That’s H.L. Mencken.
You are probably thinking of two quotes by him:
one is
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard
and the other:
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
IMHO this is a top reason they are doing this - to own the libs. The lawmakers in Florida know vaccines are fucking safe and effective, and they fucking know about herd immunity, even if they are light on the specifics. Same with the Governor. They are educated people, and they know this is wrong and is the wrong direction to go. Their own damn kids are vaccinated.
But, if it flies in the face of the libs, they’re all-in on senseless stuff like this. The top guy in the party is gratified every time one of his henchmen gets attention for pissing off people. The Governor and this idiot “doctor” just elevated their profiles because Democrats are decrying this move. And if the libs hate it, it must be good and right!
Edit: sorry for the rant - we were starting to get into the “why” here.
I’m not defending this push to remove vaccine mandates. Really, it is indefensible. But my understanding is that these vaccines will still be available to those that want their children to have them correct? If that is the case, I would hope that the more enlightened among Floridians will continue to have their children vaccinated. In that case, they will be protected from these diseases, so raising vaccinated children there will not be any more dangerous than elsewhere. I’m not a doctor, is this line of thinking correct?
Presciant … fellow wasn’t he?
No, for a few reasons. First, if your kid is immunocompromised and can’t get vaccinated, what do you do? Move out of the state?
Second, vaccines aren’t 100% effective – so, you get vaccinated and you’re still able to get the disease. With herd immunity, you’re still protected, but when, not if, Florida falls well below that level, your kid will be in danger.
thank you for this explanation, it is helpful
I certainly would if I was able to.
Let’s hope he wasn’t completely correct, otherwise we are fucked.
The Wikipedia article on herd immunity I linked to above has a lot of information about this.
In addition to the points already mentioned, immunity can wane with age or due to various diseases like HIV or leukemia, or due to medical conditions like an impaired spleen. Or people undergoing chemotherapy or radiation therapy. All of these people are normally protected by herd immunity.
Herd immunity also protects newborns who are too young to get certain vaccines. And people who can’t get some vaccines because they are contraindicated for them due to allergies or other bad reaction.
Ironically, in the case of measles—which is already spreading due to its extreme contagiousness and the high level of vaccination necessary to maintain herd immunity—it has been reported to have a side effect of creating immune system amnesia and making people more susceptible to other diseases. Cite. So you can end up with a vicious cycle of even more disease spreading.
Yeah, exactly. Maybe if this was 50 years ago and new parents deciding on whether to vaccinate their kids could remember growing up with literal plagues coming through every few years, it would have been different. Then again, maybe not: after all, that’s when the modern mandates were put in place, so I guess even they needed government prodding to get it done.
Vaccines aren’t immunity. They lower the odds of someone transmitting the disease to you, but they don’t eliminate the chance.
What they do achieve is lowering the odds of transmission enough that on average each person who gets the disease will only successfully transmit it to, on average, less than one person. Once you get transmission rates that low, the disease burns out in the population and can even go completely extinct in the wild if there is no animal reservoir, the way Smallpox did.
Diseases like measles and polio were essentially eradicated in the US, but not worldwide. A disease like measles makes it into the country every so often. Once it does, if we are above the herd immunity threshold, it will burn out and the disease will remain eradicated. If there are pockets of unvaccinated populations, we could get to the current situation, where there once again appears to be a domestic reservoir of measles in areas that are heavily unvaccinated - the disease festers within the country. Because antivaxxers often congregate in religious or hippie-dippie type communities, and this is where the measles epidemics occur right now, the disease kills about 90% unvaccinated victims each year.
But there is an even worse scenario, where instead of unvaxxed pockets the general population of the US (or of a state like Florida, at least) drops below herd immunity levels. At that point, there are always enough people for the disease to infect in order to remain in the population, and it cycles through periods of relative dormancy or rarity and outbreaks, the way the flu does but much deadlier. This was basically the state of humanity between the time that we developed agriculture and animal husbandry, becoming exposed to these diseases in the first place; and the time that vaccines were widely adopted. It is still the state of humanity in poverty striken or war torn areas.
Vaccines help in that world, the way that the flu vaccine makes you less likely to get sick and makes the sickness less severe. But the same way that there’s just so much flu out there that even if you get the flu vaccine you’ll sometimes get sick, we could get to the point where there is just so much measles out there that even vaccinated people get sick and die with some regularity.
Plus, you get the Measles vaccine at 12-15 months; without herd immunity, you’ll see far too many infants die of measles before they’re old enough to be vaccinated against it. Add on to that people who are immunocompromised and can’t be vaccinated, and it’s a total, unmitigated disaster.
