A TOP health official in Florida on Wednesday vowed to end all vaccine mandates in the state, including school requirements, likening the measure to prevent childhood diseases to “slavery”.
The announcement thrust the conservative-leaning state into the heart of an intensifying national fight, as vaccine-skeptic federal Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushes to steer the country away from the life-saving practice.
On the opposite coast, the Democratic-led states of California, Washington and Oregon said they were creating a new body to issue their own immunisation guidelines, arguing it was needed to counter “politicisation” at the federal level – underscoring just how divisive the issue has become.
“The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida – all of them, every last one of them,” Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo told a cheering audience at the Grace Christian School in Valrico.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” added Nigerian-born Ladapo, a Harvard-trained physician who has served as the state’s top health official since 2021. He was previously known for his opposition to mRNA Covid vaccines, which he has falsely claimed contaminate a person’s genome.
“Who am I 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 put in (their) body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God.”
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Speaking at the same event, Governor Ron DeSantis said Republicans would soon introduce a “big medical package” to put the changes into law.
“It is a dangerous time to be a child in the United States of America,” renowned pediatrician and vaccine expert Paul Offit told AFP. “Goodness, it’s going to be really hard to rebuild these things back up again.”
“Florida’s decision to end school entry vaccine requirements is slavish pandering to the nihilistic anti-vaccine movement,” added Amish Adalja, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.
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If fully enacted, Florida would become the first US state to abandon school vaccine requirements, long credited with wiping out once-common childhood scourges such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio and hepatitis B.
But resistance to vaccines has swelled in recent years, stoked by false claims linking them to autism – a debunked notion Kennedy himself promoted for years before taking office as health secretary.
The issue has become deeply polarised along partisan lines, with conservatives more likely to seek exemptions on religious grounds.
As a result, the United States in 2025 saw its worst measles outbreak in more than three decades, with 1,431 cases centered on a Mennonite community in Texas.
Kennedy has used his office to curb access to Covid shots and weave anti-vaccine conspiracy theories into federal policy – and last week ousted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Sue Monarez over immunisation guidelines, plunging the agency into turmoil.
That move helped spur California, Washington and Oregon, together home to more than 50 million people, to announce the formation of a “West Coast Health Alliance” that will work with scientists and medical associations to craft its own recommendations.
“President (Donald) Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists – and his blatant politicization of the agency – is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a joint statement with officials from the other two states.
A World Health Organization study last year estimated that vaccination campaigns have saved 154 million lives worldwide over the past half-century, with infants making up two-thirds of that total. AFP
