7 November 14-20, 2024 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | Joe? Say It Ain’t So! DeSantis teases anti-vax Florida surgeon general for HHS secretary. BY NAOMI FEINSTEIN F ollowing Donald Trump’s re- sounding win over Vice Presi- dent Kamala Harris in the presidential election on Novem- ber 5, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is propping up his anti-vax surgeon general as a potential member of the once and future president’s new administration. In a post-Election Day tweet on X (for- merly Twitter), DeSantis asked his followers to let him know whether they felt Trump ought to tap Dr. Joseph Ladapo to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Ser- vices (HHS). “Retweet if you’d like to see this man — Dr. Joseph Ladapo — serve as the secretary of HHS in the new Trump administration,” DeSantis posted. DeSantis appointed Ladapo to the post of Florida surgeon general in September 2021 after the Nigerian-born Harvard Medical School grad gained notoriety for his essays in the Wall Street Journal criticizing pan- demic lockdowns, COVID-19 vaccines, and mask-wearing. The Florida Senate con- firmed Ladapo’s appointment in February 2022. During his tenure, the former associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’s School of Medicine has bat- tled with public health officials over the safety of vaccines and threatened TV sta- tions with criminal charges for airing ad- vertisements in support of Amendment 4, the ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. During a measles outbreak in February of this year, Ladapo broke with federal guide- lines by leaving it up to parents of grade schoolers whether to to vaccinate their chil- dren or keep them home to stop the spread of the highly contagious disease. The governor’s tweet followed news that Ladapo is on fellow conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s shortlist for a position in Trump’s administration. Kennedy, who is expected to help the president-elect fill the top posts at federal health agencies, is said to be eyeing Ladapo as the candidate for secretary of health and human services — a cabinet post. And last week the Washington Post reported that Ladapo might also be tapped as the U.S. sur- geon general — the nation’s chief medical doctor. HHS is responsible for enhancing “the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medi- cine, public health, and social services.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, and the Health Resources and Ser- vices Administration (HRSA) are among the agencies that fall under the purview of HHS. [email protected] Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo speaks during a press conference at the University of Miami Health System Don Soffer Clinical Research Center on May 17, 2022. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images can Hispanics in South Florida. That, and “just Trump himself.” “I can’t really 100 percent explain it,” adds the professor. “It just seems like [Trump] has the ability to really talk to peo- ple in a direct way that they respond to, in- cluding a lot of people in the Hispanic community who, at first glance, would seem to never support him.” FIU professor and former Trump White House official Mario Loyola offered a more strident view of the turning of the tide. In Florida, Loyola tells New Times, “Mil- lions of Latinos realized that what the new Democrats are pushing is simply socialism under a different name. They’ve seen that be- fore and they know where it leads.” Loyola says Trump won over voters who “remember who violated their bodily auton- omy by forcing them to take medicines they didn’t want and didn’t need; who sought to censor and persecute them for expressing doubts about official policy or disagreeing with required new definitions of words like “boy” and “girl”; who traumatized their chil- dren with mask mandates for a year for no medically justifiable reason.” Adds Loyola, “Trump won voters who are worried about the threat to democracy be- cause people know who the real threat to de- mocracy is.” [email protected]
