Florida plans to become the first state to eliminate vaccine mandates, a longtime cornerstone of public health policy for keeping schoolchildren and adults safe from infectious diseases.
State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who announced the decision Wednesday, cast current requirements in schools and elsewhere as “immoral” intrusions on people’s rights that hamper parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.
“People have a right to make their own decisions, informed decisions,” Ladapo, who has frequently clashed with the medical establishment, said at a news conference in Valrico. “They don’t have the right to tell you what to put in your body. Take it away from them.”
RELATED: What do you think about Florida potentially eliminating vaccine mandates?
Vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives globally over the past 50 years, the World Health Organization reported in 2024. The majority of those were infants and children.
“Vaccines are among the most powerful inventions in history, making once-feared diseases preventable,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general.
Retired pediatrician Dr. Mary Soha warned that other places that have followed this path have endured negative consequences.
“England did away with their mandated vaccine for children—guidelines—and they saw a huge increase in not only the morbidity -- or the illness rates of their children -- but also in the mortality rates," Soha said. “Do we really want to put our kids at risk of death for vaccine-preventable diseases?”
The Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics posted a statement that says in part:
“We are concerned that today’s announcement will put children in Florida public schools at higher risk for getting sick, which will have a ripple effect across our communities.”
According to the state Health Department’s website, in Florida, vaccine mandates for child day care facilities and public schools include:
- Four or five doses of DTaP (diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis)
- Four or five doses of IPV (Inactivated polio vaccine)
- Two doses of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella)
- Three doses of Hepatitis B
- One Tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis (Tdap)
- Two doses of Varicella (chickenpox)
Currently, without all of the required shots, a student must have either a religious exemption -- obtained from the health department -- or a medical exemption -- obtained from their doctor -- to attend public school in Florida.
News4JAX has been keeping a close eye on vaccination rates and their long-term effects, even before Ladapo’s announcement.
In 2015, about 94% of kindergarteners statewide were fully vaccinated. Now, that number has dropped to less than 89%. Duval County’s rate fell from 91% in 2016 to just under 90% last year.
Health experts continue to warn about what the future holds.
“The trajectory that we’re on, we will see the resurgence of diseases that are vaccine-preventable, that multiple children will be dying from and/or incurring significant long-term consequences,” said Dr. Jeffrey Goldhagen, professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida.
Ladapo didn’t give a timeline for the changes but said the department can scrap its own rules for some vaccine mandates, though others would require action by the Florida Legislature. He did not specify any particular vaccines but repeated several times that the effort would end “all of them. Every last one of them.”
The American Medical Association issued a statement saying Florida’s plan to end vaccine mandates “would undermine decades of public health progress.”
“While there is still time, we urge Florida to reconsider this change to help prevent a rise of infectious disease outbreaks that put health and lives at risk,” said Dr. Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, an AMA trustee.
RFK’s agenda
Florida’s move, a significant departure from decades of public policy and research that has shown vaccines to be safe and the most effective way to stop the spread of communicable diseases, especially among schoolchildren, is a notable embrace of the Trump administration’s agenda led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist.
Dr. Rana Alissa, chair of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said removing vaccines puts students and school staff at greater risk.
“When everyone in a school is vaccinated, it is harder for diseases to spread and easier for everyone to continue learning and having fun,” Alissa said in an email. “When children are sick and miss school, caregivers also miss work, which not only impacts those families but also the local economy.”
Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who is running for Orlando mayor, said in a social media post that scrapping vaccines “is reckless and dangerous” and could cause outbreaks of preventable disease.
“This is a public health disaster in the making for the Sunshine State,” Eskamani said on the social platform X.
‘Make America Healthy Again’
Under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida resisted imposing COVID vaccines on schoolchildren during the pandemic, requiring “passports” for places that draw crowds, school closures and mandates that workers get the shots to keep their jobs.
“I don’t think there’s another state that’s done as much as Florida. We want to stay ahead of the curve,” the governor said.
DeSantis also announced the creation of a state “Make America Healthy Again” commission Wednesday modeled after similar initiatives that Kennedy established at the federal level.
The commission would look into such things as allowing informed consent in medical matters, promoting safe and nutritious food, boosting parental rights in medical decisions about their children and eliminating “medical orthodoxy that is not supported by the data,” DeSantis said. The commission will be chaired by Lt. Gov. Jay Collins and Florida first lady Casey DeSantis.
The commission’s work will help inform a large “medical freedom package” to be introduced in the Legislature next session, which would address the vaccine mandates required by state law and make permanent the recent state COVID decisions relaxing restrictions, DeSantis said.
Amid turmoil at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused by Kennedy’s extensive restructuring and downsizing, the Democratic governors of Washington, Oregon and California announced Wednesday that they had created an alliance to safeguard health policies, contending that the administration is politicizing public health decisions. The partnership plans to align immunization plans based on recommendations from respected national medical organizations, according to a joint statement from the states’ governors.