Recently, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis publicly insisted that “at the end of the day,” COVID-19 vaccines are “about your health and whether you want that protection or not,” ignorantly adding that someone’s decision to get vaccinated or not “really doesn’t impact me or anyone else” — which, as Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health explained during a recent appearance on CNN, is simply not reflective of the facts. Whether individuals get vaccinated has a huge impact on the spread of deadly diseases — like, of course, COVID-19 — within communities.
As Fauci put it:
‘If [DeSantis] feels that vaccines are not important for people, that they’re just important for some people — that’s completely incorrect. Vaccination… has been the solution to every major public health issue in which a vaccine was developed for. I mean smallpox, polio, measles — I’m not sure what people are talking about when they push back on vaccinations. It is historically, over decades and decades and decades, shown to be the way you control an infectious disease.’
Asked more directly about DeSantis’s comment that vaccination is a matter that merely affects the person getting the vaccine (or not getting it), Fauci added as follows:
‘Well that’s not true at all. I mean, obviously it’s important for you as an individual, for your own personal protection, safety, and health. But when you have a virus that’s circulating in the community, and you are not vaccinated, you are part of the problem, because you’re allowing yourself to be a vehicle for the virus to be spreading to someone else. So it isn’t as if it stops with you. If that were the case, then it would be only about you. But it doesn’t… You can… pass it on to someone who in fact might be very vulnerable… So when you’re dealing with an outbreak of an infectious disease, it isn’t only about you.’
Watch Fauci below:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said that getting a vaccine “doesn’t impact me or anyone else.” Dr. Anthony Fauci says that is “completely incorrect.”
“When you have a virus that's circulating in the community, and you are not vaccinated, you are part of the problem,” Fauci says. pic.twitter.com/IXSWL3sLcn
— New Day (@NewDay) September 7, 2021
“It isn’t only about you” — that’s a message that Republican leaders in this country could surely stand to take to heart. As Florida has struggled through the surge of what’s known as the delta variant of COVID-19, DeSantis has consistently fought against the imposition of basic safety precautions to the point of attempting to block the imposition of mask mandates in schools, even though many children can not yet even get vaccinated, and no age group is somehow automatically immune from the potentially deadly effects of COVID-19.
