With selection of Pumariega to lead MDC, we can put fractious process behind us
After almost two years, some consternation and more than a handful of ruffled feathers, the Miami Dade College (MDC) Board of Trustees unanimously chose a new leader to fill the void left by Eduardo Padrón. It would feel almost blasphemous to merely refer to Padrón as the former president of MDC without praising his five decades of service to the college and community. We would need more than a few hundred words to list all of his accomplishments.
It is also important to recognize Rolando Montoya who so professionally, selflessly and effectively led MDC as interim president in what must feel to him as much more than 16 months. Many of us look forward to his guidance and support during the transition and beyond.
Like Padrón and Montoya, our new president — Madeline Pumariega — is a homegrown product with her own positive history at Miami Dade College. A Hialeah native, Pumariega spent 20 years at MDC working her way up from being on the basketball team as a student athlete to serving as president of the Wolfson Campus.
After MDC, she went to the nonprofit Take Stock in Children of Florida, followed by becoming the first woman named chancellor of the Florida College System and her current post as executive vice president and provost of Tallahassee Community College.
In selecting Pumariega to be MDC’s new president, the board of trustees closes a search process that, at times, revealed some fissures within the MDC family. The 19month, sometimes tumultuous, chapter placed our students and institution in a vulnerable position as the strategic plan, along with many important decisions were placed on hold in order to select a new leader whose vision will now be part of this process moving forward. It is time to heal and move the institution forward with one of our very own at the helm.
In choosing Pumariega as president, Miami Dade College has once again illuminated its commitment to diversity and affirmed its ethos of achievement through education irrespective of gender, race or ethnicity. I am proud of our board’s decision and even prouder of the unified resolve that trustees showed with their full support of Pumariega, a proven educational leader.
Our new president will have plenty on her plate, I am rooting for her and stand ready to help her in any way I can so she can succeed along with my colleagues on the board. At the end of the day, we all win when MDC, our economic engine and democracy’s college succeeds.
Long before Americans began clamoring for a novel coronavirus vaccine, a collection of teenagers across the nation was embarking on a quest for vaccination — by posing questions on Reddit. Teenagers with “anti-vax” parents were, and still are, desperately trying to figure out how to get vaccinated, but outdated laws in many states deny them agency.
As doctors, public health officials and regular citizens push for increased immunization, teenagers can and should have a role to play. They want autonomy — not simply to protect their personal well-being, but to help end preventable diseases for everyone.
All 50 states need to give teenagers the right to be vaccinated without parental permission.
When I was 16, I stumbled upon my peers’ Reddit posts. I was stunned by the fact they were asking these questions and by how difficult it was to find clear answers. After a year of research, I launched VaxTeen, an organization that helps teenagers make informed decisions about vaccines and provides simplified state-by-state guides on vaccine consent laws.
In the United States, the ability of minors to consent to vaccinations depends on the state they live in. The patchwork of overlapping judicial decisions, state codes, federal laws and accepted practices that governs the age at which children can consent — and what vaccinations they can consent to, if any — is convoluted, inconsistent and at times deliberately obtuse.
Since vaccines often aren’t even explicitly mentioned, deciphering whether a minor is allowed to self-consent is extraordinarily complex, especially for teenagers trying to do so without their parents’ support.
Only seven states allow minors above varying minimum ages to make all of their own health care decisions, including those concerning vaccines. Delaware and Montana allow them to self-consent to all recommended vaccinations, although in Montana, this doesn’t extend to the HPV vaccine. Six states, including California, permit them to consent to HPV and/or hepatitis B vaccinations and six states apply a subjective “mature minor” exception that allows minors to self-consent to vaccination if a healthcare professional determines they are sufficiently mature.
In response to measles outbreaks among undervaccinated communities in 31 states last year, the Illinois and New York legislatures are considering bills that would broaden a minor’s ability to selfconsent to vaccinations from only those preventing sexually transmitted diseases to all vaccines that are CDC-recommended. Similar bills are being deliberated in Georgia and Washington, D.C., where minor vaccine-consent is not allowed.
Parents who are increasingly opting not to vaccinate their children have endangered everyone as immunization rates have fallen too low to keep diseases such as measles and whooping cough at bay. In the school year preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of childhood vaccine exemptions claimed by parents rose in 40 of 49 states with recorded data. Requiring parental consent also poses a barrier to immunization for older teens whose parents are provaccination, since many of them attend routine checkups alone.
Dr. Arthur Caplan, founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University Langone Medical Center, told me “a mature minor” ought to be able to obtain — without parental consent — a “proven, safe intervention” that can prevent death or disability. “Parents should not have the authority to subject their children to serious preventable harm,” he said.
The American Medical Association and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, among other medical organizations, strongly support laws permitting older minors to self-consent to vaccinations. Granting teenagers this right is essential to stemming the spread of diseases, whether they are newly emerging like COVID-19 or have faded from the news. For example, although measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, last year the country had the highest number of cases since 1992.
Overall, more than 42,000 Americans die each year from diseases preventable by vaccination. Over the course of the pandemic, the United States has experienced a dramatic drop in already falling childhood vaccination rates, driven by fears of being exposed to the virus in doctors’ offices and stoked by the growing prevalence of vaccine misinformation online. Minors must be allowed to selfconsent to existing vaccinations — and to an adolescent COVID-19 vaccine once it is available.
Young people across the country are advocating for their medical rights to protect themselves and their communities. I am fortunate enough to have pro-vaccine parents, so I can only imagine the courage a young person must have to parents’ misguided beliefs. States should empower teenagers to act.
COVID-19 has been a startling public health lesson: We each have a responsibility to prevent the transmission of disease — whether through vaccination or social distancing — to ensure our collective health. Encouraging our state legislatures to enact straightforward vaccine consent legislation for minors would help accomplish that. (c) 2020 Los Angeles
Times