Sadly, Darwin Awards are about to go to a lot of new winners.

Don’t misconstrue this. I don’t find it funny. Ironic and maddening are better words. In fact, it makes me angry as hell because innocent children will sicken and die.

I don’t blame the parents, and of course, I don’t blame the children.

I blame the damn fool Repulican doctors like Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo (Faulty Science Underpins Florida Surgeon General’s Call to Halt mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination) and Surgeon General Robert Kennedy, Jr. (Former Surgeon General on HHS canceling vaccine research: ‘Over 2 million lives have been saved because of mRNA technology’) for their dark ages stances on vaccination.

A pox on them and the rest of the damn fools who blindly go along with them.

The Darwin Awards go to people who remove themselves from humanity by doing something stupid, thereby improving the human genome.

Here is today’s example from the Florida Sun Sentinel:

South Florida childhood vaccination rates plunge. Who is vulnerable, and why?

Despite an outbreak of measles last year in a Weston elementary school, Broward County saw a dramatic drop in its immunization rate for kindergartners in 2025.

In Broward, only 82.2% of 2024-25 kindergartners got their required vaccinations — the lowest level in 15 years. The public health goal is a vaccination rate of 95% — the level that makes it unlikely that a single infection will spark a disease cluster or outbreak.

The declining rate reflects the heated debate raging on social media and among South Florida parents.

“There’s a lot of distrust in the health system,” said Daniela Rodriguez, a Broward County mother with two children in elementary school and a 1-year-old. “After COVID, people have gotten more educated about vaccines and have started questioning things that weren’t questioned before.”

Public health officials focus on vaccination rates for kindergartners because elementary schools can be hot spots for germs and origins of community spread. By kindergarten, children must be vaccinated for diseases including measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chicken pox, and Hepatitis B. Outbreaks often start in small, localized areas, where the level of vaccination in that community determines its risk.

The other South Florida counties also have low immunization coverage in kindergartners. Palm Beach County reported 89.8% of 2024-25 kindergartners received their required vaccines, and Miami-Dade reported 91%.

Florida’s statewide rate  for kindergarten vaccinations is 88.8%, well below the national average of 93%.

“When the rate is low, we are at an increased risk of some of these diseases we have seen eliminated making a comeback,” said Jennifer Takagishi, a Tampa pediatrician and vice president of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

One of the vaccines given before kindergarten is for pertussis (whooping cough), which young children are more prone to catching during the fall and winter months. Florida has already had a record number of whooping cough cases in 2025 — more than 1,100 cases compared with 391 in 2019, before the pandemic. Children diagnosed with whooping cough, a respiratory infection, can lose their breath, have apnea spells, or vomit. Health experts expect to see a continued rise.

“Vaccination declines we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t rebounding,” said Takagishi, adding that it may take a year or two before the lowered immunization rate is reflected in a rash of diseases.

Despite an outbreak of measles last year in a Weston elementary school, Broward County saw a dramatic drop in its immunization rate for kindergartners in 2025.

In Broward, only 82.2% of 2024-25 kindergartners got their required vaccinations — the lowest level in 15 years. The public health goal is a vaccination rate of 95% — the level that makes it unlikely that a single infection will spark a disease cluster or outbreak.

The declining rate reflects the heated debate raging on social media and among South Florida parents.

“There’s a lot of distrust in the health system,” said Daniela Rodriguez, a Broward County mother with two children in elementary school and a 1-year-old. “After COVID, people have gotten more educated about vaccines and have started questioning things that weren’t questioned before.”

Public health officials focus on vaccination rates for kindergartners because elementary schools can be hot spots for germs and origins of community spread. By kindergarten, children must be vaccinated for diseases including measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chicken pox, and Hepatitis B. Outbreaks often start in small, localized areas, where the level of vaccination in that community determines its risk.

The other South Florida counties also have low immunization coverage in kindergartners. Palm Beach County reported 89.8% of 2024-25 kindergartners received their required vaccines, and Miami-Dade reported 91%.

Florida’s statewide rate  for kindergarten vaccinations is 88.8%, well below the national average of 93%.

“When the rate is low, we are at an increased risk of some of these diseases we have seen eliminated making a comeback,” said Jennifer Takagishi, a Tampa pediatrician and vice president of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

One of the vaccines given before kindergarten is for pertussis (whooping cough), which young children are more prone to catching during the fall and winter months. Florida has already had a record number of whooping cough cases in 2025 — more than 1,100 cases compared with 391 in 2019, before the pandemic. Children diagnosed with whooping cough, a respiratory infection, can lose their breath, have apnea spells, or vomit. Health experts expect to see a continued rise.

“Vaccination declines we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t rebounding,” said Takagishi, adding that it may take a year or two before the lowered immunization rate is reflected in a rash of diseases.

Exemptions are setting records

Florida law requires that students entering kindergarten be vaccinated for certain contagious diseases; however, they can be exempted by their doctor for medical reasons or by their parents if they affirm the shots conflict with the family’s religious practices. Across the U.S., the share of children with exemptions from required vaccines rose to an all-time high of 3.6% in 2024-25.  In Florida, the group of kids exempted from vaccine requirements was 6.29%, surpassing the national average. And in some Florida counties, the exemption rate is as high as 15.03%, according to state health data.

The Florida Department of Health notes on its website: “The proportion of children age 5-17 years with new religious exemptions is increasing each month.” This implies that more parents choose to avoid at least some vaccines for their children.

With more children in schools who are unvaccinated, parents and older relatives are at risk, too.

“It’s not just about the danger of disease for the children; it is also dangerous for parents who may or may not have had a vaccine, for people whose immune systems are not working well, and for people who are older and were vaccinated a long time ago,” Takagishi said.  “It’s putting a lot of people at risk.”

In February  2024, an outbreak of measles spread through Manatee Bay Elementary School in Weston, where 33 of the school’s 1,067 students lacked at least one shot of the two-dose measles vaccine. By the end of the outbreak, the disease had spread to nine children between birth and 14 years old. No adults were affected. However, so far this year, within the U.S., 462 people over age 20 have gotten measles compared with 77 in 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

Each person’s risk for diseases such as measles varies, said  Dr. Lewis Nelson, dean of Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine.

“We don’t really have a lot of great information on how good your immune response will be to an exposure if you got a vaccine many years ago,” Lewis said. “But what we do understand is that for most vaccines, most infections that have left you immunized, you store memory cells in your body that will react when you’re reexposed.”

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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