Florida is moving to “end all vaccine mandates” in the state, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced at a press conference on Wednesday.
Ladapo said the Florida Department of Health would be working with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office to end all mandates in state law, at the event at Grace Christian School in Valrico, located just east of Tampa.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo said of vaccine mandates.
Currently, Florida requires children between kindergarten and 12th grade to receive four or five doses of the diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine; four or five doses of the polio vaccine; two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine; one dose of the tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis (Tdap) vaccine and at least two doses of the chickenpox vaccine unless the child has had the disease in the past.
However, Florida does allow for parents to request exemptions based on religious grounds, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
All 50 states and Washington, D.C., currently have vaccine mandates in place for children to be able to attend school.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and Gov. Ron DeSantis at a news conference in West Palm Beach, Florida, Jan. 6, 2022.
Joe Cavaretta/Sun Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images, FILE
Ladapo said an argument health care professionals have made in favor of vaccination is for people to get vaccinated to help protect those who are unable to receive a shot.
The surgeon general said that is not a “sincere” argument and said “there’s no ethical basis for that to be used as a reason, really a force to take away your ability to choose what you put in your body and what you as a parent put in your child’s body.”
Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director of the CDC, called the announcement “frightening.”
“As a pediatrician, and as a parent, it’s absolutely frightening, the idea that children could go to school and be unvaccinated,” Besser told ABC News. “That puts them at risk and others around them who may have underlying medical conditions. That’s not what America’s about. In America, there are things we do to be part of a community.”
DeSantis noted that some of the vaccine mandates would be removed immediately while others would require legislative intervention.
Over the last 50 years, vaccines have saved an estimated 154 million lives, according to a 2024 study led by the World Health Organizations. Of those lives, about 101 million were those of infants.
The study also found that the measles vaccine had the most significant impact on reducing infant infants, making up 60% of the lives saved due to vaccination.
Ladapo has criticized COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in the past. In March, Ladapo, announced Florida would become the first state to officially advise against vaccinating healthy children for COVID-19. Florida was also the only state that didn’t preorder any COVID-19 vaccines for young children for the 2022-23 season.
In December 2023, Ladapo sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration questioning safety assessments of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Despite a response from the FDA stating that agency was “confident” in the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, Ladapo called for a halt in their use a few weeks later.
During the press conference, Ladapo referred to COVID-19 vaccines as “poison.”
An analysis from The Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit organization that researches health care issues, found that from December 2020 through November 2022, the COVID-19 vaccination program in the U.S. prevented more than 18.5 million additional hospitalizations and 3.2 million additional deaths.
Besser said he expects that other states will follow Florida’s example and there will be “a patchwork across America of states that require vaccinations as they currently do, and states that do it exclusively parental choice.”
Ladapo’s move comes as three states announced they will form a group to offer their own consistent vaccine guidelines, backed by evidence and informed by major national medical groups.
The new group, called the West Coast Health Alliance, is made up California, Oregon and Washington state. The states’ governors said in a joint statement that they felt the need provide their residents with consistent recommendations in the face of inconsistent federal guidance and an erosion of trust in federal health agencies.
ABC News’ Youri Benadjaoud, Sony Salzman and Selina Wang contributed to this report.
