Scott Boehmer

Category: Health

  • The Freedom to Let Children Die

    Florida plans to become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, including for schoolchildren, rejecting a practice that public health experts have credited for decades with limiting the spread of infectious diseases.

    Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, made the announcement on Wednesday alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. Mr. DeSantis rose to national prominence during the coronavirus pandemic, and over time he has espoused increasingly anti-vaccine views.

    “Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?” Dr. Ladapo, a vocal denigrator of vaccines, said to applause during an event on Wednesday in Valrico, Fla., near Tampa. “Your body is a gift from God.”

    He added that the administration would be “working to end” all vaccine mandates. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Dr. Ladapo said, without elaborating.

    Patricia Mazzei

    Florida Moves to End Vaccine Mandates for Schoolchildren (The New York Times)

  • Conservative Seniors & Survivorship Bias

    One of the abiding realities of our political era is a major generational split anchored on the right by disproportionately conservative seniors and on the left by disproportionately progressive millennials and post-millennials. This is often thought of as a perfectly natural, even inevitable, phenomenon: Young people are adventurous, open to new ways of thinking, and not terribly invested in the status quo, while old folks have time-tested views, assets they want to protect, and a growing fear of the unknown and unfamiliar.

    …

    But it is important to note that some generational disjunctions in political behavior are driven by demography. It’s well understood that millennials are significantly more diverse than prior generations. But there is something else driving the relative homogeneity of seniors: Poorer people are often hobbled by chronic illness, and succumb to premature death.

    Ed Kilgore

    Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors (New York Magazine)

  • Egg Prices!

    Well, after farmers wrote that letter, the White House and FTC started making noise about antitrust action. They said egg companies, we heard you’ve been price gouging. You’re just overcharging and you’re using bird flu as an excuse. We see you. The fact that you can play with prices like that tells us that there’s not enough competition happening in the egg market.

    …

    And that’s all the federal government had to do. FTC didn’t have to do anything beyond that, because just threatening antitrust action is often enough to get companies to back off.

    Sarah Taber

    Egg prices! Bird flu! Price gouging! What’s going on? (Farm to Taber)

  • My Doctor Emailed Me Back

    Here we reach the crux of the matter and the source of the distrust many trans people have for the NHS. We tell them we are trans, we want to transition. But that information about who we are and what we want counts for nothing unless we also have their permission. The system denies that we are reliable bearers of fundamental truths about ourselves. Our lack of trust in that system is just the equal and opposite reaction: they don’t listen to us, so we don’t listen to them.

    Abigail Thorn

    My Doctor Emailed Me Back (Trans Writes)