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.
What are they trying to accomplish with this disinfo? It’s bizarre.
Normalizing distrust for any large institutions, even including themselves. If you want to pave the way for a strongman ruler, you first have to break down all the alternatives until one individual’s strongman rulership becomes the most preferential option.
Which works because most people are idiots who don’t see the breaking down of the existing institutions as the obviously malicious activity.
Human history, from a distance, does not always fail to look like idiots purposefully making decisions that ruins everything for themselves.
Loving this dystopian timeline we’re in. It’s just tits.
DeSantis was trying to win the 2024 Republican nomination with Covid response as his centerpiece. So he appointed a nutjob to the role.
Nut job is just proceeding to nutjob.
Same with the rest of their culture war.
It has never been about governing or public health. Ever.
This is about latching onto fear and hate and further polarizing people. Because feeding that hate is what their base wants, and raises your status in their hate group.
It has always been about selfish attempts at taking the reigns of the hate train. The destruction in their wake is just the cost to play to them.
I mean, it’s clear that they’re trying to dissuade people from getting the vaccine. This surgeon general was known at the time he was appointed to be anti-vax: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039613351/desantis-florida-surgeon-general-vaccine-mandates
Control, plain and simple. GOP as a whole only has one goal: power by any means, and a controlled populace is a disempowered populace.
Fascism needs you to fear the “others”. Health and money are the two biggest problems in people’s lives right now so making the “others” look like they’re coming after those things you already are very close to losing is an easy way to scare people. So taxes, vaccines, etc., are big targets. And as a bonus, they then get to take those things from the people instead; and people willingly hand them to them…for safe keeping or something…I don’t know…
Kill off their people so they can start collecting back Medicare costs.