TALLAHASSEE, Florida (LifeSiteNews) — Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday that he has selected Harvard-trained physician Dr. Joseph Ladapo to serve as the next Surgeon General and Secretary of Health for the Sunshine State.
“Dr. Ladapo comes to us by way of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA with a superb background,” DeSantis said. “He has had both a remarkable academic and medical career with a strong emphasis in health policy research. Dr. Ladapo will bring great leadership to the Department of Health. I would also like to thank both Dr. Scott Rivkees and Dr. Shamarial Roberson for their hard work on behalf of all Floridians.”
A Nigerian-born professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Ladapo was previously an associate professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a faculty member in New York University (NYU) School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health, and a Staff Fellow at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA). He holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School as well as a PhD in Health Policy from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. His research has focused on “clinical trial interventions and reducing the population burden of cardiovascular disease.”
“I am honored to have been chosen by Governor DeSantis to serve as Florida’s next Surgeon General,” Ladapo said. “We must make health policy decisions rooted in data and not in fear. From California, I have observed the different approaches taken by governors across the country and I have been impressed by Governor DeSantis’ leadership and determination to ensure that Floridians are afforded all opportunities to maintain their health and wellness, while preserving their freedoms as Americans. It is a privilege to join his team and serve the people of Florida.”
It's official: Joe Biden has announced that his Administration will be forcing COVID vaccinations on nearly 1/3rd of American citizens, blatantly disregarding the personal objections of millions of people and moving America ever closer towards a medical dictatorship.
We cannot stand for this unprecedented overreach, and we will not submit to Biden's tyrannical public coercion efforts.
Please SIGN this urgent petition informing the President that you will NOT comply with these unconstitutional vaccine mandate orders issued by the Biden Administration, and that elected officials should act in their capacity to block these intrusive demands.
On Thursday, September 9th, Joe Biden announced the latest round of federal orders meant to further coerce large swaths of the public into getting the COVID vaccine -- many against their will.
While the legal standing of these measures is, at best, dubious, the Biden Administration appears more ready than ever to gut our individual rights and practically erase medical autonomy in our country.
This latest escalation in overreach was announced via a televised speech in which Biden outlined a new "six-point plan" that includes far more than just six avenues to achieve mass medical compliance.
Among the most egregious new federal mandates are the following:
- A requirement that all private businesses employing more than 100 people mandate their workers get the Covid-19 vaccine or submit to weekly testing (to be implemented by way of a new Department of Labor rule)
- A requirement that all federal employees and federal contractors get the COVID vaccine
- A requirement that all healthcare workers in facilities that receive reimbursement from Medicare and/or Medicaid (an estimated 17 million) get the Covid-19 vaccine without an alternative testing option
- A requirement that all Head Start teachers get the COVID vaccine
- A federal effort to lobby states to implement vaccine mandates for all school employees, and require regular testing of all students and school staff
- A federal effort to lobby entertainment venues to require proof of vaccination or testing in order to grant entry to the public
- A continuation of mask mandates on all federal properties and during interstate travel (i.e. planes, trains, buses)
All in all, these new vaccine mandates, which will go into effect within the coming weeks, will affect an estimated 100 million American workers -- 2/3rds of the entire workforce!
And, according to an administration official, violations of these unconstitutional requirements could result in fines of up to $14,000.
While this is clearly a political ploy on the part of the Joe Biden and his team of power-hungry Washington insiders to shift the focus from their disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the American public knows better: After nearly a year and a half's worth of arbitrary, ever-changing, and unconstitutional government mandates in response to the COVID outbreak, it was always a given that the Biden Administration would ramp things up even further when it behooved them.
And now, it would seem that time has officially come.
"This is not about freedom or personal choice," Biden uttered in his remarks, confirming his administration's blatant dismissal of all Americans' right(s) to accept or decline the experimental Covid-19 vaccine.
This is a stunning reversal from Biden's declaration last December that "I don’t think [the vaccine] should be mandatory, I wouldn’t demand it to be mandatory."
In fact, Biden even confirmed his intention to flout states' rights in the process, warning that "If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way."
These are not the words of an "empathetic" leader; these are the words of an aspiring dictator. And, for the time being, the only way to stop Joe Biden's tyranny is through mass noncompliance.
As we've said from the beginning, science, basic logic, and common sense should dictate policy regarding COVID and the Delta variant.
But Joe Biden and the federal government have long abandoned those principles throughout this crisis, culminating into this disturbing yet inevitable flurry of intrusive vaccine mandates that use people's jobs, individual autonomy, and livelihood as leverage.
This assault on our individual rights, private businesses, and American workers cannot be tolerated, and the easiest way to combat these unlawful orders is to just say NO.
Please SIGN and SHARE this most important petition letting Joe Biden know that you will NOT comply with the unconstitutional medical demands being made by this administration, and that action should be taken to block any intrusive action against working Americans and private employers.
Thank you!
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
'Biden announces vaccine requirements for private businesses, impacting tens of millions of Americans': https://www.
Despite Ladapo’s medical credentials, mainstream media coverage of his appointment has fixated on his dissenting from the federal health bureaucracy’s consensus on COVID-19.
The Miami Herald reports that at the press conference announcing his appointment, Ladapo stressed that while “fear as a way of making policies” has “unfortunately…been a centerpiece of health policy in the United States ever since the beginning of the pandemic,” Florida will “completely reject” it.
When asked about the controversial COVID-19 vaccines, Ladapo declared his opposition to the “idea that people don’t get to make their own decisions on issues of health related to their own personal health,” and criticized the way the COVID vaccines have “been treated almost like a religion,” when in reality they aren’t the only path to “good health.” He also attributed vaccine hesitancy to a “climate of mistrust” for which public health officials themselves are responsible.
Ladapo is a vocal opponent of mask mandates. In April, he penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that, while potentially helpful in “some settings,” masks “are not the panacea officials have presented them as.” As support, he noted that “[d]espite a mask mandate imposed last April and steady, high rates of compliance, California experienced a surge in Covid-19 cases over the winter.”
“There has been no governor who has been more pro-COVID than Ron DeSantis and his newest hire, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, is further confirmation of that,” claimed Democrat National Committee (DNC) spokesperson Adonna Biel. “Instead of going with a trusted advocate for science, DeSantis is once again playing games with peoples’ lives by appointing someone who has trafficked anti-vaccine and anti-mask rhetoric.”
In fact, while Democrats and their allies have tried to discredit DeSantis since the beginning of the pandemic because he resisted COVID lockdowns in favor of a more targeted approach that focused on the protection of elderly Floridians, even the left-wing Associated Press eventually admitted that (as Ladapo referenced) California’s far more restrictive policies didn’t save more lives than Florida’s targeted approach. Democrats eventually tried to explain away the state’s COVID statistics by falsely accusing the DeSantis administration of manipulating the numbers, implicitly conceding the data was a credit to DeSantis.
Throughout the pandemic, DeSantis (who has been floated as a potential frontrunner for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination) has been generally positive about the COVID vaccines while defending the rights and choices of Floridians regarding their own health, including standing against school closings, vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and local lockdowns, as well as embracing therapeutics including hydroxychloroquine and monoclonal antibodies.
LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.