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FL Surgeon General tells Tapper he didn't bother to analyze the impact of ending vaccine mandates [1]

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Date: 2025-09-07

An overview of medical insanity

On Wednesday, Florida's Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, announced the state was going to end its vaccine mandates for school children. On Sunday, while appearing on CNN's State of the Union, he told Jake Tapper that he had done so without analyzing the effects of this laissez-faire policy. Tapper, unsurprisingly, was incredulous. (The reader can CLICK HERE for the video.)

In short, Ladapo said that because he viewed vaccination as a parental rights issue, there was no point in studying how and where new outbreaks of diseases would spread in the state when vaccination rates inevitably declined. (It makes sense to him)

Ladapo also waved away:

What would happen to immunocompromised kids who couldn't get vaccinated and who relied on their fellow students being vaccinated. I guess those parents don't count.

All the major medical organizations, such as the AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, etc., who have urged mandatory vaccinations. He dismisses them as simply having "bigger microphones'

Pro-vaccination politicians such as Florida Senator Rick Scott. Who, despite being the CEO of a hospital company that agreed to pay the largest Medicare fraud penalty in US history, does know something about hospitals and infectious diseases.

The Florida Medical Association.

The 82% of Florida parents who think vaccinations should be mandatory.

And the fact that Florida already has health and religious exemptions to vaccination.

Ladapo also said he made his decision based on “data and common sense”. Which is a silly claim. He had just said he wasn’t looking for data. While "common sense" is usually a euphemism for "because I believe it."

In addition, Ladapo cast vaccination refusal as having "sovereignty over your own body." Oh, please! If he really believed that, he would be pro-choice.

An analysis of Ladapo's fallacious argument

(Note: The rest of this diary focuses on the segment of the interview in which Ladapo tries to justify the unjustifiable. The reader can skip it if pressed for time or already knows how a MAGA sophist argues.)

In the interview, Tapper got the ball rolling by holding up a report produced by the Florida health authorities. Referring to it, he said:

"I'm looking at this report from your department from April showing that more people in Florida are seeking religious exemptions for vaccines, and at the same time, Florida is seeing rising cases of hepatitis A, and whooping cough, and chicken pox. This is in your own report, your own department's report. Before you made this decision to try to lift vaccine mandates for Florida — which include obviously public schools — did your department do any data analysis? Did you do any data projection of how many new cases of these diseases there will be in Florida once you remove vaccine mandates?"

Those are reasonable questions. Rational people would assume (and hope) that the answers would be "yes" and "yes". But this is Florida. So Ladapo admitted he hadn't bothered to look at the consequences of his actions. He replied adamantly, as if perplexed Tapper would ask:

"Absolutely not."

Ladapo continued with sophistry and misdirection.

Because it's not a … you mentioned whooping cough there … so there's this conflation of the science with what is the right and wrong thing to do. So, scientifically, you mentioned whooping cough. So that's an example … so that's part of the issue of informed consent … that's an example of a vaccine that's ineffective … the data show that it's ineffective at preventing transmission.

Ladapo is correct, but deceptive. The whooping cough vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission. So why take it? Because it significantly reduces the severity of the disease. In that way, it is like the COVID vaccine. People could still get COVID and transmit it, but for the vaccinated, their chances of dying were small compared to the unvaccinated.

No vaccine can absolutely guarantee that a recipient will not get the targeted disease. There are few guarantees in life. But, for instance, the polio vaccine is 99% effective , which explains why the last known polio death in the US was in 1979.

Ladapo doubles down on his sophistry. He also pretends to answer Tapper's question while ignoring it. Tapper had asked if Ladapo had analysed how many more deaths in Florida were likely. The disingenuous doctor responded by saying it was inappropriate to analyze parents' decisions. The two are not the same. Ladapo put it thus:

So mandates like that don't have anything to do with transmission. And then in terms of like analysis, well ultimately this is an issue, very clearly of parents' rights. So do I need to analyse whether it's appropriate for parents to decide what goes into their children's bodies? I don't need to do an analysis on that.

Tapper then reiterates that Ladapo had not bothered to analyse potential disease spread — information that would be useful in preparing those on the front lines of treating disease

So you're trying to lift the vaccine mandate in Florida. And your department and you did not even do a projection on how this could impact public health. So you have not prepared hospitals in the Florida counties most at risk with the best treatments for any outbreak of measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, polio, and you have not looked into how many kids might now get these preventable diseases? That's what you're saying.

Ladapo denies having done what he had done by accusing Tapper of putting words in his mouth — despite Ladapo's previous confession that he had done precisely what Tapper had said he had done, which was not to analyze disease spread in a post-mandate Florida.

"No, that's what you said."

Ladapo then doubles down on his 'parents' rights' misdirection.

What I'm saying is that it's an issue of right and wrong in terms of whether parents should be able to control … have ultimate authority … over what happens to their kids' bodies.

He also claims that Florida is just like every other state. So why worry?

In terms of outbreaks, we do have outbreaks in Florida, just like every state. So we manage those. So there's no new, you know, special procedures that need to be made.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/7/2342294/-FL-Surgeon-General-tells-Tapper-he-didn-t-bother-to-analyze-the-impact-of-ending-vaccine-mandates?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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