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Tag: own way

  • Commentary: Wake up, Los Angeles. We are all Jimmy Kimmel

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    Comics have long been on the front lines of democracy, the canary in the cat’s mouth, Looney Tunes style, when it comes to free speech being swallowed by regressive politics.

    So Jimmy Kimmel is in good company, though he may not like this particular historical party: Zero Mostel; Philip Loeb; even Lenny Bruce, who claimed, after being watched by the FBI and backroom blacklisted, that he was less a comic and more “the surgeon with the scalpel for false values.”

    During that era of McCarthyism in the 1950s (yes, I know Bruce’s troubles came later), America endured an attack on our 1st Amendment right to make fun of who we want, how we want — and survived — though careers and even lives were lost.

    Maybe we aren’t yet at the point of a new House Un-American Activities Committee, but the moment is feeling grim.

    Wake up, Los Angeles. This isn’t a Jimmy Kimmel problem. This is a Los Angeles problem.

    This is about punishing people who speak out. It’s about silencing dissent. It’s about misusing government power to go after enemies. You don’t need to agree with Kimmel’s politics to see where this is going.

    For a while, during Trump 2.0, the ire of the right was aimed at California in general and San Francisco in particular, that historical lefty bastion that, with its drug culture, openly LBGTQ+ ethos and Pelosi-Newsom political dynasty, seemed to make it the perfect example of what some consider society’s failures.

    But really, the difficulty with hating San Francisco is that it doesn’t care. It’s a city that has long acknowledged, even flaunted, America’s discomfort with it. That’s why the infamous newspaper columnist Herb Caen dubbed it “Baghdad by the Bay” more than 80 years ago, when the town had already fully embraced its outsider status.

    Los Angeles, on the other hand, has never considered itself a problem. Mostly, we’re too caught up in our own lives, through survival or striving, to think about what others think of our messy, vibrant, complicated city. Add to that, Angelenos don’t often think of themselves as a singular identity. There are a million different L.A.s for the more than 9 million people who live in our sprawling county.

    But to the rest of America, L.A. is increasingly a specific reality, a place that, like San Francisco once did, embodies all that is wrong for a certain slice of the American right.

    It was not happenstance that President Trump chose L.A. as the first stop for his National Guard tour, or that ICE’s roving patrols are on our streets. It’s not bad luck or even bad decisions that is driving the push to destroy UCLA as we know it.

    And it’s really not what Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk that got him pulled, because it truth, his statements were far from the most offensive that have been uttered on either side of the political spectrum.

    In fact, he wasn’t talking about Kirk, but about his alleged killer and how in the immediate aftermath, there was endless speculation about his political beliefs. Turns out that Kimmel wrongly insinuated the suspect was conservative, though all of us will likely have to wait until the trial to gain a full understanding of the evidence.

    “The MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said, before making fun of Trump’s response to the horrific killing.

    You can support what Kimmel said or be deeply offended by it. But it is rich for the people who just a few years ago were saying liberal “cancel culture” was ruining America to adopt the same tactics.

    If you need proof that this is more about control than content, look no further than Trump’s social media post on the issue, which directly encourages NBC to fire its own late-night hosts, who have made their share of digs at the president as well.

    “Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” Trump wrote.

    This is about making an example of America’s most vibrant and inclusive city, and the celebrity icons who dare to diss — the place that exemplifies better than any other what freedom looks like, lives like, jokes like.

    If a Kimmel can fall so easily, what does that mean the career of Hannah Einbinder, who shouted out a “free Palestine” at the Emmys? Will there be a quiet fear of hiring her?

    What does it mean for a union leader like David Huerta, who is still facing charges after being detained at an immigration protest? Will people think twice before joining a demonstration?

    What does it mean for you? The yous who live lives of expansiveness and inclusion. The yous who have forged your own path, made your own way, broken the boundaries of traditional society whether through your choices on who to love, what country to call your own, how to think of your identity or nurture your soul.

    You, Los Angeles, with your California dreams and anything-goes attitude, are the living embodiment of everything that needs to be crushed.

    I am not trying to send you into an anxiety spiral, but it’s important to understand what we stand to lose if civil rights continue to erode.

    Kimmel having his speech censored is in league with our immigrant neighbors being rounded up and detained; the federal government financially pressuring doctors into dropping care for transgender patients, and the University of California being forced to turn over the names of staff and students it may have a beef with.

    Being swept up by ICE may seem vastly different than a millionaire celebrity losing his show, but they are all the weaponization of government against its people.

