Vaccines do more than prevent diseases--they can prevent dementia. What about this don't Florida's leaders get?
News and views for Florida's Left Coast
That shingles shot you’ve been meaning to get? Guess what? It may also prevent the onset of dementia.
In fact, scientists have discovered that several routine immunizations seem to prevent cognitive decline, especially in older people. Those shots include the flu vaccine, the immunization for RSV (short for Respiratory Syncytial Virus) and the Tdap vaccine (a combination shot for tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis — a.k.a. whooping cough).
This is of interest to everyone, of course, but especially here in Florida with our disproportionately larger population of people over the age of 65 who are more vulnerable to dementia.
Which led me to do a little digging into whether Florida—sometimes called God’s Waiting Room—actually has more seniors than any other state, or if that’s just a stereotype. And I’ll get to the results of that research momentarily, but first the news about vaccines.
A variety of studies conducted by researchers have shown a relationship between lower rates of dementia—including Alzheimer’s—and the above-mentioned vaccines.
In the case of the flu shot, for instance, scientists at the University of Texas Health Center in Houston studied a database of more than 1.8 million people over the age of 65 and discovered that among those who received at least one flu shot, the rate of developing Alzheimer’s was 40 percent lower.
As for shingles, The Washington Post reports:
The shingles vaccine has the strongest evidence for reducing the risk of dementia with multiple large-scale studies in the past two years corroborating the results of older studies.
In one 2025 study, researchers tracked more than 280,000 adults in Wales and found that the shingles vaccine was linked with reducing dementia risk by 20 percent over a seven-year period.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the first RSV vaccine in 2023, and in the two years since then, studies of 430,000 adults who got the shot show a reduced risk of dementia, even more so than those who received a flu vaccine. The RSV vaccine is recommended for all adults over the age of 75 and for people 50 and older who might be at higher risk of exposure to the disease.
Similar indications of a reduction of dementia risk have been noted in studies of the Tdap vaccine.
How does all this work? Indications are that it isn’t all that complicated. Severe infections can lead to brain atrophy. Reduce the number of infections, and you reduce the risk to your brain. That’s the shorthand version, anyway.
Shingles, for instance, is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which, when it comes to scary virus names, has to rank right up there. The virus hibernates in the nervous system and can directly affect the brain.
Most of the aforementioned studies focus on adults over the age of 65 because the risk of dementia increases significantly with age.
This brings us back to Florida and that research I mentioned earlier. How old are we here in the Sunshine State?
Here are the stats:
Florida actually doesn’t have the highest percentage population over the age of 65. That distinction belongs to the state of Maine. But there are some footnotes on that:
The percentage of Main adults 65 and older is 21.8 percent.
Florida’s percentage of seniors is 21.3 percent.
The key difference is that retirees flock to Florida for the warm weather (possibly the hurricanes and pythons, too; tastes vary). In Maine, young people get out of there as soon as they can, leaving behind their elders, which jacks up the percentages of older adults still enduring the arctic conditions there.
So, while Maine has about 294,000 adults over 65, Florida has more than 4.6 million.
In fact, the only state with an elderly population larger than Florida is California (at about 6 million), but then it’s total population is twice as large, so, on a percentage basis, it’s population is nowhere near as old.
So, in summary:
Science is telling us that here in Florida, with our large population of seniors, vaccines can not only prevent disease but improve quality of life for those over 65 by reducing the risk of dementia.
Yet at the same time, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Surgeon General Joe Ladapo seem hellbent on reducing the number of vaccinated people in the state, which will inevitably increase the rate of disease, which creates disproportionate risk for older people, not only for their physical but also their cognitive health.
Sounds demented to me.
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Weekend Tropical Outlook
The red blob on the hurricane threat map may soon become Tropical Storm Imelda—or even Hurricane Imelda—but there are so many variables that it’s still too soon to tell how this disturbance will evolve. But for certain, we need to keep an eye on her over the next several days. For those living on Florida’s Left Coast, it appears the storm will stay on the easternmost part of the state if it brushes Florida at all. My preferred go-to to track this is the HurricaneIntel blog by meteorologist Bryan Norcross.
Today is …
Ask a Stupid Question Day. Some favorite stupid questions you can ask to impress your friends with your wit and wisdom include:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, can you still get splinters from it?
If you try to fail and succeed, which one did you do?
Is it illegal for a man to marry his widow’s sister?
Why is the word “abbreviated” so long?
Thought for the day
“I think public awareness of how good vaccines are for kids and how they are good for public health is a great idea.”
— Rand Paul
Florida factual
Siesta Key beach won an award in 1987 for having the whitest beach sand in the world. It is 99 percent pure quartz crystal. Where did that quartz come from? The erosion of eons of the Appalachian Mountains that washed southward to the Florida peninsula. Yep, we got mountains in Florida. They’re just in very tiny pieces.
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J.C. Bruce, journalist and author, is the founder of Tropic Press. He holds dual citizenship in the United States of America and his native Florida. When he’s not blogging, he’s in training for the Florida Man Underwater Ping Pong Championships. Forward this email to your friends. They will love you for it.
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Do not underestimate the desire of people like Desantis and Ladapo to have more Floridians with dementia…this renders such people less likely to be able to think critically about the horrors of Republican policies.
Is it posible that people who elect to receive vaccines have less demention because they are simply more concerned about taking care of themselves?