Vials of measles vaccinePaul Hennessy/Getty Images
Amid an ongoing measles outbreak in Florida, public health officials are bending the rules of quarantine for unvaccinated children.
At Manatee Bay Elementary School in Broward County, Florida, six children have tested positive for measles, a respiratory virus so contagious that 90 percent of those exposed will contract it. Infection with measles can have serious consequences, according to the Centers for Disease Control: About 20 percent of measles patients will be hospitalized, 1 in 1,000 will have brain swelling that can lead to brain damage, and 3 in 1,000 will die. Invented in 1963, the measles vaccine is considered one of the greatest public health triumphs of the last century. Thanks to it, measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, though sporadic clusters of the disease have occurred since then.
Because of the extreme contagiousness of measles and its potentially serious health consequences, in the case of a school outbreak, the CDC recommends that “unvaccinated children, including those who have a medical or other exemption to vaccination, must be excluded from school through 21 days after their most recent exposure.”
But maybe not in Florida. Bucking those guidelines, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo issued a statement on Tuesday announcing, the state’s Department of Health, “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance” because of the “burden on families and the educational cost of healthy children missing school” and the “high immunity rate in the community.”
Data from Florida’s childhood immunization records, however, suggest that the rate of immunity in Broward County might not be high enough to forestall an even greater outbreak. According to the CDC, at least 95 percent of a population must be immune to measles—either through vaccination or prior infection—to meet the “herd immunity” threshold necessary to prevent a disease from spreading broadly. As of 2022, 91.7 percent of Broward County kindergartners were fully vaccinated, according to the Florida Department of Health.
Ladapo’s guidance on the current measles outbreak is only the most recent example of the Florida surgeon general’s flouting of public health guidelines. He has long been a harsh critic of Covid vaccines for children, insisting that their risks outweigh their benefits—though plenty of evidence suggests exactly the opposite. Earlier this year, he called for Florida to stop administering Covid vaccinations entirely, falsely claiming that the shots alter recipients’ DNA. The CDC continues to recommend Covid vaccines for adults and children.
The vaccination rate in Broward County, as well as Florida as a whole, has been declining since 2019. As I reported in November, childhood vaccination rates also appear to be falling nationwide:
The percentage of kindergartners who are fully vaccinated declined from 95 percent in the 2020-2021 school year to 93 percent in 2021-2022—below pre-pandemic levels. Since schools still require routine vaccinations, more families than ever before are asking permission for their school-aged children to skip the shots, as well. Requests for exemptions increased in 41 states, and in 10 states, more than 5 percent of parents made such requests.
This decrease in vaccination rates has happened against a backdrop of a relentless campaign by anti-vaccine activists, emboldened by backlash to public health guidelines put in place during the pandemic. High-profile politicians have supercharged this campaign—Florida governor Ron DeSantis has shaped his state’s policies on Covid vaccines around Ladapo’s baseless claims about the dangers of the shot. Meanwhile, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has built an anti-vaccine empire with his organization Children’s Health Defense.
Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with pediatricians in Florida who worked diligently for decades to increase the state’s childhood vaccination rates. They told me that they were dismayed by what they saw as an attempt by the state leadership to undermine those efforts and especially worried about an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease, like measles, the kind that used to routinely land kids in the hospital. “It’s just mind-boggling to think that we could go back to that,” one pediatrician told me in 2022. “The diseases are waiting. They’re waiting for stupidity.”
