Florida’s government continues to take positions at odds with national health authorities. The state’s surgeon general Joseph Ladapo, a DeSantis ally, became the only state health leader to recommend against coronavirus vaccination for children and recently urged people aged under 65 to shun booster shots. In March he drew an unprecedented letter of rebuke from the CDC director and FDA commissioner over his misrepresentation of findings in a state sponsored study of vaccine adverse events.

Yes, Il Dapo is who my brother told me to read. Unfortunately, IIRC the gov caused some problems when authorizing the Pfizer vaccine, they included some speculative questions from a pre-print article. The studies weren't done because they were already covered in mounds of data. Ladapo seized on those questions and spun his anti-vaccine narrative.

My brother thinks the vaccines can change your DNA. The response to Ladapo's claims is that there's an absolute ton of evidence that the vaccine, including any particles doesn't enter the nucleus of the cell. So it can float around the cell, inactivated, and while the vaccines are cleared of particles, whatever particles are left don't enter the nucleus.

It was a revelation to me that my brother, an intelligent guy, could be so wrong - and Ladapo provides confirmation bias for his belief.

It seems to take very little for some people to become suspicious of almost everything around them, even if it's nothing new. The US Army holds exercises every four years in Texas, because the terrain and conditions are similar to areas they think they may be deployed to. I think they had done these exercise for forty years, but suddenly people got the idea that Texas was being invaded and people were being hauled off to concentration camps. Weird.