Under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida will become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, it was announced Wednesday.
Equating vaccine mandates with “slavery,” Joseph Ladapo, the state’s surgeon general who has a history of promoting health-related misinformation, said the Florida Department of Health and the governor’s office would work together to end every single vaccine mandate.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo said.
For decades, Florida has required a set of vaccines for children attending public or private school from kindergarten to 12th grade – unless they fill out a form invoking a religious or medical exemption. Those vaccines are mandated to prevent life-threatening illnesses such as measles, mumps, and rubella, polio, tetanus, Hepatitis B, and many more.
State officials’ push to end vaccine mandates accompany new policy announcements that align with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda called “Make America Healthy Again.”
DeSantis said Wednesday that Florida will create a MAHA commission and “recommend state-level integration” of the movement’s policies, which includes “individual medical freedom,” “informed consent,” and “parent rights.”
Experts have raised concerns with RFK Jr’s MAHA initiatives because of his history of promoting health conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that vaccines are linked to autism.
Since becoming HHS chief, Kennedy has sought to undermine vaccines by firing members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory board; hiring fellow vaccine skeptics; reducing the CDC’s communications with the public, and canceling studies on mRNA vaccines.
Ladapo has also peddled health-related conspiracy theories by questioning vaccines as well as fluoride in water.
“Who am I as a government or anyone else, or as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should be putting in their body? I don’t have that right,” Ladapo said Wednesday, to a round of applause from the audience.
Every state requires vaccines for school-aged children to prevent the spread of deadly diseases.
Multiple studies, spanning decades, have shown that state laws requiring childhood vaccines have “remarkable” impact on lowering the spread of preventable diseases, “particularly in school-aged populations.”
Without state requirements for children, vaccination rates against those preventable diseases, and others, could drop and have devastating consequences.
The CDC estimates that childhood vaccines save more than four million lives every year worldwide.
Time and time again, areas of the country with low childhood vaccination rates have seen fast-moving and lethal outbreaks of diseases, such as measles.
This past year, more than 760 people were infected with measles in West Texas, where kindergarten vaccination rates were 82 percent, far below the levels needed for herd immunity which is around 93 percent. Two unvaccinated children, aged six and eight, died as a result.
Immunization rates among Florida kindergartners have dropped significantly over the last five years, according to the Florida Department of Health. In 2020, 93.5 percent of kindergarteners were vaccinated. In 2024, that number has dropped to 89.8 percent.
In 2018, when the state’s kindergarten vaccination rate dropped to 91.1 percent, the state saw an uptick in measles cases, with at least 15 reported.
Florida Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat, called the decision a “public health disaster in the makeing.”
“Ending vaccine mandates is reckless and dangerous. It will drive down immunization rates & open the door to outbreaks of preventable diseases, putting children, seniors, and vulnerable Floridians at risk.” Eskamani wrote.
The Independent has asked the White House and Department of Health and Human Services for comment.
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