-------------------------------
The vaccination rate of Florida kindergarteners has fallen to 90.6%, the lowest in over a decade, and concerned pediatricians say they are exhausted trying to combat anti-vax information – including from the state government.
“It's gotten difficult to manage,” said Dr. Lisa Gwynn, a Miami pediatrician and medical director for a mobile clinic that serves uninsured children.
Nearly 91% may seem high, but for highly contagious diseases like measles, for example, public health experts recommend a vaccination rate of at least 95%. Lower than that increases the risk of outbreaks of diseases that are otherwise preventable. That's especially a problem in schools, where children are in close contact with each other.
"Kids aren't getting the protection they need. We're just one step away from another outbreak," Gwynn said. “The data is very clear. Vaccines are safe and effective, but we're up against this polarization right now. It's difficult; it's hard to do the work that we've been trained to do.”
The kindergarten vaccination rate does not just affect children, she added, but also adults with immunodeficiencies, people undergoing chemotherapy and other “vulnerable members of our society.”
In Florida, a religious exemption is all that’s needed to avoid immunizations for diseases like measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), pertussis (whooping cough) and varicella (chicken pox).
According to a Florida Department of Health report for July 2024, the proportion of children 5-17 with new religious exemptions are increasing each month. St. John’s, Flagler, Sarasota and Walton counties have the highest number of children with religious exemptions, according to that data.
Since the pandemic, vaccine hesitancy over the mRNA “jab” spread to other vaccines, pediatricians say, who add that it’s becoming difficult to practice in the state. Some refuse to take unvaccinated patients, and the ones that do accept them don’t have the capacity.
Gwynn, the past president of Florida's chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, has seen an increase in unvaccinated patients in the past 20 years — first with the wave of misinformation from fraudulent research about how MMR vaccines cause autism, and now with COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr. Jeff Goldhagen, professor and chief of the Division of Community and Societal Pediatrics at the University of Florida, said the rise of unvaccinated children has multiple reasons, but points to the state’s own messaging about mRNA vaccines as “the most perverse.”
“It's an issue across the country, but it's a pertinent issue, a particular issue in Florida, because of the policies of our governor and our surgeon general,” said Goldhagen, who was also the previous director of the Duval County Health Department for 13 years.
In Florida, the state’s own surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has been an outspoken critic of COVID-19 vaccines and has tried to win over vaccine skeptics by appearing on right-wing and conspiracy theory-promoting talk shows.
In January of this year, Ladapo called for a halt of all COVID-19 mRNA vaccines: “The American people and the scientific community have a right to have all relevant information pertaining to the COVID-19 vaccines to properly inform individual decision making,” Ladapo wrote to the heads of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Thursday evening, DOH issued guidance that advises against the latest COVID-19 booster. Its press release alleges "the federal government has failed to provide sufficient data to support the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 boosters."
In a section called "Safety and Efficacy Concerns," the health department lists seven bullet points of issues with the mRNA vaccine. "Based on the high rate of global immunity and currently available data, the State Surgeon General advises against the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines."
Goldhagen says DOH's report is deceptive, and many of its issues aren't scientifically-based.
For example, the department lists the risks of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, from the COVID-19 vaccine as an example of a safety and efficacy concern. But Goldhagen says the risk is far greater from a COVID infection than getting it from the vaccine.
Another example DOH includes, DNA integration, has been debunked, Goldhagen said. "You have a better chance of becoming Spider-Man” than being harmed by DNA from the COVID vaccines, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who serves on an FDA advisory committee for the COVID vaccines, in a Scientific American article.
Goldhagen said Ladapo is "absolutely wrong" when they say the new booster doesn't provide protection among circulating variants. According to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Yale Medicine, all say the new booster protects against the latest variants.
"This is beyond infuriating," he said. "Ladapo is playing on people's fears."
Goldhagen said the latest press release sends a message, and COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are the “tip of the iceberg.”
The last time the vaccination rate dipped below 90% was in 2009 when it was 89.8%. A recent WalletHub report lists Florida’s vaccination rates among the lowest, at 46 among U.S. states and Washington, D.C.
In Florida, to obtain a religious exemption, Gwynn said parents used to have to consult with a nurse at the department of health about the risks of not getting children vaccinated.
But not anymore.
Goldhagen and other physicians have said families are moving to the state in part because of how easy it is to obtain a religious exemption to vaccines. To obtain an exemption for school-entry health examinations and immunizations against communicable diseases, Florida law says the parent of the child can object in writing that a vaccine “conflicts with his or her religious tenets or practices.”
But Gov. Ron DeSantis has labeled the decision of vaccination as a parents’ rights issue, a point of view that has been at the forefront of not only his public health agenda but also education.
When hospitalizations of children soared during the delta wave of 2021, he implemented the Parents Bill of Rights and banned mask mandates in schools. Later, he banned vaccine requirements for businesses as well.
This year, after a measles outbreak at a school in South Florida, the state did not follow the CDC’s recommendations that students should remain at home to quarantine and left the decision up to parents on whether to send their children to school.
“Once again, Florida has shown that good public health policy includes personal responsibility and parents' rights,” DeSantis said in a press release. “While the national medical health establishment and media have lost the public’s confidence, Florida continues to restore sanity and reason to public health, and will always do so under my leadership.”
In the July 2024 Vaccine-Preventable Disease Surveillance Report, the state recorded 66 whooping cough infections, a steep increase from the previous month. The 66 infections were also above the previous five-year average. Most of those infections were in infants under 1.
While Hepatitis A, meningitis and chicken pox were below the previous five-year averages, the disease rate for meningitis and incidence rate for chicken pox were the highest among infants under 1.
In the report, on the first page and in bold, DOH says: “Unvaccinated children are at increased risk of vaccine-preventable diseases like mumps, pertussis (whooping cough), and varicella. Communities with a higher proportion of religious exemptions (REs) to vaccination are at increased risk of vaccine-preventable disease transmission.”
The state does provide free vaccinations through county departments and its Florida Vaccines for Children Program, including immunizations for MMR, chicken pox, polio, tetanus, human papillomavirus (HPV) and the flu.
DOH, however, does not provide COVID-19 vaccines at the county health departments “due to the widely available supply in communities,” a spokesperson said.
In Florida, children over 3 can get a COVID-19 vaccine at Walgreens. CVS Pharmacy can vaccinate children age 5 and over for COVID-19, and the company’s MinuteClinics can vaccinate children 18 months and older.
Physicians can order COVID-19 vaccines through the Florida SHOTS system, which is overseen by DOH, but shipments of vaccines are not sent to DOH before being sent to doctors’ offices. Vials are sent directly from the manufacturer to the physician’s practice.
Gwynn said she has ordered the new COVID-19 immunizations for children 6 months and older for her mobile clinic through Florida SHOTS. While the numbers of hospitalizations aren’t as high as the delta wave, children are still becoming seriously ill because of the latest COVID variants, she said.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment