Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius expressed concern on Wednesday about how parents in Florida will manage to safeguard their children as the state considers abolishing all school vaccine requirements.
“It’s alarming that Florida is planning to eliminate all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren,” Sebelius commented during her appearance on CNN’s “CNN News Central” on Wednesday.
“As a parent in Florida, I can’t fathom the worry of sending my child to a school with the uncertainty of potential measles outbreaks or, worst-case scenario, the resurgence of polio. We’re navigating completely new waters here,” she added.
Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has likened current vaccination mandates to slavery, causing an uproar among health specialists and vaccine proponents who warn that the absence of vaccines will lead to disease outbreaks.
Ladapo is spearheading the effort to revoke vaccine mandates in Florida’s educational institutions, in alignment with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who declared earlier this year that the CDC will cease recommending the COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children and pregnant women.
“In my lifetime, the CDC has been a beacon for public health globally,” Sebelius shared with CNN. “Yet, within just seven months, we witness an administration lacking scientific expertise and dominated by vaccine skepticism and profiting from legal cases against vaccine manufacturers, starting to dismantle the protective measures surrounding Americans.”
“This is about health security. And as we learned with COVID, this is about our economic security. Another infectious disease that we’re not prepared for takes the whole economy down. So, this is very dangerous territory,” she added.
Last week, the CDC Director was removed by the Trump administration while four senior officials resigned citing the “weaponization of public health.”
“For the good of the nation and the world, the science at CDC should never be censored or subject to political pauses or interpretations,” former CDC Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry wrote in her resignation letter. “Vaccines save lives — this is an indisputable, well-established, scientific fact.”
She added that “the overstating of risks and the rise of misinformation have cost lives,” citing a major measles outbreak from earlier this year.
Other officials agreed and said new policies were beginning to lean further and further away from scientific data or evidence and more towards political pursuits.
“I am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponizing of public health,” Demetre C. Daskalakis, former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said.
