Florida's government has decided to urge most adolescents not to get
vaccinated, and parents not to vaccinate most children.
Its surgeon general had given no medical specifics to justify this
position, perhaps because there are none. It is surely bad advice.
Vaccinating a child protects that child. It also helps protect other
children in the same school, and helps protect adults in their family.
I suspect that the reasons for this policy are political and derived
from Republican ideology.
The Republican Party, with few exceptions, has opposed measures that
reduce the spread of Covid. That includes masks
and (since 2021) vaccination.
Republican leaders started this when they discovered,
in April 2020, that deaths from Covid-19 were
concentrated among mainly Democratic demographic groups, such as
blacks.
As the US commits the folly of unilateral tactical disarmament against
Covid-19, by encouraging people to abandon masks, and fails to help
people who work in a plant or office to stay home when sick,
reducing Covid-19 to a low level rests on vaccination. The
prevalence of the disease has been decreasing for around 6 weeks, but
we cannot count on that to continue if we cease pushing it along.