I would strongly recommend to any Florida parents of immunocompromised children to do exactly that, before it’s too late.
This. I’m somewhat sympathetic to people who are actually opposed to being vaccinated, even if i think they are wrong. In most cases, I’m willing to support generous rules for opting out. But if it’s harder to get your kids vaccinated than to avoid getting your kids vaccinated, a whole hell of a lot of kids won’t get vaccinated.
Maybe de santis cynically wants to kill off Florida’s elderly population.
Oh, so this is why it’s such a big problem. The UK doesn’t have any kind of vaccine mandate, but the NHS does push pretty hard to get children vaccinated, and parents are used to having regular contact with the healthcare system. We can safely assume Florida will not be replacing the mandate with any kind of advertising or encouragement for parents to get their kids vaccinated.
Vaccines… aren’t free? Mandatory vaccines for kids, that are intended to achieve herd immunity? That CANNOT be true.
Aren’t most of the people in Florida elderly?
They are, if they are recommended by the CDC, which may no longer be the case, soon. But, doctor’s visits, even wellness visits, aren’t free and that’s where your child would typically get vaccinated. So, if you don’t need to get your kid vaccinated and you don’t have insurance (see other Trump administration actions), are you really going to take time off from work, have an expensive doctor’s visit, etc.?
The average age in FL is around 42, so no. About 20% are under 18.
It should be understood that vaccines alone don’t eradicate disease; most vaccines do not provide ‘sterilizing immunity’, and many pathogens have animal reservoirs that can host them. Controlling and hopefully eradicating a disease also requires active public health interventions including public education, surveillance, contact tracing, quarantine, and eliminating animal vectors to the extent possible. What vaccines do in this scheme is as described in the highlighted sentence above; they prevent an endemic disease from becoming an epidemic outbreak, allowing the other interventions to be practicable. Eliminating Variola major (the virus that causes smallpox) wasn’t just a matter of inoculating everyone but tracing the paths of infection and ensuring that no host, human or animal, could remain infected and unquarantined.
We will almost certainly never accomplish this with measles (even though there are no animal hosts other than primates) because the vaccine is not extremely close to 100% effective (it’s about 92% effective in preventing infection, and almost completely effective in suppressing severe and fatal reactions to the illness such that people who are infected typically only experience a slight fever and mild inflammation of the lymph nodes and sinus tissues akin to a respiratory infection) and its extreme prolificacy. It is also possible that the measles vaccine doesn’t provide lifelong immunity, and the elderly and immune-compromised are often advised to get a booster when there are uncontained measles outbreaks. The vaccine is not recommended for infants (typically given 9-12 months depending on the incidence in local population) so they remain a vulnerable category regardless of whether parents are well-informed or not.
So, vaccination is not just “a personal choice”; it can have real impacts upon society at large, and there are very good reasons for mandatory childhood vaccination. There are valid reasons to be skeptical of a lot of modern medical practice but the production, testing, approval, and scheduling of vaccines is so transparent, cautious, widely reviewed, and virtually universally supported by everybody who has expertise in this area that the counterarguments (essentially being “Because I don’t wanna!” and “I’m too fucking paranoid that someone might be pulling something over on me that I’m going to listen to a screechy-voiced lawyer who has made his fortune suing vaccine manufacturers than to medical scientists and public health experts who have devoted their lives to the welfare of others”) don’t really carry any weight.
Stranger
Indeed. About 22% of Florida’s population is age 65+ (thanks to being a retirement destination), which makes it one of the states with the highest proportion of its population being elderly, but this only makes it comparable with some Northern states in this regard: Maine, Vermont, Delaware, and West Virginia all have similar proportions.
Oh dear.
I got my daughter vaccinated against chickenpox privately, since it wasn’t included in the UK vaccination schedule (they’re adding it in January), and I took her to a pharmacy to get the vaccine. I’m pretty sure we went on two Saturdays, so no time off work required. I had to pay, since it wasn’t provided on the NHS, but there’s no reason the government couldn’t pay for the visit to a nurse as well as the vaccine itself, and provide at least some vaccines at pharmacies that open outside office hours rather than only doctor’s offices.
It should be as easy as possible for parents to do the right thing.
There are no animal hosts of smallpox, which is a major reason humanity was able to eradicate it. (Also, nit-pick, but there are two viruses causing smallpox, variola major and variola minor, and both have been eliminated in the wild).
At least all the kids that will be coming down with measles and chicken pox in the coming months and years will have Florida’s strong, accessible public health care system to catch them. /snark
The point is if he state is going to make vaccinations optional, then they don’t care if your kid lives or dies. Florida already doesn’t care about their education.