Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced Wednesday that the Sunshine State will seek to become the first state in the nation to repeal “every last one of” its 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 at a Christian school in Hillsborough County.
“Every last one of them is wrong,” he declared, “and drips with disdain and slavery.”
A Harvard-trained physician who has repeatedly challenged the prevailing medical orthodoxy, Ladapo made it clear that his reference to slavery wasn’t a mere rhetorical flourish. Ownership of one’s body means deciding whether or not to subject it to vaccinations, he contended.
“Who am I as a government or anyone else … to tell you what you should put in your body?” he asked. “Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [his] body?”
How did states come to mandate an ever-growing number of vaccines for children attending public schools?
It all started in 1905, when the Supreme Court ruled that states had the power to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the court held that the Bay State could force Henning Jacobson, a Swedish immigrant who had previously experienced a severe adverse reaction to a smallpox vaccine, to be vaccinated for smallpox or pay a fine for refusing.
Jacobson served as the basis for many subsequent decisions, including a 1922 case in which the court found that public schools could impose vaccination mandates on students.
States took their time exercising this court-approved authority. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, by 1969, only 29 had mandatory school vaccination laws, the majority of which were strictly for measles. Thanks to “efforts by the public health community and other immunization advocates,” wrote the NEJM, “by the beginning of the 1980s, all 50 states had school immunization requirements.”
Florida now has the opportunity to become the first state to reverse that trend. Ladapo said he would see to it that the “handful” of vaccine mandates the Florida Department of Health has enacted are taken off the books. After that, he explained, it will be up to the Legislature, working with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, to repeal statutory mandates.
“People are going to have to choose a side,” he said. “The moral side is so simple.”
He elaborated:
People have a right to make their own decisions. Informed decisions. You want to put whatever different vaccines in your body? God bless you. I hope you make an informed decision. You don’t want to put whatever vaccines in your body? God bless you, and I hope you make an informed decision.
And that’s how it should be. That is a moral, ethical universe, not this nonsense where people who don’t know you are telling you what to put in … the temple of your body. It is a gift from God. They don’t have that right.
Anticipating objections, Ladapo said he realized “the world is imperfect” and “sometimes people will end up regretting the decision that they made,” whether that decision was to get vaccinated or to abstain.
“How many people put that poison in their bodies with these mRNA Covid-19 vaccines and wish they could turn back the hands of time and undo that?” he queried.
“So it’s not to say that the world is perfect,” he continued, “but it is to say if we want to move toward a perfect world, a better world, you can’t do it by enslaving people in terrible philosophies and taking away people’s freedoms.”
Democrats such as State Representative Anna Eskamani — who called Ladapo’s plan “a public health disaster in the making” — along with the public-health establishment and vaccine pushers, are, of course, aghast that anyone would advocate liberty.
Rana Alissa, president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told CNN that Ladapo’s “announcement will put children in Florida public schools at higher risk for getting sick, which will have a ripple effect across our communities.”
Richard Besser, former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the CEO of the left-wing, Big Pharma-endowed Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told NBC News, “The idea that children would be allowed to go to school unvaccinated is absolutely frightening.”
Considering that Besser was born in 1959, he must have had a terrifying school life given the relatively lax immunization requirements of the era. It’s amazing he survived to adulthood.
Others, however, applauded Ladapo’s announcement.
In a statement to The New American, Jeremy Snavely of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) said:
AAPS is encouraged by Surgeon General Ladapo’s announcement that Florida will work to end all vaccine mandates. It aligns with the resolution adopted by our organization 25 years ago calling for “a moratorium on vaccine mandates and for physicians to insist upon truly informed consent for the use of vaccines.”
Republican State Representative Peggy Gossett-Seidman told the Orlando Sentinel she’s willing to consider Ladapo’s proposal.
“He’s not saying [vaccines are] not allowed in Florida. He’s allowing people to make their own decisions,” she said. “He doesn’t want to dictate people’s medical care. I don’t disagree with that philosophy.”
And Children’s Health Defense, in an X post, said simply: “This is how you make America healthy again. Will other states follow Florida’s lead?”