Are anti-COVID vaxx parents fueling one more unhealthy trend?
While the country is divided over COVID-19 vaccines — and Florida lawmakers plan to pass laws to undermine federal mandates — another ominous problem is going largely unnoticed: Routine immunizations for children, required under state law for school attendance, have fallen during the pandemic.
That means fewer children immunized for diseases such as measles, polio and mumps, which have been controlled or eradicated because of vaccine mandates — the boogeyman that has ignited school board protests and angry Facebook posts, driving Republicans across the nation to pass laws to make them more difficult for COVID-19.
Miami-Dade County has always struggled to get kids vaccinated because of its transient population and families from around the world who aren’t familiar with Florida’s vaccination schedule, according to Dr. Lisa Gwynn, a pediatrician with the University of Miami and president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Even before the pandemic, the county fell below the state’s goal for 95% of kindergarten students receiving all doses of all vaccines required for school entry or attendance.
On Oct. 28, I sat in Miami City Hall as residents gave public comments about the cruelty of SR-2, an ordinance proposed by City Commissioner Joe Carollo, that would ban camping on public property. This legislation directly targets homeless people who live in tents all over the city, by arresting and fining them. This throws them further into the poverty
In the 2020-21 school year, vaccinations among MiamiDade kindergartners in public and private schools fell from 93.4% the previous year to 92.9%. The biggest drop occurred among seventh-graders receiving their booster shots: 95.3% to 89.2%.
STATEWIDE DECLINE
Florida overall saw a similar decline, with vaccinations among seventh-graders hitting its lowest level since 2009-10, though at 94.5% it still beats Miami-Dade’s. Among kindergartners, the state’s 93.3% rate is the lowest in seven years, according to a Florida Department of Health report.
The likely reasons behind this decline are parents skipping trips to their pediatrician because of fear of catching the coronavirus and students’ transition to virtual learning last academic year, according to Miami-Dade County Public Schools. Medical providers also had a limited number of appointments. Florida’s stay-athome order early in the pandemic didn’t help. To catch up, the district has partnered with UM’s mobile pediatric clinic to offer free vaccines at different schools.
As life returns to normal, and kids are back on campus, the expectation, and hope, is that they will meet their immunizathat keeps them on the streets.
As impassioned community members championed housing-first alternatives and first-hand interviews with homeless people for safe and viable solutions, commissioners were checking texts, chatting with each other and, it appeared, falling asleep. Obviously, they only want praise, rather than dissent or criticism, for the harm their legislation can cause.
Instead of catering to tech giants invading a sinking city, we should prioritize the safety and security of all those already living here.
No one is impervious to struggle. No one is safe from the unpredictability of life, not even the men voting for these ordinances.
Our commissioners are out of touch, out of solutions and out of compassion.
Opinion content from syndicated sources may be trimmed from the original length to fit available space.
– Rachel Komich,
Miami
SECOND OPINION
The Florida Senate should not confirm Dr. Joseph Ladapo as our state’s surgeon general. His record of pandering to Gov. Ron DeSantis has reached a sad crescendo with his refusal to wear a mask to a meeting with a cancer patient, State Sen. Tina Polsky. Moreover, Ladapo, in defending his actions, emphasized he had offered other alternatives, all maskless.
Journalists throughout Florida have questioned how the governor would feel and act if Ladapo met with Florida’s first lady, Casey DeSantis, in the same manner. She recently announced her own breast-cancer diagnosis.
To ask the governor and Ladapo to put their money where their mouths are would be as bad in taste and poor judgment as are Ladapo’s irresponsible actions and statements.
– Julio Rumbaut,
Surfside
NANCY A. MEYER
tion schedule. But school districts and health departments must also prepare for the antivaxx sentiment that has started to creep into these long-standing routine vaccinations. More parents are picking and choosing which vaccines they give their children, and when, and others are deciding to forego them all together, Gwynn told the Herald Editorial Board. She has even seen parents of babies in newborn intensive care unit turning down shots.
Most of the pushback is coming from affluent, educated and politically engaged parents, not low-income and migrant families who often lack access to care and information, she said.
