literal fraudster who kicked off a large part of things and who aimed to profit from the anti-vaccine sentiment, was wrong. Frankly the only argument and patience I have now for anti-vaccine skeptics is extreme derision and insults. They deserve nothing and should receive zero respect.
- Dig1t 1y agoI can tell you that whatever education you think has been put out there, it’s absolutely not reaching its intended audience, and much of what does land is actually doing the opposite of what it intends to do. Example: Colbert’s “The vax scene” episode did more to damage the reputation of vaccines than I think anyone realizes. Yes discrediting Andrew Wakefield helps, but you have to fight the incorrect ideas about the vaccines themselves not just one of the people who pushed these ideas. One example: many skeptics ask the question “if vaccines are so safe then why are they immune to lawsuits?”. This is a very reasonable question for people to ask! And honestly, responding to this common sense question with derision and insults hurts your cause. The establishment needs good responses to questions like this and they need to be repeated in a non-hateful way. 99% of media and online conversation is just condescending. Like look at the comments in this HN post, most people are extremely unkind. “Extreme derision and insults” is going to make the problem so much worse.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoBeing ignorant, unreasonable, a billionaire, or a pedophile should be uniformly punished severely socially if judicial, legislative, and executive bureaucrats won't.
- AIorNot 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- msarrel 1y agoIt's like it would just be the end of the world if one American had to think about another American's life. Very disappointing, but then again I guess getting rid of vaccines will be all the rage until the backlash and then it'll be 20 years of we need vaccines and then it'll be 20 years of no vaccines and then... Because we just can't learn anything.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoForget caring about others do Floridians really think families will keep flocking to Disney and Florida vacations if the state lets measles and mumps outbreaks leave kids deaf, or a polio outbreak paralyze them? When my kids were little Florida would instantly be a pass from me after this.
- cosmicgadget 1y agoIt's terrible that kids have to suffer because their parents are terminally online.
- somethoughts 1y agoLooking at this from a glass half full mindset, a decade from now we should have a pretty interesting data set from a public health policy perspective. Prior to this, to get such a large subset of children to not take vaccines for an epidemiological study would probably be illegal or at best be considered highly unethical. Convincing parents to enroll their children in such a study in the name of science and for a small stipend would probably be next to impossible considering the potential lifetime impacts. I posit that the challenge has been that in order to prove vaccine efficacy on a continuing/updated basis, you need access to a non-vaccinated control group that controls for developed world socio-economic conditions which didn't exist (until now). Thus there hasn't been an easy way to do large population scale studies on vaccine efficacy - so it did somewhat become a "trust us" tautology (until now).
- pavel_lishin 1y agoI'd argue that the current situation is pretty damn unethical.
- triceratops 1y agoScientists have to answer to ethics boards. Politicians do not.
- Dig1t 1y agoPlease don’t flame me, this is an honest question. Why is this unethical and for whom? The vaccines work, so parents who choose to vaccinate their kids will be protected. Parents who don’t trust the vaccine for whatever reason, they feel strongly that they might harm their child. Isn’t it sort of unethical to force parents to inject their child with something they think is dangerous? You’re basically asking parents to willfully harm (in their mind they think it’s harmful, I’m not saying it’s actually harmful) their own child, from their perspective why should they make that choice? I just don’t see how this problem can be solved other than going back to square one and trying to educate people and convince them that vaccines are not harmful. The alternative is to force people to accept these injections even though people believe they are harmful, which just isn’t going to work well in the United States.
- fzeroracer 1y agoA remarkably stupid decision made by remarkably stupid people that won't face the consequences of their actions, because it'll primarily be the vulnerable that have to deal with the fallout of disease resurgence.
- treetalker 1y agoSteel-man it: Perhaps DeSantis and the other geniuses in Tallahassee are simply incentivizing the Florida population to develop herd immunity to polio, measles, and meningitis.
- krapp 1y agoPeople aren't going to "develop herd immunity to polio, measles, and meningitis," they're just going to get sick and die en masse. Herd immunity at the scale of modern societies requires mandatory widespread vaccinations.
- treetalker 1y agoI agree with this and the other responses I have seen so far. I was simply trying to make the Florida argument as strong as I could — which is not very strong, because once again Florida government is being hare-brained.
- Tadpole9181 1y agoDefending these policies is actively harmful. Why in the world would you do that? Actual, real-world policy being created that will cause children to die or be crippled for life is something to joke about or try to justify? Are we going to steel man Nazism next?
- krapp 1y agoTo be fair to treetalker, we're supposed to use the strongest possible interpretation per the guidelines. Doing so isn't implicit defense or advocacy. I sometimes take positions I don't necessarily believe in if I think it will spur on better discussion, there's nothing wrong with it.
- treetalker 1y agoApparently my comment was not dripping with enough sarcasm. In no way am I defending this — quite the opposite.
- jerlam 1y agoWhen would we see actual effects from ending vaccine requirements immediately, seeing as a large number of children are already vaccinated? What would it look like?
- Balgair 1y agoDepends on your assumptions. Measles requires 92-95% immunity for hers immunity. Here's a likely scenario for a K-5 school of 600 children, 100 per class, assume incoming post requirement drop is 1/5 students: Year 0: 96% immune (Typical from what I can glean online) Year 1: 80% of Ks now immunity from vaccination. 96% of 1-5 immune as normal. Non immune =20 +5*(4) = 40 out of 600, or 7% of 600 kiddos. So 93% rate of immunity. Right on the bubble in a year's time. Tweak numbers as you'd like, but with even modest decreases (16% loss, or and additional one in 6 hesitancy) in vaccination, Measles herd immunity is tettering in a year and lost in the second year, by a large margin
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bluesounddirect 1y agoThe better question is why announce this message? was there some sort of push for some contradictory vaccine policy from the federal government? This is another thinly veiled attempt to distract from the fact Trump is connected to Epistein. The children of Florida are going to pay, again for Trump meddling with their lives.
- xnx 1y agoThe beauty/tragedy of the modern world is we're so far removed from all he painful lessons that got us here that we don't think about them at all.
- uncircle 1y agoWe must learn from history; if we don't, history will beat us with the textbook until we finally get the lesson. Honestly I am glad that Nature has very effective mechanisms to keep a rein on the ever-increasing hubris of humanity.
- NoGravitas 1y agoGiven the current levels of hubris, we will need Godzilla.
- ChoGGi 1y agoI've a plan for an iron lung startup in Florida, any investors looking to get in early? I've got AI and blockchains.
- morepork 1y agoHonest question: do you get charged more for health insurance in the US if you and/or your family aren't vaccinated?