The spectacle of anti-vaccine nonsense coming from Florida last week would be hard to top but it was more than matched on Capitol Hill, where U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. engaged in serial science denialism before a combative chorus of Senate critics.

In a continuing political attack on the foundation of American health care, Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Lapado stood beside Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sept. 3 to announce their intention to end all vaccine mandates. The Republican chief executive nodded and smiled smugly as his Black appointee consigned a generation of Sunshine State schoolchildren to heightened risks from diseases like polio, smallpox, measles and tuberculosis that had all been virtually wiped out by vaccine science over the last 60 years.

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