The Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) will no longer encourage mass vaccination, the state attorney general and his deputy said yesterday in a news release and on social media, alarming health experts amid a growing measles outbreak in neighboring Texas.
And LDH has banned vaccine events and ordered staff not to promote vaccination, New Orleans Public Radio (NOPR) reported today, citing an internal memo to staff yesterday, the same day as the confirmation of vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
In December, NOPR reported that LDH employees had been instructed not to produce news releases, presentations, or social media posts urging vaccination against COVID-19, flu, or mpox.
‘Offense against personal autonomy’
“Government should admit the limitations of its role in people’s lives and pull back its tentacles from the practice of medicine,” Ralph Abraham, DVM, MD, and Wyche Coleman III, MD, said in yesterday’s release. Restoring public trust, they said, “requires returning medical decisions to the doctor-patient relationship, where informed, personalized care is guided by compassion and expertise rather than blanket government mandates.”
Abraham is a veterinarian, physician, and was a Republican US representative for Louisiana’s fifth congressional district from 2015 to 2021. He made a failed bid for governor in 2019. Coleman is an ophthalmologist who practices in Shreveport.
The statement noted that for much of last century, public health has worked to fill the gaps in the “broken” US healthcare system by providing guidance, information, and recommendations. “But when we get it wrong and overreach, the harm is often irreparable,” it said, calling the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendation that 6-month-old children receive COVID-19 vaccinations “woefully out of touch with reality and with most parents.”
“Trust is built over years and lost in seconds, and we’re still rebuilding from the COVID missteps,” namely the vaccine mandates that constituted an “offense against personal autonomy that will take years to overcome,” they said.
‘Not a reason to eschew the value of vaccines’
Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called the logic of the surgeons general statement on vaccines “tortured.”
“They say ‘here we had mandated vaccines for COVID, and there were things we didn’t know about COVID because, as with everything, we learn as we go. But we still mandated vaccines when there were things we still didn’t know; therefore, we can’t trust the people who made those decisions, and we shouldn’t have mass vaccine campaigns ever again.'”
