A seventh case, the first in a child under age 5, follows the state’s controversial surgeon general’s decision to let parents decide whether to quarantine children or keep them in school.
The Florida measles outbreak is expanding. On Friday, health officials in Broward County confirmed a seventh case of the virus, a child under age 5.
The patient is the youngest so far to be infected in the outbreak, and the first to be identified outside of Manatee Bay Elementary School in Weston, near Fort Lauderdale.
It’s unknown what connection the youngest measles case has to the school, but the spread beyond school-age kids was expected.
Cases are “not going to stay contained just to that one school, not when a virus is this infectious,” said Dr. David Kimberlin, co-director of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
All of the unvaccinated children’s parents should be charged with child endangerment.
Here is the problem as I see it and I don’t know a way around it:
*There are some kids who cannot get vaccinated for legitimate reasons such as allergies or being immunocompromised.
*There are highly unethical anti-vax doctors willing to give anti-vax parents fake exemptions based on those legitimate reasons that their kids don’t actually have.
So how do you get around that?
A brief search indicates that only 1-2% of children are unable to receive traditional vaccinations due to allergies or immunocompromised conditions.
I’m willing to bet that the unethical doctors writing exemptions likely have an unbalanced amount of child-vaccination exemptions to administered child-vaccinations ratio. Such discrepancies should be thoroughly investigated.
In other words, if more than 2 out of every 100 children, a particular doctor consults with, are given vaccination exemptions, then something is suspicious.
That doesn’t work. Doctors specialize in specific things. There are probably doctors who legitimately have 100% vaccine exempt patients for medical reasons.
The real problem is that doctors can’t be “fired”. Stop asking the government to do something when it’s really the AMA licensing board that is the problem.
It’s a private organization that is run by doctors. Obviously doctors are not going to prioritize making it easier to take away someone’s license. Demand the AMA do something about “killer doctors” or something. If their brand is associated with sickness, then they might take action.
Hey, maybe the AMA licensing board should be a government body! Maybe industry self-regulation doesn’t work!
Should be charged with bio-terrorism
Reminder that Florida’s Surgeon General, hand-picked by DeSantis, is an anti-vaxxer.
And he’s telling parents of kids without measles vaccinations to send their kids to school during this outbreak.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/joseph-ladapo-florida-ron-desantis-measles
Anyone whose kid catches measles because of this should sue the surgeon general for malpractice. Maybe also drop a complaint to the medical board, see if they can get his medical license revoked.
As much as I’d love to see that, the likelihood of it happening is low. The boards move on public opinion and consensus. The public they care about may be only other doctors, but as we’ve seen since covid, there are plenty of doctors who listened to Ozzy and boarded the crazy train.
Public consensus is that vaccines for diseases like measles, polio, etc., are a good thing. Even most of the people and doctors who were against taking the covid vaccines seem to be in agreement with this, or at least the ones I have heard speak on the subject. Its just an extremely small outlier that claims otherwise.
Still, I feel like you are sadly right about the likelihood of any sort of prosecution happening. I would also love to see logic prevail, every once in a while.
MMR was the boogeyman jab that started the whole modern antivax movement. I wouldn’t say it’s rare for antivax people to be opposed to getting the measles vaccination.
