As Florida halts some mandatory childhood vaccines, residents in the state are split — some fear a drop in herd immunity while others praise the decision as a win for parental choice.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Florida is moving to make vaccines optional for students in public school. What does that mean for parents and children? When we at NPR pose a question like that about a story in any state, we can rely on local stations that are in the communities affected. And that is true today as we hear from Kerry Sheridan of our member station WUSF.
KERRY SHERIDAN, BYLINE: Mary Holmes teaches students with special needs. Some have Down syndrome and a history of surgeries that could make it harder to fight off an infectious disease.
MARY HOLMES: We have an entire group of students that are medically fragile.
SHERIDAN: Not to mention teachers and staff who have weakened immune systems. Holmes is 64 and a cancer survivor herself. She’s concerned that more parents in Florida are opting out of vaccinating their children.
HOLMES: And I do think that if a parent chooses to do that, that’s their right. And I think that I have a right as a public school teacher and a first line of defense for my students to say, but you’re not going to expose us.
SHERIDAN: In Sarasota County, where Holmes teaches, just 79% of kindergarteners are up to date on their shots. That’s far below the 95% recommended for herd immunity, to protect everyone, even those who cannot get vaccinated. In September, Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, announced a plan to do away with all vaccine mandates.
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JOSEPH LADAPO: All of them. All of them.
SHERIDAN: He says it’s an issue of medical freedom.
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LADAPO: Who am I as a government or anyone else or – who am I is a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body?
SHERIDAN: Generally, officials in his position make public health recommendations, but Ladapo is going against the norm, says Scott Rivkees, Florida’s former surgeon general.
SCOTT RIVKEES: The viewpoints that he has put forth are not in keeping with mainstream medicine.
SHERIDAN: Rivkees says it’s standard practice to analyze how many diseases would spread and where if vaccine mandates were lifted. Ladapo said he didn’t do that. The Florida Department of Health did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether it has any such projections.
JENNIFER TAKAGISHI: We will start seeing a lot of these vaccine preventable illnesses again. We just don’t know exactly when.
SHERIDAN: That’s Dr. Jennifer Takagishi with the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
TAKAGISHI: We are a victim of our own success. People aren’t seeing children and adults dying from measles, from whooping cough, from polio, from invasive meningitis and pneumonias the way they used to, so they think that they’re gone. And they’re not.
SHERIDAN: She says anyone without strong immunity could get sick. Two children and one adult died after getting measles this year in a Texas county that had a higher vaccination rate than some Florida counties. For parents of little ones, the messages they see online about vaccines can be confusing. Julie Forestier (ph) has a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old. She admits she had her doubts at first. A friend kept sending her social media posts that raised concerns about vaccine safety.
JULIE FORESTIER: But after doing my own research, I realized those claims were largely scare tactics and that there was extensive scientific research that had consistently shown that vaccines do not cause autism. Furthermore, just the risk of severe vaccine injury is extremely low compared to the very real dangers of measles or polio.
SHERIDAN: Florida’s health department says by early December, they will have lifted the requirements for four vaccines – hepatitis B, chickenpox and two meningitis shots. Lawmakers will have to act to lift mandates for all other vaccines like polio and measles. A recent Washington Post/KFF poll shows there’s still overwhelming support for requiring vaccines in schools, both nationally and in Florida.
For NPR News, I’m Kerry Sheridan in Sarasota.
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