Preserve Life-Saving Vaccine Mandates in Florida

On September 3rd, Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, backed by Governor Ron DeSantis, announced that the state plans to end all vaccine mandates, equating these life-saving requirements to “slavery.” This would include ending required vaccination for all K–12 students, whose parents already have the ability to opt out of these vaccines by invoking religious or medical exemptions.

Vaccine mandates for school children are in place in all 50 states, and the benefits of these laws in preventing the spread of deadly diseases like measles, polio, mumps, rubella, and tetanus have been studied and proven for decades. This plan to end vaccination requirements was immediately criticized by health experts, who noted that “It is clearly against empirical evidence of what is safest for individual children” and will have ripple effects on public health and its accessibility. Ladapo and DeSantis’s plan comes after the Trump administration and RFK Jr.’s campaign to discredit scientific integrity in the HHS and proliferation of vaccine misinformation, much of which has been repeated by Ladapo.

If the state legislature agrees to DeSantis’s request to repeal the statute that requires certain vaccinations, Florida will be the first state to eliminate vaccine mandates for school children; but with vaccine skepticism and the politicization of science on the rise, it may not be the last. Tell your representatives to keep us safe by maintaining these necessary vaccine mandates.