Every time Joseph Ladapo cheapens UF’s name and reputation I ask myself two questions:
What would Robert Quarrels Marston do?
What would Parker Small say?
Actually, they’re rhetorical questions. I know what they would have done and said about Ladapo – Florida’s Surgeon General and highly paid UF medical faculty member – comparing vaccines to slavery and vowing to rid public schools of vaccination requirements.
Marston was the first physician to be named president of the University of Florida, in 1974. He was also a scientist of the first order.
In his younger years he was part of the research team that, under Nobel Prize winner Howard Florey, developed penicillin as the world’s first reliable antibiotic.
Lyndon Johnson appointed Marston director of the National Institute of Health – a post he held for nearly five years until he was forced out because he refused to sign onto Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer.”
The scientist in Marston deemed it both bad policy and bad medicine to put all the NIH’s chips on one disease at the expense of other vital medical research.
Marston’s mark on UF
Marston was UF President for a decade. I was editor of the Alligator when he was hired and later joined The Sun as higher education writer. So I reported on pretty much the entirety of Marston’s administration.
When Marston took the job, UF’s Shands hospital fit into a single building, and its billing system was in chaos. By the time he left, UF’s health enterprise was well on its way to becoming a nationally reputable medial research and health care complex.
Then there was Parker Small.
Small was an immunization pioneer
During my years as Sun Editorial Page Editor, Parker was one of my favorite “go to” UF scientists. A renown immunologist, he was recipient of the Center for Disease Control’s Florida Childhood Immunization Champion Award in 2012 for his advocacy of “fair and full” flu immunizations for all children.
Basically Dr. Small understood that kids tend to be little germ factories. And that if you want to improve the odds of health-challenged adults and, especially, the vulnerable elderly, avoiding the flu you needed to start by getting as many school age kids as possible vaccinated.
Parker, with UF’s full support, was the motivating force behind an inspired drive by Alachua County schools to immunize as many students as possible for flu season.
The result? A three-year campaign to immunize children in local schools that made Alachua County residents “among the most protected in the United States against contracting influenza,” UF bragged in a 2011 news release.
A public health campaign that would be a non-starter our present Free State of Floriduh.
Both left shining legacies
Dr. Marston passed away in 1999, and Dr. Small is long since retired.
But I have no doubt about what, if they were still here, Marston would do and Small would say while Ladapo spouts nonsense about the efficacy of vaccinations and insists that he doesn’t need scientific data to back him up.
Not to belabor the point, but Drs. Marston and Small were of an era when UF took its medicine, its educational mission and its robust research capabilities seriously.
Before Gov. Ron DeSantis declared that “woke” was bad, DEI was evil, sociology, the humanities were a waste of time…and best medical practices must take a back seat to political expediency.
Which is why as soon as DeSantis hired Ladapo as Florida’s Surgeon General, in 2021, at a salary of $250,000, UF immediately awarded him a part time associate professor gig. Thereby padding his pay check by an additional $262,000.
The end of a UF era
If Marston – or someone possessed of his integrity and professionalism – still occupied Tigert Hall he would have refused to put Ladapo on the med school faculty. Even at the cost of his own job.
Marston gave up a prestigious federal job at arguably the pinnacle of his career because he refused to play politics with science. As much as anyone who ever led UF, his was the guiding hand that turned a nondescript Southern football school into a world class graduate research university.
Likewise Parker Small devoted his professional life to fighting contagious diseases. And with his, and UF’s, help, Alachua schools became, for a brief time, a national model for how communities can contain flu outbreaks.
If Small were still on UF’s medical faculty he would rally his like-minded colleagues at UF Health to speak out loudly and frequently in opposition to Ladapo’s anti-vax nonsense.
To set the medical record straight. Despite The Great DeSanitizer’s determined efforts to silence critics on the public payroll on pain of firing.
All of which begs another question:
Would the University of Florida today even be able to recruit leaders and scientists of the caliber of Marston and Small?
Professionals who believe that politics have no place in a university’s pursuit of that next medical breakthrough?
Who would not sacrifice best practices in medicine on the alter of expediency?
What will Landry do? Say?
As it happens, Dr. Donald Landry, new interim president, is the first physician and medical scientist to lead UF since Marston departed.
He is former chair of the Department of Medicine at Columbia University, and one time Physician In Chief at New York Presbyterian Hospital,
And with credentials like his, two questions concerning Landry’s professionalism and ability to lead by example immediately come to mind:
What will Dr. Donald Landry do?
What will Dr. Donald Landry say?
About UF faculty member Joseph Ladapo’s dangerous anti-vax crusade?
So far, the silence coming out of Tigert Hall is deafening.
FreeGNV 