Callers comment on the Florida surgeon general’s vaccine advice, GRU bills and more

What’s on your mind? Call Sound Off, our weekly column of community comments, at 352-337-0368.

• To the parents of Florida’s children, please do not listen to our surgeon general’s advice about COVID vaccines for your child. He has no credentials, no experience in pediatrics, infectious disease, epidemiology. Please rely on your pediatrician’s advice. After all, your pediatrician is the one who will be taking care of any child of yours who does come down with COVID.

• All UF hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices, etc., require people who enter them to wear masks. I wonder how they are handling Dr. Ladapo’s visits within those institutions as he refuses to wear masks, and how they would handle a visit from Gov. DeSantis, who refuses to wear a mask.

• Why hasn’t The Sun or, namely, Nathan Crabbe done an editorial about why our utility rates are so high? You leave it to people to write in letters to the editor, and they get bashed as racist or whatever names you can throw at them. But, the bottom line, if I’m not mistaken, and I could be, that our past mayors and current mayor are the ones who voted for this biomass plant, and this biomass plant has caused unknown obstacles, hurdles and expenses back to GRU and the city.

• You know, you can’t contact GRU if you discover an error in their billing. You can’t contact anybody at GRU without a 30-minute to 45-minute hold time, and then they refer you to somebody else. Maybe the City Commission can do something worthwhile for a change and find out why this backlog of customer service at GRU is so great. This has been going on for years!

• The city of Gainesville says it is green, but the city allows many demolitions. Demolitions are not green. Stop sending our buildings to the landfill.

• I am calling in regards to the person that submitted the article on the parental rights bill. Each year, students are given the parental rights bill to be reviewed by the parent and a student. At the beginning of each school year, the rules and regulations are briefly reviewed with students by teachers. It is ultimately the parents’ responsibility to take time and thoroughly read it and discuss it with their child, the student. Maybe if we invest more in being parents to our children, as opposed to waiting for educators to do the parents’ job, we would have a better school system.

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• The Florida Legislature has only thing that they must, by law, do during the annual session, and that is to pass a budget. They failed, so we, as the taxpayers, get to buy them each a plane ticket to go home for the weekend so they can return on Monday and finish what they were supposed to do. Oh well, at least we have a new Florida official dessert. I guess we should be grateful for that.

• Several recent letter writers proclaimed, “Republicans stand for respect.” Really? House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy refuses to reprimand two Republicans that recently spoke and supported the white nationalists’ convention in Orlando, yet will punish any Republican that participates in the Jan. 6 insurrection investigation. Worthy of respect?

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This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Sound Off for March 20, 2022