{"id":13966,"date":"2021-08-07T20:54:19","date_gmt":"2021-08-08T00:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/?p=13966"},"modified":"2021-08-07T20:54:31","modified_gmt":"2021-08-08T00:54:31","slug":"three-of-the-five-polk-county-commissioners-called-the-vaccine-experimental-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/2021\/08\/07\/three-of-the-five-polk-county-commissioners-called-the-vaccine-experimental-why\/","title":{"rendered":"Three of the five Polk County Commissioners called the vaccine \u201cexperimental.\u201dWHY?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Driven by the radically contagious delta variant, COVID-19 is spreading briskly through Polk County residents. Now sending the highest never number of people to the hospitals, most of them younger than 50 and almost all of them unvaccinated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The message at a news conference was called by the leaders of Lakeland Regional Health, Watson Clinic, and the Florida Department of Health (DOH)<\/a> Polk County office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main way to prevent the spread is by getting more people vaccinated, PERIOD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ledger headlines state, \u201cAs health officials push COVID-19 vaccine, Polk County commissioners cling to false information\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there wasn’t a health official in attendance at this commission meeting to respond to the father’s comments or provide him with information driven by data, science, and first-hand experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, the commissioners dispensed their own thoughts and opinions about the virus and its vaccine. In doing so, they made untrue statements \u2014 such as children don’t get COVID \u2014 and amplified some common misconceptions, such as characterizing the vaccine as “experimental.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One commissioner, who’s paid by taxpayers for his government role,\u00a0told The Ledger reporter\u00a0that he doesn’t trust the government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Commissioner Neil Combee said, \u201cWe do know that children do not get COVID-19. They’re not getting the Delta variant.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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However, of the new 989 cases in Polk County on Wednesday, 14% were in children 14 and younger, according to the Florida Department of Health in Polk and Hardee counties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“To individuals who say, ‘Oh kids don’t get this,’ it’s absolutely untrue,” the department’s director, Dr. Joy Jackson, said at a press conference Thursday. “Kids can get infected, kids can transmit infection.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last Tuesday, three of the five Polk County Commissioners called the vaccine \u201cexperimental.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s also false, as all three vaccines authorized for emergency use in the USA underwent clinical trials involving tens of thousands of people and have proved effective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe vaccine is working,\u201d Mary Mayhew, the CEO of the Florida Hospital Association said. “If we are going to stop the mutations and the spread of this virus, we need to get people who can be vaccinated to get vaccinated.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That includes children ages 12 and up, said Dr. Mobeen Rathore, a pediatrician, and professor of Pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville. He’s also a former president of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are seeing a lot more kids being admitted to the hospital, being very ill, going into ICU and going onto ventilators,\u201d Rathore said. \u201cWe need to do everything in our power to protect our children.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The best way to do that is with masks and the vaccine, he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s time to wake up the Polk Commissioners so they can be on the same page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Driven by the radically contagious delta variant, COVID-19 is spreading briskly through Polk County residents. Now sending the highest never number of people to the hospitals, most of them younger… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13968,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":71799,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[960],"class_list":["post-13966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","category-news","tag-three-of-the-five-polk-county-commissioners-called-the-vaccine-experimental-why"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}