Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inboxGet our free Inside Washington emailGet our free Inside Washington emailUnder the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida will be the first state to end all vaccine mandates, the state’s surgeon general announced on Wednesday. Equating vaccine mandates to “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 arrives in conjunction with new policy announcements that align with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda called “Make America Healthy Again.”open image in galleryFlorida’s surgeon general said the state would move to remove all vaccine mandates, claiming they are ‘wrong’ and akin to ‘slavery’ (Getty)DeSantis said on Wednesday that the state will create a MAHA commission that will “recommend state-level integration” of MAHA’s policies, which include “individual medical freedom,” “informed consent,” and “parent rights.”Experts have raised concerns with Kennedy’s MAHA initiatives because he has a history of making anti-vaccine claims and promoting health conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that vaccines correlating to autism.Since becoming the head of the Department of the Health and Human Services, Kennedy has sought to undermine vaccines by firing members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory board, hiring fellow vaccine skeptics, reducing government health agency’s communications with the public, and canceling studies on mRNA vaccinesLadapo 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 to a round of applause from the audience. Every single U.S. state require vaccines for school-aged children to prevent the spread of deadly diseases. Multiple studies, spanning back decades, have shown that state laws requiring childhood vaccines have “remarkable” impact on lowering the spread of preventable diseases, “particularly in school-aged populations.” open image in galleryFlorida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced on Wednesday that the state would move to revoke all vaccine mandates (AP)Without state requirements for children, vaccination rates against those preventable diseases, and others, could drop and have devastating consequences. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that childhood vaccines save more than four million lives every year. 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 are below the levels needed for herd immunity. 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 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.
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DeSantis to make Florida first state to end all vaccine mandates for schools
