Last week, the Sun-Sentinel alerted the public to a theft of your property, paid for with your taxpayer dollars. This theft happened not with violence or under cover of darkness but on the watch of our very own Florida Department of Health.
This department is responsible for knowing which diseases are circulating among us—and telling us about those diseases so we can protect ourselves. But last week, the disease trackers disappeared from the Florida Department of Health’s website.
Without the knowledge of which diseases are spreading, illnesses like measles and tuberculosis can tear through our communities. Such illnesses are highly contagious, and they can be deadly. Measles can also destroy your body’s ability to fight off other diseases, leaving you vulnerable to other infections later on.
Fortunately, at least in the case of measles, this vaccine is one of the most common that children get—pediatricians are happy to answer parents’ questions about this—and can prevent much suffering and regret. But will the Florida Department of Health do its part by returning Floridians’ property so we, our doctors, and our institutions can make the best decisions for us?
This isn’t just about some numbers quietly disappearing from a website. This is about our health and our freedom. Without knowing whether infectious diseases are spiking in Seminole County, parents won’t know whether to send their children to that midsummer birthday party or skip it.
People who are immunocompromised or immunosuppressed will have to take even more precautions to make up for the lack of information they used to have from the Florida Department of Health. Senior citizens wanting to avoid unnecessary risk as they age will find it harder to make informed decisions about spending time in crowded areas. And health-conscious individuals of all ages, abilities, and disabilities deserve the freedom to make well-founded decisions based on information that we, the public, have already paid for.
We also deserve the freedom to access this information. This is the twenty-first century! No matter where we go in our lives, no matter what work we do and for what amount of money, we get an education early in our lives. We learn the basics of secondary research—in other words, looking up information written by people who have spent their lives learning a subject deeply and published by people who know that same subject just as well. With the Internet at our fingertips, we often learn online, and we expect the information our government provides on the Internet to not just disappear one day.
We can’t set up a lab in our living rooms. We can’t hire a team of pathologists to tell us what’s spreading in our neighborhood. “Do your own research” has poured too many well-meaning folks down a rabbit hole of algorithms that feed the interests of people those folks will never know. To make good decisions, we need access to expert research—the kind of research the Florida Department of Health took down from its website.
And, of course, we deserve the freedom to live—free from measles, from tuberculosis, from the fear that these vaccine-preventable diseases could make a comeback and infect our loved ones who are too young or too ill to be vaccinated. We deserve that freedom, and we deserve answers.
Where did our disease-tracking data go?
If this doesn’t sit right with you, join us in holding the Florida Department of Health accountable for their theft of the public’s data. Call your state representative and state senator and let them know you expect that information to be restored to the Florida Department of Health’s website without delay.
Also, call Governor Ron DeSantis’s office and tell him the same thing. Your elected representatives need to know, whether or not you voted for them, that they work for the people of Florida, and the disease trackers your tax dollars have paid for belong to you.