Do vaccines work? Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo was reluctant to answer.

For a while it was enough to shout about the mandates. The vaccines are whatever, the thinking went, though manufacturing People getting the vaccines is the problem. There’s some reason to argue that this is outside the federal government’s legal powers, but with some of these folks in mind, it was hard not to take it as a game. Like it or not, some people in this country have a vested financial or political interest in prolonging the pandemic, or at least trumpeting rhetoric that will eventually do so. (Another consequence? Plenty of unnecessary deaths.) The mandate’s focus was a way to continually denigrate the vaccination campaign as liberal hyperbole without denigrating the vaccines themselves — a sort of anti-anti-Trump smear for a new era. I am not against vaccinationsthe routine went I just spend all my time talking about vaccination issues in extremely negative terms.

In any case, that doesn’t seem to be enough. This stuff is like a drug. You need to keep increasing the dose. And so now you can find the number one star on The Fox News Channel hosting a guy who got kicked off Twitter for spreading it weirdly bad information about COVID-19 spread comically bad information about the vaccines. However, what more can we ask for from Alex Berenson, a guy whose previous appearance sold the idea for Smoking weed can turn you into a psychotic killer? It’s the officials we might hope will continue to hold to some sort of standard, but the evidence from Florida this week isn’t great. They have a new candidate for surgeon general down there in the nation’s third most populous state, and at a state senate hearing, Joseph Ladapo was asked if vaccines are working to fight the pandemic.

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Well, this video is from the Florida Senate Democrats who were clearly trying to get some points throughout. They even cut the video prematurely, at a point where it seemed like Ladapo would start saying that Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines have “relatively high efficacy in preventing hospitalizations” and deaths. But it’s unclear why it took so many repetitions of the question to even come close to an answer. The second back-and-forth between Ladapo and State Senator Lauren Book is notable.

BOOK: Just a yes or no. Do vaccines work in the fight against COVID-19, yes or no?

LADAPO: Senator, I’m just – I, I, as a scientist, you know, I, I, I, I’m compelled to answer the scientific question. And I’m happy to answer any specific scientific question you have related to vaccines and COVID-19.

What? This guy is a public health official tasked with communicating with the residents of the state about how best not to get sick or die. When asked the next question, he gave up anyway, essentially admitting that he could have answered those questions all along, just like any other functioning adult a year into the vaccine phase of the pandemic. The data – scientific! – are clear. As dr Craig Spencer demonstrated This week, the Omicron wave has kept trends in New York City. Vaccination not only reduces hospitalizations and deaths, but also reported cases of infection. In other words, vaccines are effective in fighting COVID-19.

Which we can say with some certainty that Ladapo knows. So why was he silent when asked? That’s like asking a Supreme Court nominee what precedent is. One explanation would be that Ladapo considers this bad policy, assuming he intends to run for senior office as a Republican in the future. Or his boss, Gov. Ron DeSantis, may see it as bad policy ahead of his now inevitable presidential bid. Both parties are now denying it DeSantis recently shadow boxed with ex-President Donald Trump about what stance Republican leaders should take on the vaccines. It appears that DeSantis is determined to position himself furthest to the right on the vaccine issue now refuses to say if he got a refresher or not. Considering he once openly admitted he was on the starting dose(s), it could also be a measure of how Vax policy has shifted in the conservative movement over the last year.

Ladapo and DeSantis frequently appear together as part of Florida’s pandemic response.

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This has also surfaced in politics, where DeSantis has made repeated appearances selected to highlight therapeutic treatments for people who contract COVID because of vaccines to prevent them from contracting COVID in the first place. The shortcomings of this approach were exposed by the Omicron variant, against which doctors and nurses have found that two widely used monoclonal antibody treatments do not work. (Another antibody treatment still works, but is scarce.) The FDA has now withdrawn approval for the drugs It starts on this basis a backlash from Florida’s Republican leadership. The DeSantis strategy appears to be trying to keep deaths down without supporting the vaccination campaign, the latter a sin Donald Trump was recently booed for the commitment, and the antibody treatments were a big part of that. It’s striking evidence of the political content of vaccines at this point: the same people who denounce them as experimental are assuming therapeutics that, if anything, are more experimental?

This intra-Republican bickering is in addition to the party-versus-party political dynamic that is fueling at least some of the attacks on the vaccination campaign. There are many explanations for President Joe Biden’s falling approval ratings, but the most likely seems to be that he pushed ahead with fighting the pandemic and the pandemic is still here. People blame the President for everything in this country, so he takes the heat, some of it deserves. In that sense, the anti-anti-vax types are right that their behavior will likely benefit the electoral prospects of Biden’s political opponents. The question is which of these opponents will triumph over the others by saying the Am.

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