It’s back, just like always.
The kids are home from school and December travel is at an all-time high. Influenza, COVID-19 and RSV are home for the holidays, too.
State officials are showing regular increases in those viruses in several regularly tracked metrics.
With rampant hysteria and disinformation in social media — also spread across the nation by crackpot celebrities and “influencers” — as well as increasingly complicated and sometimes unaffordable costs, mandatory vaccinations, public attention and changing laws to increase compliance fall to the wayside.
And the newest public health threat comes from the upcoming White House, where president-elect Donald Trump is hoping to boost adherents to pseudoscience and medical quackery into top public health positions for his new administration.
Last week, National Public Radio revealed that the administration of Louisiana’s governor was purposely forcing that state’s public health departments to not recommend public vaccination programs.
The NPR report, and others, have revealed that the entire army of public health employees and officials can no longer “send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines,” according to NPR.
Health officials cannot even put up signs or notes at state health department clinics indicating vaccines are available at those locations.
That is a state where anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. worked last year with other quack officials to push that state’s legislature away from public vaccination.
Trump wants Kennedy to lead his administration’s public health team.
Real scientists and public health experts agree that more states behaving like Louisiana, or taking debunked advice from Kennedy, bodes ill for public health, nearly guaranteeing waves of deadly infections across the nation.
This is the perfect time for state lawmakers in Colorado to make a New Year’s resolution as soon as they convene the General Assembly in January: Follow the science.
Colorado regularly ranks low in the nation for vaccination rates. It’s endangering lives, health and costing millions of dollars.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says that critical combined vaccination rates in Colorado are at an alarming low 74%, putting thousands of children at risk of an outbreak.
The problem stems from past legislators, succumbing to fake science and political pressure, who were either sympathetic to misguided parents who didn’t want to vaccinate their children or shortsighted in thinking that making it easy to “opt out” of mandatory vaccines was just no big deal.
To date, Colorado still allows for a “philosophical” rejection of vaccine mandates.
The root of most of this growing crisis came from a regularly debunked study run by a discredited doctor tying autism to childhood vaccinations, and the U.S. media elevated the hoax, helping to legitimize it.
Now, one of the biggest promoters of those deceits, Kennedy, could be boosted as one of the nation’s top health spokespersons.
To date, there is not one reputable pediatrician, pediatric organization, hospital, clinic nor researcher that does not vehemently work to debunk the autism lie and insist that parents vaccinate their children.
In Colorado, it’s still easier to say that you don’t want to vaccinate children than to prove that you have, despite feeble attempts to shore up vaccine mandates.
Many lawmakers, and too much of the public, erroneously believe that since the bulk of the “herd” was vaccinated against potentially lethal diseases such as measles, polio and whooping cough, we’re all protected.
They’re wrong — dead wrong for some people. The incidence of those diseases continues to increase as vaccination rates decline.
Earlier this year, state health officials revealed that only 93% of children starting kindergarten in the previous school year came to school fully vaccinated, a 2% drop from the school year before that.
It means an increasing number of children are susceptible to entirely preventable diseases like measles, chickenpox, rubella and, astonishingly, polio. Active polio virus is now being regularly detected in places like New York where an unvaccinated man was paralyzed in 2022 by a polio infection.
Colorado must join states that require every child who attends a public school or college to undergo vaccination, and to grant exemptions only for legitimate health concerns documented by a physician.
It doesn’t mean that parents must vaccinate their children against their will. It means that they cannot create a health danger for other children by imposing them on the children of other parents in group settings.
It’s almost unthinkable that a country like the United States would slide back decades in health care progress, risking the lives of millions of Americans potentially exposed to diseases we nearly eradicated — because of lies, laziness or ignorant fear.
Rather than emulate the looming disaster in Louisiana, state lawmakers in Colorado should make mandatory vaccination a top public concern, and early January is the right time to do that.
This country has gone insane.
Isn’t the Sentinel regularly pontificating about the necessity for a free press? Now you are once again advocating the use of government power to micromanage our health and access to health care information. Did we learn nothing from the fiasco of the COVID-19 crisis when government officials such as Jared Polis sent men with guns around to enforce his “prescriptions” and wound up crippling the Colorado economy, which has still not entirely recovered?!?