A top Florida health official on Wednesday vowed to end all vaccine mandates, including school immunization requirements, likening the measures to prevent childhood diseases to slavery.
The announcement thrusts the conservative-leaning US state into the center of a growing political battle, as vaccine-skeptic federal Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seeks to steer the nation away from the life-saving medical intervention.
“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 of them, 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,” he added.
“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 your body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God.”
The changes, which would require new state laws to fully implement, would make Florida the first state to eliminate such mandates.
Vaccination requirements have long been credited with boosting protection against once-common childhood diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio and hepatitis B.
Nigerian-born Ladapo, a Harvard-trained physician who has served as Florida’s top public health official since 2021, was already known for his opposition to mRNA Covid vaccines, which he has falsely claimed contaminate a person’s genome.
Speaking at the same event, Governor Ron DeSantis added a “big medical package” would be introduced in Florida’s legislature.
Kennedy spent decades spreading vaccine misinformation before being appointed by President Donald Trump as health secretary, a position he has used to curb access to Covid shots and embed anti-vaccine conspiracy theories into government policy.
A World Health Organization study last year estimated global immunization efforts have saved 154 million lives over the past 50 years, with infants making up two-thirds of those.
But opposition to vaccines has grown in recent years, fueled by false claims linking them to autism.
In the United States, the issue has become increasingly polarized along the right-left political divide, with conservatives more likely to exempt their children from shots on religious grounds.
