Top Florida officials announced plans to get rid of all vaccine mandates, including for schools, making it the first state to do so.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s top health official announced the move on Wednesday, with state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo saying that state vaccine mandates are “immoral” and that “every last one drips with disdain and slavery.”
Health and legal experts are worried that Florida’s move to rescind immunization requirements will hurt public health and education far beyond the nation’s third largest state.
School vaccine requirements are an extremely effective intervention for preventing childhood illness, said James Hodge, a professor at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law who also directs the university’s Center for Public Health Law and Policy.
“These vaccine mandates have been in place for decades now, designed to make sure we’re providing the safest environments not just for students, but for the teachers and staff as well,” he said. “These things flat-out work to limit greatly the spread of disease.”
School vaccine requirements aren’t just designed to keep students healthy, said Lynn Nelson, the president of the National Association of School Nurses.
“When we have outbreaks in schools, those children go home to their families. That’s when we get infants with measles, or elderly people with pertussis that puts them in the hospital,” she said.
Florida’s new policy push, Nelson said, “is a doorway to a public health crisis that is 100% preventable.”
Ending vaccine mandates will likely require legislative action
How, exactly, Florida will abolish all of its vaccine mandates and what legal challenges it will run into is not yet clear. Ladapo said that rules relating to vaccine requirements created by Florida’s health department, which he oversees, will be removed. The state’s legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, will likely have to take some action to abolish all immunization requirements.
Lawmakers, Ladapo said during the event held outside Tampa, are “going to have to make decisions. That’s the way that this becomes possible. People are going to have to make a decision, people are going to have to choose a side.”
But Ladapo said that the state department of health, in partnership with the governor’s office, “is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida law. All of them.”
Florida currently requires children in public schools and child care facilities to receive shots for chickenpox, measles, and polio, among other diseases, according to the state health department’s website. Florida offers religious and medical exemptions from its vaccine mandates.
Florida’s decision to move toward ending vaccine mandates is another example of lawmakers injecting politics into public education at the expense of addressing more pressing problems, said Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union, a parent and education advocacy group.
“At a time when we’re dealing with mental health challenges, learning loss, economic instability, the last thing we need to be doing is putting our children back at risk of preventable illness,” she said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Nelson, who is also the senior director for student health services and support for the Capital Region ESD 113 school system in Tumwater, Wash., is concerned that Florida’s vaccination rates will drop below herd immunity for many diseases.
It’s important for parents to have the ability to make decisions about their children’s health in consultation with their pediatricians, she said, and that’s why states have religious, philosophical, and medical exemptions.
If vaccines aren’t required for school, Nelson said, more families will simply not get vaccinated because parents forget, are busy, or have trouble getting their children to a doctor or clinic.
“Potentially, access will be impacted and it will be even harder for parents who want those vaccines to get them,” she said. “Because they’re not required for school attendance, I can easily see, for example, vaccine clinics that are set up for back-to-school times won’t be as well attended so they will fall by the wayside.”
On the other side of the country, the governors of California, Oregon, and Washington announced a new health alliance to provide vaccination recommendations to their residents in response to concerns over the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s credibility. The head of the CDC was recently fired and other top medical experts at the agency recently left over reported disputes with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy.
Anti-vaccine sentiments fuel Florida’s move
Florida’s move comes against a backdrop of rising pushback against established vaccine policies at both the state and federal levels.
President Donald Trump appointed Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, as secretary of health and human services. Among some of his early actions, Kennedy dismissed all 17 experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
That group helps determine the childhood vaccine schedule, which many states rely on to develop their school vaccine requirements. Kennedy installed eight new members (one of whom has since withdrawn) on ACIP, several of whom have expressed anti-vaccine sentiments to varying degrees.
During a press conference to announce Florida’s new vaccine policy, Ladapo said the government does not have the right to tell parents what they put in their or their children’s bodies.
“Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God,” said Ladapo, a Harvard-educated doctor whom DeSantis appointed to the surgeon general role in 2021. “I don’t have that right. Government does not have that right.”
Vaccine skeptics say mandates violate people’s rights
However, courts have long said that vaccine requirements for public schools, day care facilities, and other institutions don’t violate people’s rights, said Hodge.
“A mandate is simply there to say, as a condition of you attending school or your children attending school, you will have them vaccinated for these specific conditions,” he said. “That is not forcing anybody to get vaccinated. If you don’t want your kids in that environment, then you may home-school them, you may [use] a religious exemption, which Florida recognizes.”
Students and parents can also claim a right to safe and healthy schools, Hodge added.
The question now is whether other states will follow Florida’s lead. Florida’s new policy is likely to be challenged on a number of fronts, said Hodge.
“Florida’s massive population and societal influence could mean that other states, especially in the Southeast, pick up on this and start to run with it as well,” he said. “I think Florida is going to deal with so many substantial legal challenges that I think more states will be watching this environment and trying to assess, ‘do we really want to get into that?’”
