The Panican Ledger

 💉Chronicles of Misrule:

Florida Declares War on Germ Theory

In this latest entry from our national asylum, Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has decreed that vaccine mandates — those dusty old bulwarks against polio, measles, and the poxes of yesteryear — are nothing more than a modern form of slavery. Thus, with a flourish of rhetoric more fit for antebellum melodrama than epidemiology, he proposes to strike them down.

One can almost hear the bacilli cheering.

Governor Ron DeSantis, flanking his medical freedom crusader, nodded along as if he were announcing a tax rebate, not the unraveling of a century of public health safeguards. Together they declared Florida to be the first state in the Union to dismantle all vaccine mandates, including those required for children to attend school. Why stop with smallpox eradication when you can invite it back for a victory lap?

Of course, some mandates are bound up in the dull cords of statute law. These, alas, require the Florida legislature’s complicity before being cast aside. But given the state’s political mood, one suspects the only debate will be whether to replace the school immunization form with a “Choose Your Own Adventure” pamphlet.

Health experts have sounded the alarm, warning that this gambit all but guarantees a revival of outbreaks thought buried with the phonograph. Their voices, alas, carry little weight in a political bazaar where “medical freedom” is hawked as though it were a tonic from a carnival tent.

To gild this farce, a new commission — styled the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) committee — has been conjured, chaired by First Lady Casey DeSantis. Its charter? To enshrine “parental rights” and “informed consent,” while leaving “community health” to fend for itself, like an orphan abandoned on the courthouse steps.

Thus Florida strides boldly into the 19th century, where maladies roam free and the physician’s kit once more features leeches, bloodletting, and perhaps a tincture of snake oil.