Often times doing the right thing is more difficult, however, choosing to do what is easy while knowing it is wrong is not what we expect from true leaders.
That is the lesson the leaders of Florida are demonstrating to the rest of America and to the world with their recent announcement on COVID-19 vaccinations.
This from redstate.com.
When it comes to vaccinating children, few Republicans of note have had the guts to stand up and speak clearly on the matter.
No doubt, a lot of peer pressure exists to go along with the “Vaccinate everything that moves” narrative being pushed by the federal government.
At a round table yesterday, Ladapo let it be known that his state would be recommending against giving the COVID-19 vaccines for children, making Florida the first state in the nation to do so.
According to @FLSurgeonGen, Florida will become the first state to recommend against the COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children. #desantisroundtable
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) March 7, 2022
By the numbers, this is absolutely the right move:
Less than 1,000 children have died from COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic.
There are 75 million children aged 0-18 in the United States.
Further, when you drill down, almost all the children that have died from COVID-19 also had pre-existing conditions.
Given all these facts, certainly the government would be wiser to take a more targeted approach in vaccinating children from the coronavirus by giving the vaccine only to those who are significantly immunocompromised.
The above numbers are not cited to downplay the death of any child.
Every lost life is a tragedy, no matter the cause. Still, at no point in our history have we as a society chosen to blanket-vaccinate children from a virus that presents such a minuscule, almost non-existent risk to them.
It simply makes no sense, especially without long-term data tracking trends and changes on how the vaccines affect developing children.
Public policy should never be decided by emotion, and it is nothing but an emotional response to vaccinate a six-year-old from COVID-19 who is otherwise healthy.
There’s simply no data to back that up, and even if there were, we should not be using children to placate the irrational concerns of adults.
Doing the right thing overrides public relations concerns, though.
Besides, the mass propaganda media and the radical left are going to trash Florida no matter what.
They see the free state as a foil and distraction from the abject failures taking place in their own states.
DeSantis and Lapado are to be commended for placing on disregard the irrational hype of the fear-theorist absolute vax-ers and then moving forward to do that which makes sense.
Of course, this has been Florida’s mode of operation throughout the pandemic. And the state of Florida and its citizens are better for it.
