Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Wednesday announced that the state will become the first in the country to end all vaccine mandates.
“The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida law,” Ladapo said. “All of them. All of them. All of them. Every last one of them.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” he continued.
According to Ladapo, Florida’s Health Department mandates “maybe a half a dozen” vaccines. “So those are going to be gone for sure,” he said. “And we’re going to be working with our amazing Governor DeSantis and our wonderful lawmakers to get rid of the rest of it.”
Florida currently requires vaccines for kids to attend public school, including for diseases like measles, polio, chicken pox, and hepatitis B.
“Today is a great day for chickenpox, measles, and polio in Florida,” wrote state Senator Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat, on X in response to the news.
Democratic state Representative Anna V. Eskamani called the move “a public health disaster in the making for the Sunshine State,” as it will “drive down immunization rates” and “open the door to outbreaks of preventable diseases, putting children, seniors, and vulnerable Floridians at risk.”
At the same Wednesday event, DeSantis announced the establishment of the Florida MAHA Commission, a working group chaired by his wife, Casey DeSantis, and Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins.
The new commission will, per the governor, “recommend state-level integration” of the “Make America Healthy Again” principles espoused by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who is currently dismantling the nation’s public health infrastructure and stoking vaccine skepticism as the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
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