Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting vaccine use
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Because that’s just how stupid we’ve become as a nation:
A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.
Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop..
NPR has confirmed the policy was discussed at this meeting, and at two other meetings held within the department’s Office of Public Health, on Oct. 3 and Nov. 21, through interviews with four employees at the Department of Health, which employs more than 6,500 people and is the state’s largest agency.
According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.
Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department’s work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department’s clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.
The new policy in Louisiana was implemented as some politicians have promoted false information about vaccines and as President-elect Donald Trump seeks to have anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And some public health experts are concerned that if other states follow Louisiana, the U.S. could face rising levels of disease and further erosion of trust in the nation’s public health infrastructure. . .
Staff at Louisiana’s health department fear the new policy undermines their efforts to protect the public, and violates the fundamental mission of public health: to prevent illness and disease by following the science.
“I mean, do they want to dismantle public health?” one employee at the health department said.
This is what happens when you give the car keys to Bobby Brainworm (I assume the worm in question has expired from starvation) and his unhinged idiocies. And good for NPR for using the phrase “anti-vaccine” to describe this worse than useless failson, rather than referring to him as a “vaccine skeptic,” as if there were some sort of legitimate debate about whether getting vaccinated is desirable on either the individual or social level.
Oh wait there is a debate because we’re ruled by superstitious morons:
In a statement, the Louisiana Department of Health told NPR it has been “reevaluating both the state’s public health priorities as well as our messaging around vaccine promotion, especially for COVID-19 and influenza.”
The statement described the move as a shift “away from one-size-fits-all paternalistic guidance” to a stance in which “immunization for any vaccine, along with practices like mask wearing and social distancing, are an individual’s personal choice.”
Freedom’s just another word for no neurons left to lose.
BTW I got a Covid booster yesterday by walking into a Safeway, filling out a form, and going into an unoccupied waiting room. The whole process took about seven minutes from beginning to end, and was “free,” in the sense that an insurer was required to pay for it — a requirement that will probably go bye-bye fairly soon, given that lunatics like Kennedy are going to be running the public health establishment.