Florida's government has decided to urge most adolescents not to get vaccinated, and parents not to vaccinate most children.

Its surgeon general had given no medical specifics to justify this position, perhaps because there are none. It is surely bad advice. Vaccinating a child protects that child. It also helps protect other children in the same school, and helps protect adults in their family.

I suspect that the reasons for this policy are political and derived from Republican ideology.

The Republican Party, with few exceptions, has opposed measures that reduce the spread of Covid. That includes masks and (since 2021) vaccination. Republican leaders started this when they discovered, in April 2020, that deaths from Covid-19 were concentrated among mainly Democratic demographic groups, such as blacks.

As the US commits the folly of unilateral tactical disarmament against Covid-19, by encouraging people to abandon masks, and fails to help people who work in a plant or office to stay home when sick, reducing Covid-19 to a low level rests on vaccination. The prevalence of the disease has been decreasing for around 6 weeks, but we cannot count on that to continue if we cease pushing it along.