Sept. 8, 2025:
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Florida’s plan to drop school vaccine mandates likely won’t take effect for 90 days and would include only chickenpox and a few other illnesses unless lawmakers decide to extend it to other diseases, like polio and measles, the health department said Sunday.
The department responded to a request for details, four days after Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, said the state would become the first to make vaccinations voluntary and let families decide whether to inoculate their children.
It’s a retreat from decades of public policy and research that has shown vaccines to be safe and the most effective way to stop the spread of communicable diseases, especially among children. Despite that evidence, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed deep skepticism about vaccines.
Florida’s plan would lift mandates on school vaccines for hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib influenza and pneumococcal diseases, such as meningitis, the health department said.
“The Department initiated the rule change on September 3, 2025, and anticipates the rule change will not be effective for approximately 90 days,” the state told The Associated Press in an email. The public school year in Florida started in August.
All other vaccinations required under Florida law to attend school “remain in place, unless updated through legislation,” including vaccines for measles, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, mumps and tetanus, the department said.
Lawmakers don’t meet again until January 2026, although committee meetings begin in October.
Ladapo, appearing Sunday on CNN, repeated his message of free choice for childhood vaccines.
“If you want them, God bless, you can have as many as you want,” he said. “And if you don’t want them, parents should have the ability and the power to decide what goes into their children’s bodies. It’s that simple.”
Florida currently has a religious exemption for vaccine requirements. Vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives globally over the past 50 years, the World Health Organization reported in 2024. The majority of those were infants and children.
Dr. Rana Alissa, chair of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said making vaccines voluntary puts students and school staff at risk.
This is the worst year for measles in the U.S. in more than three decades, with more than 1,400 cases confirmed nationwide, most of them in Texas, and three deaths.
Whooping cough has killed at least two babies in Louisiana and a 5-year-old in Washington state since winter, as it too spreads rapidly. There have been more than 19,000 cases as of Aug. 23, nearly 2,000 more than this time last year, according to preliminary CDC data.
Sept. 3, 2025:
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Florida will work to phase out all childhood vaccine mandates in the state, building on the effort by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to curb vaccine requirements and other health mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
DeSantis also announced on Wednesday (Sept. 3, 2025) the creation of a state-level “Make America Healthy Again” commission modeled after similar initiatives pushed at the federal level by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
On the vaccines, state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo cast current requirements in schools and elsewhere as an “immoral” intrusion on people’s rights bordering on “slavery,” and hampers parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.
“People have a right to make their own decisions, informed decisions,” said Ladapo, who has frequently clashed with the medical establishment, at a news conference in Valrico, Florida, in the Tampa area. “They don’t have the right to tell you what to put in your body. Take it away from them.”
The state Health Department, Ladapo said, can scrap its own rules for some vaccine mandates, but others would require action by the Florida Legislature. He did not specify any particular vaccines but repeated several times the effort would end “all of them. Every last one of them.”
Florida would be the first state to eliminate so many vaccine mandates, Ladapo added.
Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who is running for Orlando mayor, said in a social media post that scrapping vaccines “is reckless and dangerous” and could cause outbreaks of preventable disease.
“This is a public health disaster in the making for the Sunshine State,” she said on the social platform X.
Meanwhile, the Democratic governors of Washington, Oregon and California announced Wednesday that they created an alliance to safeguard health policies, contending that the administration of President Donald Trump is politicizing public health decisions.
The partnership plans to coordinate health guidelines by aligning immunization plans based on recommendations from respected national medical organizations, according to a joint statement from Gov. Bob Ferguson of Washington, Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
In Florida, vaccine mandates for child day care facilities and public schools include shots for measles, chickenpox, hepatitis B, Diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP), polio and other diseases, according to the state Health Department’s website.
Under DeSantis, Florida resisted imposing COVID vaccines on schoolchildren, requiring “passports” for places that draw crowds, school closures and mandates that workers get the shots to keep their jobs.
“I don’t think there’s another state that’s done as much as Florida. We want to stay ahead of the curve,” the governor said.
The state “MAHA” commission would look into such things as allowing informed consent in medical matters, promoting safe and nutritious food, boosting parental rights regarding medical decisions about their children, and eliminating “medical orthodoxy that is not supported by the data,” DeSantis said. The commission will be chaired by Lt. Gov. Jay Collins and Florida first lady Casey DeSantis.
“We’re getting government out of the way, getting government out of your lives,” Collins said.
The commission’s work will help inform a large “medical freedom package” to be introduced in the Legislature next session, which would address the vaccine mandates required by state law and make permanent the recent state COVID decisions relaxing restrictions, DeSantis said.
“There will be a broad package,” the governor said.
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