Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s January 2024 Florida ban on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines—while dismissing DNA risks—mirrors RFK Jr.’s "selective rejection" tactic, claiming opposition only to "unsafe" shots despite pushing blanket vaccine refusal, exposing a pattern of exploiting ambiguity to evade accountability. Like a 16-year-old dodging ridicule, these moves prioritize public perception over evidence, revealing extremists’ calculated strategy to normalize fringe claims by avoiding outright confrontation with widely accepted science. [Automatically generated summary]
When I was in high school, all of my friends were smokers except for me.
They hung out in the smoking area outside the school, and I hung out there with them because they were my friends.
The topic of if and when I might start smoking came up often.
At some point, one of my friends decided it would be funny to offer me a cigarette, which I declined.
The joke persisted, though, and soon it became a regular thing.
Friends offering me cigarettes that they knew I would decline.
I decided that I wanted to be in on the joke rather than merely the butt of it, so I started riffing on their bit.
I decided to reject their offer based only on the nature of the cigarette.
It went something like this.
A friend would offer me a cigarette.
I would ask them if the cigarette was a menthol.
They might say yes, to which my reply would be, I don't smoke menthols.
And uproarious laughter ensued.
At least it does in my memory.
Sometimes a person would be standing nearby that wasn't in on the joke and would have a cigarette of the other kind and would consequently offer it once I give my punchline.
At which point, I would be forced to carry on the joke and say, I don't smoke non-menthol cigarettes.
I would never say either because that would give the thing away.
It was much funnier to leave them guessing about what was really going on.
It was always better to know what was happening and be in on the joke than be on the outside wondering what was going on.
This is called selective rejection.
When you want to reject something entirely, but you don't want to be seen as rejecting it entirely, so you only reject one subsection or selection of that thing.
I was doing it for comedic effect as a 16-year-old.
We are seeing this done now for a very different reason.
Just this morning, on January 3rd of 2024, the Surgeon General of Florida, a man by the name of Joseph Ladapo, announced a halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in the state of Florida.
He hasn't been explicit about his feelings on the non-mRNA vaccine choices, but his previous actions and rhetoric involving vaccine safety reporting are relevant.
In April of 2023, he personally altered key findings in a COVID-19 vaccine safety study.
The alterations drastically changed the risk metric and were not justified by any available data.
His announcement today is based in part on a conspiracy belief that the mRNA technology can change or contaminate the DNA of people who receive it.
This belief has been debunked many, many times.
The notes for this brief will include a link to a YouTube video by Dr. Dan Wilson doing exactly that.
We also see this in RFK Jr.'s rhetoric about vaccine use.
That's the same RFK Jr. who, as of this moment, is still running for president as an independent candidate and just yesterday announced that one of the other biggest anti-vaxxers, Del Bigtree, would be the communications director for Kennedy's campaign.
Kennedy claims that he isn't an anti-vaxxer, that he is, instead, only against the unsafe vaccines.
This is also selective rejection.
In truth, Kennedy is against all vaccine use.
His rhetoric is meant to disguise himself in a cloak of reasonableness.
Kennedy is attempting to make the world very marginally more safe by protecting people and, in his rhetoric, the children, from the rare and mostly innocuous vaccine side effects.
While he does this, he will also make those same people many times more vulnerable to the many diseases which these vaccines are helping to keep at bay.
We learn something important about the nature of our social environment when we look closely at what the extreme people among us attempt to do to disguise their actions.
It means that they know what is a reasonable position and that they know how to imitate it.
They know what position the majority of the population will accept.
We need not worry about giving them the benefit of the doubt in these cases.