Children in Florida will not be required to get the coronavirus jab, even if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends making it part of a child’s regular vaccine routine, Florida Surgeon general Joseph Ladapo said on Wednesday.
“Regardless of what @CDCgov votes tomorrow on whether COVID-19 vax are added to routine child immunizations – nothing changes in FL,” the official assured.
“Thanks to @GovRonDeSantis, COVID mandates are NOT allowed in FL, NOT pushed into schools, & I continue to recommend against them for healthy kids,” he added.
Ladapo’s assurance came one day before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) votes on adding the coronavirus vaccine to its formal list of immunization recommendations for children. However, nothing about the CDC’s vote is binding. In other words, it will still be up to each individual state to decide if it wants to update its own recommendation list. ABC7 acknowledged that the CDC’s vote, however, “will open the door for states to begin making those calls, too.”
Despite the assertion from critics, this does not automatically mean that children will not be able to attend school or participate in certain activities without the shot, although some fear it will eventually come to that.
The concerns stem from the reality that many states abide by CDC recommendations, as seen throughout the Chinese coronavirus pandemic with mask mandates — a factor that remained a major point of contention in several school districts across the country.
This trend was also seen in medical care settings, as many establishments continued to implement mask mandates until the CDC quietly dropped its universal masking recommendation last month.
While it is very possible that schools and states will formally break from the CDC recommendations, the lingering concern is that some will not, treating the recommendations as obligatory, even though they are not binding. Because of this, some states and localities may need to take proactive steps to prevent this recommendation from becoming the standard in their communities.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo recently came under fire from the establishment media over the state advising against mRNA vaccines for men under the age of 40, prompting Twitter to temporarily censor him.
The Florida Department of Health analysis specifically found an 84 percent increase in “the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination,” prompting the recommendation against the mRNA shots for men in that age group.
“FL will not be silent on the truth,” Ladapo assured.