Faded tombstones in old church cemeteries document how perilous childhood used to be in this country. When Jefferson was president, nearly half the children died before age 5. Grief was the constant companion of parenthood.
As late as 1850, life expectancy in the U.S. was below 40 years. By 1925, it was 58.6. Today it’s 79.6 years — 21 years and 36% longer than a century ago.
Americans can confidently anticipate old age simply because we now survive childhood. The reason: Vaccines, modern medicine’s standout miracle.
Diphtheria, once a major killer, is history. So is polio. Measles, too — or so we thought.
That measles is once again killing our kids shows why the greatest threat to public health is not some new virus incubating the next pandemic, deadly as it may be.
Sick in more ways than one
The grave threat is the calculated, cynical irresponsibility of political hacks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joseph Ladapo, the health secretaries of the nation and state of Florida, and their patrons, President Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis. A nation that submits to their subversion of public health could fairly be called sick — morally and clinically.
Kennedy’s influence on U.S. vaccine policy is already so destructive that three well-governed Western states, California, Oregon and Washington, are forming their own health alliance to promote vaccines independent of national policies driven by ideology.
DeSantis and his quack surgeon general, Ladapo, now mean to make this the first state to repeal all of its vaccination mandates, including those for school children, college students and residents of nursing homes.
They would need legislation to carry out most of that. Any legislator who agrees would be voting to kill children. Florida childhood vaccination rates have already fallen below 90%, the worst showing in 20 years, well below the 95% deemed essential for herd immunity.
Banning fluoridation in public water supplies was stupid enough, guaranteeing rotten teeth. This latest idiocy augurs deaths.
For voters, a litmus test
Saving Florida’s children from DeSantis’ extremism should be every voter’s litmus test for 2026.
“Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God,” says Ladapo, whose history is as distorted as his science.
In Ladapo’s twisted logic, the government does not have the right to tell anyone what to put in their body. Indeed it does. That is the indisputable lesson of worldwide public health.
This propaganda is from an administration that embezzled $10 million from a Medicaid settlement to spend on telling Floridians what not to put in their bodies when it funneled the money to advertising against a recreational marijuana amendment. The DeSantis-Ladapo commitment to “personal choice” is never consistent.
The last major measles outbreak, incubated by declining vaccination rates, prompted Congress in 1994 to pump more money into protecting children.
A federal CDC study of the ensuing 20 years credited childhood vaccines with preventing 322 million illnesses, 21 million hospitalizations and 732,000 premature deaths, saving the nation a net $1.38 trillion in overall costs to health care and the economy.
An audition for CDC post?
DeSantis and Ladapo unveiled their morbid plan on the eve of Kennedy’s scheduled confrontation with the Senate Finance Committee. According to a fast-spreading rumor, Ladapo engineered it in a bid to be CDC director. His stance, if anything, is more extreme than Kennnedy’s.
As expected, the Senate hearing showed quickly what an arrogant jackass Kennedy is, and that most Republican senators are still willing to cover (or cower) for him. But not all.
The Republican chairman’s refusal to put Kennedy under oath, as the Democrats demanded, left his petulant responses subject to disbelief — notably, his unconvincing explanation for firing CDC Director Susan Monarez. Kennedy should be the one fired, not her.
Three notable exceptions to the Republican deference to Kennedy were Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Barrasso of Wyoming, both physicians, and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, who’s not running again.
They dramatized how Kennedy broke his own promise to Cassidy to not discourage vaccinations. The new FDA policy effectively bars pharmacies from administering COVID-19 shots to children and healthy adults under 65. Kennedy cancelled $500 million worth of mRNA research and continues to lard his vaccine advisory committee with anti-vax cranks.
Cassidy did get Kennedy to applaud President Trump’s first-term achievement in distributing the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. But Kennedy also claimed, incredulously, not to know how many died in the pandemic and refused to credit the vaccine with saving millions of lives. He said his advisory committee’s conflicts of interest do not matter because they were disclosed.
GOP senator: ‘Vaccines work’
The rapid development and distribution of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, to which Kennedy is so hostile, are credited elsewhere with saving approximately 2.5 million lives around the world over four years, from 2020 to 2024.
“I’m a doctor. Vaccines work,” Barrasso told him.
The post-hearing reality, unfortunately, is that Kennedy is still health secretary, remaining a threat to the nation’s health and a sorry example for state officials like DeSantis and Ladapo.
Like a deadly virus, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine hysteria has now fully infected Florida. And there’s no immediate cure.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