    It was Disney, not Donald Trump, who took action against Kimmel. But Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatening to “take action” if ABC did not sounds a lot like the way the White House talks about Washington, Oakland and so many other blue cities, L.A. at the top of the list.

    Our Black mayor. Our Latino senator and representatives. Our 1 million undocumented residents. Our nearly 10% of the adult population identifies as LGBTQ+. Our comics, musicians, actors and writers who have long pushed us to see the world in new, often difficult, ways.

    Many of us are here because other places didn’t want us, didn’t understand us, tried to hold us back. (I am in Sacramento now, but remain an Angeleno at heart.) We came here, to California and Los Angeles, for the protection this state and city offers.

    But now it needs our protection.

    However this assault on democracy comes, we are all Jimmy Kimmel — we are all at risk. The very nature of this place is under siege, and standing together across the many fronts of these attacks is our best defense.

    Seeing that they are all one attack — whether it is against a celebrity, a car wash worker or our entire city — is critical.

    “Our democracy is not self-executing,” former President Obama said recently. “It depends on us all as citizens, regardless of our political affiliations, to stand up and fight for the core values that have made this country the envy of the world.”

    So here we are, L.A., in a moment that requires fortitude, requires insight, requires us to stand up and say the most ridiculous thing that has every been said in a town full of absurdity:

    I am Jimmy Kimmel, and I will not be silent.

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    Anita Chabria

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  • Florida’s Experiment With Measles

    Florida’s Experiment With Measles

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    The state of Florida is trying out a new approach to measles control: No one will be forced to not get sick.

    Joseph Ladapo, the state’s top health official, announced this week that the six cases of the disease reported among students at an elementary school in Weston, near Fort Lauderdale, do not merit emergency action to prevent unvaccinated students from attending class. Temporary exclusions of that kind while an outbreak is ongoing are part of the normal public-health response to measles clusters, as a means of both protecting susceptible children and preventing further viral spread. But Ladapo is going his own way. “Due to the high immunity rate in the community, as well as the burden on families and educational cost of healthy children missing school,” he said in a letter released on Tuesday, the state’s health department “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”

    That decision came off as brazen, even for an administration that has made systematic efforts to lower vaccination rates among its constituents over the past two years. Ladapo’s letter acknowledges the benefits of vaccination, as well as the fact that vulnerable children are “normally recommended” to stay home. Still, it doesn’t bother giving local parents the bare-minimum advice that all kids who are able should get their MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) shots, Dorit Reiss, a professor and vaccine-policy expert at UC Law San Francisco, told me. “I wouldn’t have expected him, in the middle of a measles outbreak, to be willing to sacrifice children in this way.”

    The Florida Department of Health has not responded to a request for comment on Ladapo’s future plans, should this situation worsen. For the moment, though, he has chosen to lower the guardrails from their standard height. It’s an escalation of his, and Florida’s, broader push against established norms in public health, especially as they relate to vaccination. So what happens now?

    At least in any immediate sense, Ladapo’s decision may not do much harm. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that its effects will end up being minimal. Parents who have children at the school, Manatee Bay Elementary, have until today to decide whether to pull out those kids for the next three weeks. Many seem to have already done so: About 200 students, and six teachers, have been absent, according to local news reports. In the meantime, Broward County Public Schools’ superintendent said yesterday that just 33 students out of the school’s nearly 1,100 were still unvaccinated. Given those two facts—some degree of self-imposed isolation, and 97 percent of the community now having some level of immune protection—the virus will have a hard time spreading no matter what the rules for attendance might be.

    Disease modeling, too, suggests that the risk of a larger outbreak is low. For a study released in 2019, a team of researchers based at Newcastle University and the University of Pittsburgh simulated thousands of measles outbreaks at schools in Texas, the most populous state to allow nonmedical exemptions from routine vaccine requirements. The researchers looked at the extent to which a policy of sequestering unvaccinated kids would help to reduce the outbreaks’ size. In the median outcome, even without any school-wide interventions, they found that an initial case of measles spreads only to a small handful of people. Adding in the rule that unvaccinated kids must stay at home has no effect on transmission. When the school’s vaccination rates are assumed to be unusually low, the rule reduces the outbreak’s size by one case.

    Not all the modeling outcomes are so rosy. For the very worst-case scenarios, in which a case of measles emerges in a school where unvaccinated kids happen to be clustered, the study found that forced suspensions have dramatic benefits. A major outbreak in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, for example, might end up infecting 477 people in the absence of any interventions, according to the model. When unvaccinated kids are kept from going to school, that number drops by 95 percent.