“Never before have doctors been so challenged about vaccines,” Gwynn said,
All of that in the name of “parental choice” — and often based on bogus information parents have found on social media and the internet. Still persistent is the myth about MMR vaccines (measles, mumps and rubella) causing autism. A hyped-up 1998 paper making that connection was retracted and later found to be based on falsified data about patients’ medical histories, according to the medical journal BMJ.
The anti-vaxx movement and vaccine hesitancy are not a new phenomenon. Even before the pandemic, the use of religious exemptions for school immunizations in Florida was on an upward trend among seventhgraders, reaching its highest level this academic year, according to DOH data.
But never before have leaders at the highest levels of government and the Republican Party openly fueled anti-vaccine sentiment. For example, Florida’s top doctor, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, gave a speech this month casting doubt on the COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy and safety.
Did they not expect that fearmongering could spill over to long-established vaccines such as diseases as measles, rubella and polio — a paralyzing disease once so feared that parents wouldn’t let their children outside to play?
‘REVIEW’ RECONSIDERED
State Sen. Manny Diaz Jr., R-Hialeah, told Florida Politics in September that it might be time to “review” school vaccination requirements. Chastened after a firestorm of criticism, he walked those comments back. Diaz said in a statement to the Herald Editorial Board on Wednesday, “I do not intend to change or review current vaccination statutes.”
Phew! It looks like our school immunization requirements are
PROVIDE A ROOF?
When will Miami City Commissioner Joe Carollo bring a homeless person home to live with him?
– Bertram J. Goldsmith, Jr.,
Coral Gables
DISTURBING FUTURE
Facebook’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, envisions a world in which we will work, play, socialize, and spend most of our time in a virtual reality helmet.
Will that be a better way to live?
Will it be good for people to believe they live in a mansion on a mountain surrounded by beautiful people rather than face the reality that their place is awful and they can’t even walk a mile?
This “metaverse” may create a world in which each person becomes a slave to maintaining the cost of their augmented reality instead of striving to improve their actual reality.
Zuckerberg has proven
MONICA R. RICHARDSON
he is not to be trusted with shaping our world view. There may be a backlash to all of this, and it may not be pretty.
– Gary Costales,
Miami
TIME’S A’WASTING
The Oct. 28 article “Dade’s new climate action strategy doesn’t meet its own goal” is sobering. The county’s plan does not get us to our 2030 goal of halving emissions. I applaud Miami-Dade County Mayor Levine Cava’s serious commitment to the goal, but to succeed, other players need to step up.
With solar becoming the cheapest energy source in 2020, it is disappointing that only 27% of our county’s power is generated by renewables.
Much of it is in the hands of Florida Power & Light, and as the only investor-owned utility without a goal to reduce
NANCY ANCRUM
safe — at least for now. On the other hand, Florida lawmakers will do anything within their power to undermine President Biden’s plan to increase COVID-19 vaccinations through employer mandates — which appears to be our only way to immunize more Americans before another highly contagious variant takes hold.
Diaz, the chair of the Senate Health Policy Committee, vowed to “stand on the side of freedom” against “any NEW government mandated vaccinations, including COVID-19 vaccines.”
Imagine if our lawmakers worked instead to boost our local health departments, which have been running on shoestring budgets for years, and to push parents to stay up to date on their children’s immunizations.
Dare we say? Imagine if our elected officials worked to promote more COVID-19 vaccinations. We can only dream.
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THE COMPANY SAYS, ‘THE NAME FACEBOOK IS NOT GOING AWAY, BUT FROM NOW ON, WE ARE GOING TO BE METAVERSE FIRST, NOT FACEBOOK FIRST.’ BUT DON’T WORRY — THE SELF ESTEEM OF TEENAGE GIRLS WILL ALWAYS BE LAST.
Stephen Colbert
its absolute carbon emissions, we may be in trouble.
Chief Resiliency Officer Jim Murley encourages working with FPL as the best approach.
Nationally set carbon fees that would reward highly dependent fossilfuel utilities like FPL to switch to clean energy are essential to fill gaps in local emissions commitments.
Time is ticking away, and FPL needs to budge. We cannot afford to fall short on our commitments.
– Hannah Waxman,
Key Biscayne
A WORTHY NAME?
In the Oct. 28 letter “Changing brands,” the writer suggested changing the name of Facebook to Scrapbook.
Had he left out the “S”, it would have be even better.
– Bill Silver, Coral Gables
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