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The Louisiana Department of Health officials have instructed their department not to promote several vaccines, including COVID-19, influenza and mpox vaccines. According to anonymous employees who spoke to NPR, “Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines.”
This announcement comes after Louisiana ranked least healthiest state in 2023, and No. 49 in 2024. Louisiana also had the first recorded death of the H5N1 Bird Flu.
Dr. Ronald Blanton, Tulane University William Henderson Chair in the Prevention of Tropical Diseases in the School of Public Health, described the new policy as “shameful, ignorant, and illogical” in an email to The Hullabaloo. “It would appear that the authors of the policy are not willing to shout its benefits to the public,” Blanton said.
Blanton said that infection disease prevention is a community issue, not a personal one.
“We ask people to cover their coughs, not to protect them, but to protect us. Vaccination is not just for personal protection but function at the community level,” he said.
Brian Lucas, a second-year master’s student in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, recently spent a year as a policy advisor for the Louisiana Department of Health.
Lucas questioned why the policy was not made official and public.
“It’s fairly unusual for an executive department to try and establish official policy without putting it in writing, right? And I think that’s where the alarm bells should be going off for people before we actually evaluate what the policies are themselves,” Lucas said.
Robert F. Kenedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, has repeated anti-vaccine conspiracies as part of the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign.
In this campaign, RFK Jr. has stated that vaccines cause autism and that COVID-19 was made of “ethnically targeted microbes,” which were engineered as a bioweapon to not infect the Chinese or Ashkenazi Jews.
In September 2024, Louisiana Surgeon General Dr. Ralph Abraham and his deputy, Dr. Wyche Coleman, spoke at a committee meeting regarding Louisiana’s response to COVID-19.
“Mask mandates, lockdowns, forced closures of churches, schools and businesses, coerced vaccinations, and suppression or intimidation of those who resisted are just a few examples of policies endorsed by the previous administration, which I opposed then and still oppose now,” Abraham said.
As a private university, Tulane is legally allowed to set its own vaccine requirements for attendance.
“All students taking classes in person at Tulane University are required to provide proof of immunization compliance (meeting Louisiana law, CDC and American College Health Association guidelines),” according to the Tulane Campus Health website.
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