Florida Wants to Kill Its Young? and Trump Brags About His Racism
Frat Boys or Future Rapists of America?, Lindell May Lose His Pillows, "Wakanda Forever" Music
The thing that gets me most upset in the news is people needlessly and cruelly mistreating other people. Sometimes those people are mistreating entire states or even the whole country, sometimes it’s a particular group. I’m hoping that the more we examine this kind of behavior, the better our chances of eliminating it.
Politics: Florida Surgeon General Sets Medicine—and Black People—Back 100 Years
In threat to public health, Florida publishes flawed and unscientific anti-vaccine ‘study’ (LA Times)
Summary: Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo issued “a guidance” on October 7, 2022 recommending against males aged 18-39 receiving the mRNA vaccines for COVID. Ladapo based his recommendation on a study that supposedly showed higher risk of cardiac-related death among males in that age range within 28 days after the vaccination. According to the article, “As numerous qualified professionals have pointed out, however, the study is so sloppy and incoherent that it amounts to a monument of pseudoscience.” Wrote Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist and professor of surgery, “This is the first time that we’ve seen a state government weaponize bad science to spread anti-vaccine disinformation as official policy.”
My Take: Ladapo—I can’t bear to call him “doctor” because he clearly does not embrace the Hippocratic Oath—has long been a hand puppet for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential ambitions. He’s the Black poster boy for photo opportunities to show diversity under a governor and political party who is actively attempting to restrict Black voters, robbing them of their voices and political power.
As such, Ladapo has become a human megaphone for DeSantis’ anti-vaccine policies that helped Florida lose 81,000 lives. Those policies made Florida the 13th worst in the nation in death rate (compared to California, with strict vaccine protocols, which ranked 40th).
To support Ladapo, some people point out that last year, Germany, France, and a few other European countries restricted Moderna’s COVID vaccine for people under 30 over concerns about a very small risk of heart inflammation. But Pfizer was not restricted and that same age group was encouraged to get vaccinated. To put this in perspective, anyone over the age of 12 entering Germany must be vaccinated. Because they aren’t idiots.
Ladapo is Black. He knows this virus has been much more devastating to the Black community than to the White. In part, this is because of vaccine hesitancy based on well-documented bad treatment from the medical community. In one poll, 7 out of 10 Blacks say they’ve been treated unfairly by the medical profession. Part of the reason they have been is because of pseudo-science and biases (White doctors believed Black patients did not feel pain as much as White patients). Ladapo should be helping his community rise so they can be healthier, live longer, and be more successful. Instead, he gives them the same bad science that caused the problem in the first place.
Another major issue here that is more social than medical is that when Black professionals (like Clarence Thomas and Herschel Walker) allow themselves to be used by White politicians, they aren’t just an embarrassment to the Black community, but they are a threat to our well-being. They embrace and promote the stereotypes that African Americans have been fighting against for centuries. In this case, Ladapo’s incompetence and lack of scientific knowledge does damage to the reputations of all the dedicated Black doctors who had to work twice as hard as most Whites to become doctors and to build a practice. He confirms biases in STEM hiring that currently discriminates against Blacks.
The only equality here is that Ladapo’s ambition is just as harmful to the Black community as DeSantis’. Floridians must be pretty defensive about the criticism their state has been getting lately. That criticism isn’t at Floridians but at the Republican politicians who use the state as a base to nurture their personal political ambitions the way a crow feeds off roadkill. It’s not too late to take the state back.