Florida will be doing away with all of its vaccine mandates, the Sunshine State’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced on Wednesday. 

Ladapo, a strident critic of vaccine mandate policies, said during a press conference with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis that all vaccine mandates are wrong and tantamount to “slavery.”

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“Every last one is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo said. “Who am I, or anyone else, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right.”

Ladapo, who earned his MD and PhD from Harvard in 2008, was chosen by DeSantis for the surgeon general position during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, Ladapo has condemned mRNA vaccine technology over concerns of DNA contamination, which the Food and Drug Administration has dismissed as not supported by evidence. 

Ladapo also came under public scrutiny in March 2024 for his handling of a measles outbreak in eastern Florida, during which he advised parents of unvaccinated children to use their best judgment on whether to send their children to schools with known cases. 

Florida currently requires seven childhood vaccines for parents to be able to send their children to daycare, including polio, chickenpox, and Hepatitis B, among others. Ladapo did not announce a timeline for when the existing mandates would be rolled back.

The vaccine announcement came as part of a larger press conference outlining that DeSantis is creating a state-level Make America Healthy Again Commission, paralleling the effort spearheaded at the federal level by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

DeSantis said that the Florida MAHA Commission will be led by Florida first lady Casey DeSantis and Lt. Gov. Jay Collins. Ladapo and other health officials will also be on the commission, which is designed to focus on parental rights and promoting nutrition. 

“I think that this is something that has great potential,” DeSantis 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.”