Florida’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, announced on Wednesday that the state would end all vaccine mandates, likening them to slavery.
Lifting the mandates would mean children would not be required to be vaccinated in order to attend school in Florida. It would be the first state to withdraw from the practice, which has been credited with increasing vaccination rates and lowering the risk of infectious diseases like measles spreading.
“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?” Ladapo said.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis endorsed the move and acknowledged that although the state can eliminate some vaccine mandates, it would need “changes from the legislature” to eradicate them all.
Ladapo is a known vaccine critic and has opposed mainstream scientific research and guidance. In the past, Ladapo has downplayed the importance of COVID-19 vaccines, which public health experts have credited with saving millions of lives during the pandemic, calling them “nothing special.” He also promoted unproven treatments for COVID-19, including hydroxychloroquine, which the World Health Organization has warned is not an effective treatment for the virus. During a measles outbreak in 2024 at an elementary school in Florida, Ladapo said guardians should have the right to decide whether their unvaccinated children are kept home, contrary to federal guidance that children be excluded from schools in such cases.
Ladapo did not provide specifics on the plans to eliminate all vaccine mandates in the state, although he repeatedly said that “every last one of them” would be eradicated, “is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
Florida’s move to end mandates in the states comes as the national Department of Health and Human Services—led by another well-known vaccine skeptic, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—has made a number of controversial changes to the country’s vaccine policies.
The governors of Oregon, California and Washington formed a health alliance on Wednesday to provide health guidance for the residents of their states, including on vaccine safety, in a rebuke against the Trump Administration. The alliance comes in response to what the three governors described as “the blatant politicization” of the CDC following the firing of its former director, Susan Monarez last week.
Meanwhile, anti-vaccine sentiments have been on the rise among the American public. Vaccination exemptions have been increasing in states across the country. During the 2024-25 school year, vaccine exemptions for kindergarteners rose from 3.3% to 3.6%, while 36 states reported overall rising exemptions, according to CDC data. Seventeen states reported exemptions exceeding 5%. Childhood vaccination rates, meanwhile, have been declining: The agency recorded a decrease in vaccine coverage for kindergarteners for all reported vaccines in the 2024-2025 school year.
About 4 million deaths worldwide are prevented by childhood vaccines every year, according to the CDC. The World Health Organization estimated roughly 154 million lives have been saved over the last 50 years from global immunization efforts.
