Do you, like me, harbor dark images of vaccinating our state surgeon general until he tickle-weeps with gratitude?
I didn’t used to think such thoughts. But there is no vaccination against whatever it is we are living through, and so I also imagine Dr. Joseph Ladapo celebrating his new disease protections with a tall, cool glass of fluoridated water.
“To the kids!” we will toast.
And that’s where the daydream stops and the nightmare begins.
Pat Beall is an editorial writer and columnist for the Sun Sentinel, focusing mainly on Palm Beach County issues.
I got vaccinated when I was a kid.
Such an easy sentence. Notice that I did not break out in flop sweat writing it.
This is how you know I am not Ron DeSantis.
I emailed the governor about his own childhood vaccines. I asked whether he and Casey had their children vaccinated. I asked the same thing of the lieutenant governor.
I heard back. Specifically, I heard the roar of jet engines speeding them away from the question and its cheeky little soupçon of implied hypocrisy. Understandable. No one’s sticking around to be fitted with the “Polio for thee but not for me” T-shirt.
But since I am all about tossing out the occasional cheeky little soupçon, now that I finally learned to spell it, here’s another one.
Governor, if you are throwing your weight behind a policy that hurts other people’s children, then you owe us answers about whether you made the same choice for your own.
Because hurting children is the end game of the Ladapo/DeSantis push to end mandatory childhood vaccinations, even if it’s not the goal. So, please, no weasel words about empowering parents when the power we are talking about is the right to let unvaccinated kids — and newborns, seniors, the immunocompromised and those with chronic diseases — get sick and die.
This “They choose, I pay” policy runs afoul of the all-American adage that one person’s freedom of expression ends when their freedom slams into another person’s life. In this case, one parent’s freedom of choice ends when their unvaccinated kid gives my can’t-be-or-isn’t-yet-vaccinated kid whooping cough and I go over for a neighborly chat and wind up violating the life-freedom rule and the cops come and say: Pat? Again?
To be fair, it’s not as though Ladapo and DeSantis are getting strong science vibes from the top. The Centers for Disease Control’s new chief operating officer sold photos of politicians on the side, which I have seen, and I would say keep the day job but the former pharmacist’s day job should really be in a law office because she’s a lawyer. Meanwhile, the CDC’s chief of staff once consulted for Interstate Batteries. That’s fortuitous because the Department of Energy head insists that solar power can’t work because it gets dark outside, not just now and then, but every single day. No light, no lights.
If only we knew how to store energy.
If only our CDC battery guy would take time off from not being a scientist and get together with our DOE guy over coffee; if only he would whip out a box of Rayovacs. Or a Tesla. Or the North American Power Transmission Grid.
But I can’t fret over national non-science, not when we have so much home-grown non-history, non-fact, non-science, nonsense on our plate. Like Ladapo equating slavery and mandatory vaccinations. Just the same. Peas, pod, etc. Maybe except for the part where slavery puts children in chains and vaccinations keep them out of iron lungs?
I avoided the iron lung but not the measles. It was pre-vaccine. I can still remember how it felt. I remember how scared my mother was, too, which tells you something, given that I was three. It’s that kind of sick. Had bad politics or worse science stood between the needle and my arm when vaccines did roll out, my mother might have taken the news poorly enough that my grandmother would have been on the phone, calling to report a violation of the life-freedom rule: Edna? Again?
And now you know where I get it from.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer. Contact her at beall.news@gmail.com.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/09/12/through-the-vaccine-looking-glass-pat-beall/
