TAMPA, Fla. — Following the announcement by Governor Ron DeSantis and other officials that Florida will move to end vaccine mandates, we saw many questions pour in over social media.
Today, Tampa Bay 28 took a few of those questions to local pediatrician Dr. Lisa Cronin, who has practiced in the Tampa Bay area for the last 15 years:
Watch Blake Phillips full report
Q: Where are we kind of at in terms of herd immunity with a mandate possibly going away?
We're sort of right on the cusp, there are parts of Florida that still have pretty good herd immunity, but there are also parts of Florida that do not have herd immunity...There already are school districts in Florida that are below what we would need to keep protection for the bulk of the people if a case of measles got in.
Q: The measles outbreak in Texas was an instance of a community that did not have herd immunity and that disease getting in there. Walk me through why something like that could happen.
So, because of the high contagious nature of this disease, it is very easily spread amongst communities. So when you have one case that gets in and you have a lot of people that do not have immunity, for example, in a school setting, every child that doesn't have the immunity is very quickly going to get the disease and then they're gonna bring it home they're gonna. It's going to spread very very quickly once it gets into those close school environments.
Q: For families that may be on the fence that hear on TV, "Hey vaccines aren't safe." Hey vaccines are safe." For those families, what would you say to them?
I think the biggest thing is talking to your pediatrician, because we are not just here to practice medicine, we are here to educate...It is our job to make sure that our patients and our families have the right information in hand to make an informed choice.
Cronin said at the end of the day, she feels like removing a mandate is a bad thing for the state of Florida.
"Mandates like this are gonna start popping up that don't require kids to have their vaccines. We're gonna see lower and lower levels of herd immunity, which means we are inevitably going to see more and more cases of deadly diseases."
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