Under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida will be the first state to end all vaccine mandates, the state’s surgeon general announced on Wednesday.
Equating vaccine mandates to “slavery,” Joseph Ladapo, the state’s surgeon general, said the Florida Department of Health and the governor’s office would work together to end every single vaccine mandate.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo said.
For decades, Florida has required a set of vaccines for children attending public or private school from Kindergarten to 12th grade – unless they fill out a form invoking a religious or medical exemption. Those vaccines are mandated to prevent life-threatening illnesses such as measles, mumps, and rubella, polio, tetanus, Hepatitis B, and many more.
But without state requirements for children, vaccination rates against those preventable diseases, and others, could drop and have devastating consequences.
Time and time again, areas of the country with low childhood vaccination rates have seen fast-moving and lethal outbreaks of diseases, such as measles.
This past year, more than 760 people were infected with measles in West Texas, where kindergarten vaccination rates are below the levels needed for herd immunity. Two unvaccinated children, aged six and eight, died as a result.
“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? Who am I to tell you what your child should be put in their body? I don’t have that right,” Ladapo said to a round of applause from the audience.
Every single U.S. state requires vaccines for school-aged children to prevent the spread of deadly diseases.
Multiple studies, spanning back decades, have shown that state laws requiring childhood vaccines have “remarkable” impact on lowering the spread of preventable diseases, “particularly in school-aged populations.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that childhood vaccines save more than four million lives every year.
Immunization rates among Florida kindergartners have dropped significantly over the last five years, according to the Florida Department of Health. In 2020, 93.5 percent of kindergarteners were vaccinated. In 2024, that number has dropped to 89.8
In 2018, when the state’s kindergarten vaccination rate dropped to 91.1 percent, the state saw an uptick in measles cases, with at least 15 reported.
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