Children in Florida will no longer be required to receive vaccines against preventable diseases including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis, said Joseph Ladapo, the state’s surgeon general, on Wednesday in a speech during which he likened vaccine mandates to “slavery”.
Ladapo, hand-picked for the role by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, is a longtime skeptic of the benefit of vaccines, and has previously been accused of peddling “scientific nonsense” by public health advocates.
In his announcement at a press conference in Tampa hosted by DeSantis, Ladapo said every state vaccine requirement would be repealed, and that he expected the move would receive the blessing “of God”.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” said Ladapo, who altered data in a 2022 study about Covid vaccines in an attempt to exaggerate the risk to young men who received one.
“People have a right to make their own decisions. Who am I, as a government or anyone else, to tell you what you should put in your body? Our body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God.”
Ladapo condemned lockdowns and vaccination requirements during the coronavirus pandemic as a time “when crazy things did happen”, and said that growing skepticism of vaccines were “reflections of God’s light against the darkness of tyranny and oppression”.
Formerly affiliated with the controversial ultra-conservative America’s Frontline Doctors group, Ladapo has long railed against Covid vaccines. In 2023, he urged Florida residents to ignore public health advice and reject mRNA booster shots that he falsely claimed had not been tested on humans.
Several of his other positions on public health issues, such as promoting the removal of fluoride from drinking water and urging parents to reject measles vaccines for their children, have been called “dangerous” and a “disservice to Florida residents”.
His “slavery” comment, made with DeSantis at his side, was notable. The governor drew allegations of racism in 2023 when the state introduced a new education curriculum teaching that the “full truth” of America’s history with slavery is that it was beneficial to those enslaved.
Florida’s department of health currently has strict requirements for immunizations that must be given during childhood, which are posted to its website. With few exceptions, no child can be enrolled in a Florida public school unless they have received a series of shots against a number of diseases.
Routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented about 508m cases of illness, 32m hospitalizations, and 1.13m deaths among children born in the US between 1994 and 2023, according to a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report published last year.
It estimated that the vaccine program nationally resulted in direct savings of $540bn and societal savings of $2.7tn.
Ladapo gave no details or timeline for the proposed repeal, but said his department would work with lawmakers and the DeSantis administration to make it happen.
“I love our lawmakers. They’re going to have to make decisions … People are going to have to make a decision,” he said. “People are going to have to choose a side. And I am telling you right now that the moral side is so simple.”
Ladapo also said that “it’ll be wonderful for Florida to be the first state to do it”.
Florida’s plan drew praise from Robert W Malone, a conservative physician and prominent anti-vaxxer appointed by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to his new advisory committee on immunization practices that replaced the independent panel he fired.
“Go Joe!” Malone said in a post to X, shortly after another tweet in which he said he spoke to Ladapo on Tuesday and called him “a measured scientist – who is on fire to change the system for the better”.
Others were not so convinced. Anna Eskamani, a Democratic Florida state representative, called the move “a public health disaster in the making”.
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“Ending vaccine mandates is reckless and dangerous. It will drive down immunization rates and open the door to outbreaks of preventable diseases, putting children, seniors and vulnerable Floridians at risk,” she said in a statement.
David Jolly, a former Republican congressman for Florida who is running as a Democrat to succeed DeSantis as governor when he is termed out in 2027, posted to X that he believed Ladapo’s tenure could be limited.
“The next Governor gets to fire this guy. I know I would. Hopefully Byron Donalds or Paul Renner would do the same,” he wrote, referring to two high-profile Florida Republicans who have announced their candidacies.
Some experts, however, were not so convinced.
“Florida’s undertakers will now need to plan for the future by increasing their stocks of small coffins,” said John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
Moore said all the vaccine preventable infections would increase within the school setting as a result of the move, and that some diseases – measles, diphtheria, whooping cough and polio – can be fatal. Rubella transmitted from infected children to pregnant women was another area of concern.
“Since the 1980s, all states had school vaccines mandates. If Florida abolishes [its mandate], it would be the first in recent times to do so,” said Dorit Reiss, professor of law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, who specializes in vaccines law and policy.
But she pointed out that there doesn’t seem to be a law introduced yet, which is a big if. She noted that Idaho attempted to end school mandates in April, but ended up carving out exceptions for existing mandates – effectively rendering that part of the law moot – after pushback from advocates.
“I would also add that one reason all states adopted them is that evidence showed school mandates reduce and prevent outbreaks. If Florida does this, it’s creating an unfortunate natural experiment with its children as guinea pigs,” Reiss said. “Children deserve better.”
The Florida department of health did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Melody Schreiber contributed reporting
