09 September 2025 - Florida ends childhood vaccine mandates
Florida plans to become first state to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandatesccine mandates
Curt Anderson (AP News, 04/09/2025)
Florida plans to become the first state to eliminate vaccine mandates, a longtime cornerstone of public health policy for keeping schoolchildren and adults safe from infectious diseases.
State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who announced the decision Wednesday, cast current requirements in schools and elsewhere as “immoral” intrusions on people’s rights that hamper parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.
Trump shares video highlighting discredited theory linking vaccines to autism
Megan Messerly (Politico, 08/09/2025)
President Donald Trump on Monday posted a video to his social media account promoting the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism.
The decades-old video, in part, features David Geier, who Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapped this spring to investigate links between vaccines and autism, alongside his father, Dr. Mark Geier, whose medical license was suspended following claims he endangered children with autism. The anti-vaccine activists have published numerous studies on the topic and discuss some of their ideas in the video, which circulated around the internet Monday after Trump shared it.
This is what could happen to a child who doesn't get vaccinated
Michal Ruprecht (NPR, 08/09/2025)
Pneumonia struck first. Then tonsillitis spiraled into sepsis. Malaria battered him next, and after treatment, the other illnesses flared back up again. This unvaccinated 2-year-old boy is trapped in a relentless cycle.
"I was very sad. I knew these things could be prevented by vaccines," his mother, Alzhraa Fadul, says through an interpreter.
The strange history of the anti-vaccine movement
David Robert Grimes (BBC News, 07/09/2025)
Vaccine scepticism may seem like a new, growing movement. It’s probably a lot older than you think.
Since the dawn of human history, our species has been besieged by terrible viruses and deadly plagues. Smallpox, a viral disease defined by a rash of painful pustules across the body, has been one of the most lethal of all, claiming an estimated 300 million lives over the 20th century alone.
Vaccination. Pexels.