Florida announced last week that the “Free State” is becoming freer as it takes steps to be the first state to end the school vaccine mandate. The new initiative restores public trust by giving parents the right to decide what goes into their children’s bodies, and every state should follow suit. 

“Who am I as a government,” Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said during the announcement, “to tell you what you should put in your body?” 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in June announced a systematic review of the current vaccine schedule and guidance to schools concerning vaccine requirements for attendance in order to “restore public trust in vaccines.”

Most Americans support vaccines, according to a June survey by Harvard University and the de Beaumont Foundation. However, fewer now consider them to be important, with 40 percent in 2024 saying they are “extremely important” in 2025, down from 58 percent in 2019 to, according a Gallup poll. 

Current Requirements

Florida currently requires all K-12 students to be vaccinated in order to get an education, with daycare and preschool entry requiring seven vaccines and kindergarten through 12th grade requiring 16 vaccines.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommends 25 vaccine injections by the time a child is two. By the time a child is 18, they’ve had about 50 injections.     

Ladapo said people might criticize Florida’s move as immoral because of the risk unvaccinated people could cause to others — a similar guilt trip was used during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

“There is no ethical basis for that to be used as a reason to take away your ability to choose what you want to put in your body,” he said during the announcement last week. 

The latest rhetoric from Florida’s surgeon general is refreshing after the Covid-19 vaccine, or “poison,” as Ladapo called the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.

FDA Chief Acknowledges Risk

The Covid-19 vaccine was the fastest created in history and was distributed to Americans in under a year; vaccine development usually takes 10-15 years.

The FDA’s Marty Makary said the agency is investigating how many American children died due to the Covid vaccine and will release a report in the coming weeks.

Although there are always risks with vaccines, kids are “especially at risk” with the Covid-19 vaccine, because young healthy men are at a higher risk for myocarditis, Makary said on CNN last week.

Doctor Dissents

“We don’t have honest data on all the shots. And we know other communities, the Amish being the most famous, are healthier without the shots,” Dr. Simone Gold, a lawyer, medical doctor, and founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, a medical and political advocacy organization, said in an interview.      

With so many vaccines required at the school level, Dr. Gold says it is hard to say whether the vaccines are truly a “public health measure.” 

She also said that requiring vaccines violated informed consent laws. State laws say “you have to get a person’s informed consent” before treating them, Dr. Gold said.

As Ladapo said during the announcement, you can’t make the world better “by enslaving people in terrible philosophies and taking away people’s freedoms.”