Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced plans to eliminate all vaccine mandates, including those for K-12 school children.
Previously, parents were required to fill out religious or medical exemption forms if they wanted to abstain from vaccinating their children for illnesses such as measles, rubella, and polio. Under the new system announced Wednesday, which will require approval from the state legislature, there would be no requirements whatsoever, even for diseases such as polio and measles, which have been vaccinated against for decades.
“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?” Ladapo said. “Who am I to tell you what your child should be putting in their body? I don’t have that right.”
“Every last one of them [vaccines] is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” he continued.
In order to fully eliminate all vaccine requirements, DeSantis will need to secure regulatory changes within the Florida Department of Health as well as legislative action. Florida Democrats immediately issued a statement declaring their “unanimous opposition” to the move.
The Florida Department of Health, meanwhile, announced a plan to make exceptions easier to secure for parents who don’t want their children vaccinated, until the full mandate repeal is complete.
Should DeSantis succeed in getting the legislature on board, Florida would become the first state in the union to entirely do away with vaccine mandates.
Florida is also implementing its own Make America Healthy Again commission, according to DeSantis. The objective is to promote individual medical freedom, informed consent, and parents’ rights.
This past spring, schools in South Florida saw a rise in religious vaccine exemptions, including in both Broward and Miami-Dade county schools.
The Florida Association of School Administrators (FASA) also reported this August that childhood vaccination rates in Central Florida had hit a 20-year low.
“Across the U.S., the share of children with exemptions from required vaccines rose to an all-time high of 3.6% in the 2024-25 school year,” the FASA report reads. “In Florida, the group of kids exempted from vaccine requirements was nearly double that at more than 6%. And in some Florida counties, the exemption rate is as high as 15%, according to state health data.”
In 2020, 93.5 percent of Florida kindergarteners were vaccinated, while in 2024, that number fell to 89.8 percent, according to the Florida Department of Health. This school year, the numbers dropped even further, with only 88.7 kindergarteners vaccinated.
The decision to drop all vaccine mandates is in keeping with DeSantis’s campaign promises on parental rights. He also signed a bill prohibiting instruction on sexual identity and gender ideology in classrooms in 2022.
Florida’s announcement continues the state’s trend of vaccine hesitancy, especially for children, notably after Ladapo said that he does not recommend that children receive mRNA Covid vaccines in 2022.
Florida was ground zero for the anti-lockdown movement and Covid vaccine hesitancy during 2020.
Florida was the first state in the country to mandate in-person learning after shutting down schools. The state also passed a law that required employers to provide broad Covid vaccine exemptions if there was a mandate in place. Exemptions included religious, medical, and Covid-19 immunity, to name a few.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect that the move to eliminate all vaccine requirements requires legislative approval.