    Hypothetical models can’t tell us what will happen in a real-life school with real-life kids, like the one in Weston, Florida. But given Manatee Bay Elementary’s reported vaccination rate, it’s fair to assume that Ladapo’s policy won’t be catastrophic. Indeed, it may well end up sparing a few dozen families from the fairly serious inconvenience of being out of school without having much effect at all on the outbreak’s final size.

    But is the sparing of that inconvenience worth the risks that still remain? (And how should one value the time of a parent who could have vaccinated their child but chose not to?) As Reiss points out, if this policy leads to even one more case in the current outbreak, it will have put one more kid at risk of hospitalization, long-term complications, or even death. Worst-case outbreak scenarios do occur from time to time, as we all know well by now; and the Weston outbreak getting much worse is certainly within the realm of possibility. Any public-health authority would have to weigh these odds in the face of a six-case cluster; and surely almost every statewide health authority would choose to err on the side of caution. In Florida, though, the scale appears to tip the other way. Ladapo has rolled the dice on doing less.

    That’s been his way since the very day he was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis, in September 2021. Just hours after he was introduced, the state ended mandatory quarantines for low-risk students who had been exposed to COVID. The following March, just a few weeks after being confirmed into the job, Ladapo announced that Florida would be “the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children.” He continued to scale up from there: That fall, he recommended against the use of mRNA vaccines by any men under the age of 40. A year later, in October 2023, his office warned everyone under the age of 65 about the risks of getting an mRNA-based COVID booster. And then, finally, just last month, Ladapo came out with a warning that mRNA-based COVID vaccines “are not appropriate for use in human beings.”

    Read: The curious case of Florida’s pandemic response

    The man’s commitment to undermining vaccination is truly unparalleled among leading public-health officials. “As a surgeon general he stands alone,” Reiss told me. Yet Ladapo’s policy activism, however grotesque it might seem, has been bizarrely ineffective in practice. Take his March 2022 move to lead the way on not vaccinating young people against COVID. Media coverage of that announcement dwelled on reasonable concerns that this policy would dampen immunization rates; vaccine experts said it was a dangerous and irresponsible move that would “cause more people to die.” In practice, though, it seems to have done almost nothing. At the time of Ladapo’s announcement, 24.2 percent of Florida’s kids and 66.3 percent of its teenagers had received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. (The corresponding national numbers at the time were somewhat higher.) By the end of the year, and in spite of Ladapo’s contrarian guidance, Florida’s vaccination numbers for these age groups were up by about four and three points respectively—which is almost exactly the same amount, percentage-wise, as the increases in those numbers seen across the country.

    Or compare Florida’s experience to that of Nevada, a state which had very similar child and teen vaccination rates in March 2022: 23.1 percent and 64.0 percent. Through the end of 2022, while Ladapo was discouraging his constituents from getting shots, that state’s Democratic governor was engaged in a large-scale effort to do just the opposite. And yet the results were essentially the same: Nevada’s rates increased by pretty much the same amount as Florida’s.

    For all of Ladapo’s efforts to dampen his state’s enthusiasm for life-saving interventions, Florida’s age-adjusted rates of death from COVID do not appear to have increased relative to the rest of the country, at least according to reported numbers. In this way, one of the nation’s loudest and most powerful voices of vaccine skepticism seems to be shouting into the wind. His proclamations and decisions to this point have been exquisitely effective at producing outrage, but embarrassingly feeble when it comes to changing outcomes. Even taken on its own terms, as a means of changing public-health behavior, Ladapo’s anti-vaccine activism has been a demonstrable failure.

    Read: The good news about vaccine hesitancy

    Perhaps this week’s decision to relax the rules on fighting measles will mark just one more step along that path: Once again, Florida’s surgeon general will have taken an appalling stance that ends up having no effect. But then again, now could be different. By the time Ladapo got around to undermining COVID shots, more than two-thirds of the state’s population, and 91 percent of its seniors, were already fully vaccinated. The damage he could have done was limited, by definition. But the measles outbreak in Weston is unfolding in real time. More such outbreaks are nearly guaranteed to occur in the U.S. in the months ahead. Reiss worries that Ladapo’s new idea, of choosing not to separate out unvaccinated kids during a school outbreak, could end up spreading into other jurisdictions. “If this becomes a precedent, that becomes a bigger problem,” she told me.

    For the first time since taking office, Ladapo may finally have a real opportunity to make a difference through his vaccination policy. That’s a problem.

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    Daniel Engber

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