It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.
That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.
This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”
“Scaring people unnecessarily like this has been hard to watch. … It is hard to believe that Dr. Ladapo actually issued that statement.” Vaccine authority Paul Offit.
Can he lose his credentials for this? That seems very contrary to what an MD should stand for.
Andrew Wakefield deservedly lost his for something similar, so yeah, he definitely should.
Then again, Wakefield was working under the British NHS rather than being the pet doctor of a fascist demagogue…
Yeah the process for losing credentials under the NHS isn’t going to have much in common with losing credentials in Desantis’ Florida. And if it does he’ll threaten them until they back down.
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Florida will be an excellent case study for future historians about how authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism are a deadly combination.
Would that make him ineligible to be surgeon general in Florida? I suspect not in that crazy state.
This guy has ceased being a doctor and taken up the call of ambitious social and political climber, he got his current posting from Op-Ed’s that DeSantis read and only because the Op-Ed’s stances aligned with the GOP’s stance on COVID and Vaccines, which is just echoing Trump’s stances on those topics like the good lapdogs they are.
You sure? What if he’s a true believer? A political liar is better than the latter because he swings according to the voters. A true believer will go to the ends of the world for his faith.
It’s possible but he looks like a grifter trying to get in on the action to me, and that’s what like half the right wing is these days.
In case you wonder who Paul Offit is, from the wikipedia entry on him:
Paul Allan Offit (born March 27, 1951) is an American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, former chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases (1992–2014), and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Offit is a member of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee and is a member of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.[3][4] Offit is a board member of Every Child By Two[5] and a founding board member of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF).[6]
Offit has published more than 130 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety,[3] and is the author or co-author of books on vaccines, vaccination, the rejection of medicine by some religious groups,[7] and antibiotics. He is one of the most public faces of the scientific consensus that vaccines have no association with autism. As a result, he has been the frequent target of hate mail and death threats.[3][8][9]
In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[10]
Why? Why the fuck?
