Florida officials announced Wednesday they will seek to make the state the first in the country without school vaccine mandates, with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo comparing the requirements to slavery.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic, said after announcing Florida plans to end all vaccine mandates without exceptions.
“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God,” he added.
Ladapo said his department will repeal what mandates are under his control, and the state Legislature will have to take care of the rest.
School districts in Florida, like others across the country, require vaccinations for polio, diphtheria, measles, rubella, pertussis, mumps, tetanus and other communicable diseases.
The decision comes as vaccination rates among children are already on the decline and as the federal government has taken the COVID-19 vaccine off the recommended list for healthy children.
Florida also announced it would be creating a “Make America Healthy Again” commission led by state first lady Casey DeSantis.
“I think that this is something that has great potential,” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said. “We’ve already done a lot. I don’t think there’s any state that has done even close to what we’ve done.”
Florida’s decades-old vaccine mandates for day care facilities and public schools include shots for whooping cough, polio, chickenpox, Hepatitis B, and measles among others, according to the state’s health department.
Ladapo said the Florida Department of Health can remove mandates on “half of dozen” vaccines and that the governor and state legislature would be needed to “get rid of the rest.”
Physicians and other health experts have long supported school vaccination requirements as a way of stopping the spread of infectious diseases among children and their communities by contributing to herd immunity.
Target vaccine rates vary by illness. With the measles, about 95 percent of people need to be vaccinated against the virus to knock down the disease’s chances of spreading, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Many in the public health world were deeply troubled by Ladapo’s announcement and warned that removing school vaccine mandates will have ripple effects across Florida and eventually, the country, given the millions of tourists that visit the Sunshine State every year.
More than 40 million people traveled to Florida during the first three months of 2025 with about 2 million of those visitors coming from overseas, according to the governor’s office.
“I’m shocked, it’s a very clear and important public health tool to maintain good health in schools,” said Emily Smith, associate professor of global health at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
“A pocket of infectious disease outbreak really affects us all in this interconnected world.”
Public health experts pointed to the ongoing whooping cough outbreak in Louisiana and the recent measles in Texas that spread to neighboring New Mexico as two examples of how dips in vaccination coverage can have deadly consequences.
As of Tuesday, there have been more than 1,400 confirmed cases of measles reported in the U.S.—the most the country has seen in more than 30 years—largely driven by the outbreak in Texas.
As of May, there have been 170 cases of whooping cough in Louisiana, surpassing the total number of cases for the disease in 2024, according to the state’s department of health.
“I would argue that this is the worst public health decision I’ve ever seen [from] a state health official,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “This guy will have dead children at his feet.”
Updated: 5:22 p.m.