Nigerian-born Surgeon General of Florida, Dr. Joseph Ladapo says the state has stopped taking fear into consideration when making public health policy.
The Harvard-educated doctor said he hoped that the state would set an example for others in approaching public health.
Ladapo, who was appointed in September by Governor Ron DeSantis, stated this in a video of his unveiling which recently resurfaced.
He was an Associate Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles before his appointment to replace Dr. Scott Rivkees as Florida’s top doctor.
“Florida will completely reject fear as a way of making policies in public health,” Ladapo said.
“So we’re done with fear.”
The former decathlete explained that fear has been the “centerpiece of health policy in the United States ever since the beginning of the pandemic.”
Watch video:
Ladapo vowed to ensure there is a known difference between science and opinions.
“You’ll know when we’re talking about data, and you’ll know when we’re talking about our opinions, our impressions, our preferences about the data,” he said.
“That will always be clear here. So you can count on that.”
In 2020, Ladapo wrote a famous Wall Street Journal article headlined, “How to Live With Covid, Not for It,” where he said that masks are a distraction from the pandemic reality.
At his unveiling, the Daniel Ford Award recipient said that Florida “should be promoting good health, and vaccination isn’t the only path to that.
“It’s been treated almost like a religion, and that’s just senseless, right? There are lots of good pathways to health, and vaccination’s not the only one.”