Florida’s crusading surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, announced at a news conference on Wednesday that he intends to eliminate “all vaccine mandates” in the state. “The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida,” he said. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
If successful, such a move could have broad implications for workers across state government sectors. Most significantly, it could allow many more unvaccinated children to attend school, putting others at risk of acquiring highly contagious and potentially deadly diseases such as measles and polio.
Under Ladapo’s leadership, Florida’s rates of routine childhood vaccination—shots that protect against catastrophic diseases like polio and tetanus—have already declined. Today, the immunization rate for kindergartners is 90 percent, the lowest it’s been in a decade, and below the threshold required to prevent the spread of some serious illnesses. The rate of families seeking religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements has increased over the past few years.
In 2022, just as the state’s vaccination rates were beginning to drop, Florida pediatrician Dr. Mobeen Rathore told me, “Of all the things that government mandates, this is the simplest and the most useful one. I just don’t know why we have to politicize health care, especially for children.”
Ladapo, who assumed his Florida position in 2021, attracted national attention when he flouted federal pandemic protection measures, including guidelines around Covid vaccines. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he was an early critic of the US government’s approach to pandemic management. In April 2020, he wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal called “Lockdowns Won’t Stop the Spread.” That same year, he reportedly appeared in a video produced by America’s Frontline Doctors, the conspiracy-promoting group led by Dr. Simone Gold, who went on to participate in the insurrection at the US Capitol the following year. The video criticized Covid treatment protocols and praised alternative medications—the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the antiparasitic ivermectin—despite the lack of robust evidence to support their use.
Over the next few years, Ladapo provided medical justification for the notoriously lax pandemic policies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Ladapo became a staunch opponent not only of Covid vaccine mandates, but also of the shots in general. In 2022, under his guidance, Florida became the first state to recommend against their use for healthy children. I reported at the time:
Bucking the advice of major medical organizations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has emphasized that the state doesn’t recommend Covid vaccines for any healthy children under age 16 because he believes the risks of the shots outweigh those of the disease itself. (They don’t.) In June, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that the state was “affirmatively against” Covid vaccines for children under the age of 5, and Florida was the only state that didn’t pre-order shots for the youngest children when they became available (though DeSantis eventually relented after heavy criticism from public health officials, including those in the White House).
In 2023, Ladapo wrote a letter to the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration calling for a halt to all Covid vaccines, citing concerns about “nucleic acid contaminants,” which he alleged could “transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell” or “result in chromosomal instability.” In a public response, the FDA called Ladapo’s statements “misleading.”
Ladapo’s controversial public health decisions continued beyond the pandemic. Last year, during a measles outbreak, he bent the rules on quarantine:
Because of the extreme contagiousness of measles and its potentially serious health consequences, in the case of a school outbreak, the CDC recommends that “unvaccinated children, including those who have a medical or other exemption to vaccination, must be excluded from school through 21 days after their most recent exposure.”
But maybe not in Florida. Bucking those guidelines, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo issued a statement announcing the state’s Department of Health “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance” because of the “burden on families and the educational cost of healthy children missing school” and the “high immunity rate in the community.”
He has also led Florida in flouting federal guidelines for gender-affirming care. As my colleague Madison Pauly wrote:
DeSantis’ handpicked surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo—a critic of Covid vaccines, masks, and quarantines—issued a memo advising doctors to withhold medical treatments like hormones and puberty blockers from youth with gender dysphoria, claiming that there wasn’t enough “conclusive evidence.” Even non-medical measures, like changing names, hair, and pronouns, should “not be a treatment option,” Ladapo wrote. “The surgeon general did a great job,” DeSantis later commented.
Today, with the ascension of anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, with its massive power over public health policy, the movement opposing immunizations has gone mainstream. Kennedy dismissed the members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with a new group, some of whom had been staunch opponents of Covid vaccines. He also vowed to re-investigate the supposed link between vaccines and autism, despite the robust research that shows there is no connection.
Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement has emboldened contrarian physicians to intensify their claims about the impurity of vaccines—and that line of reasoning was on full display in Ladapo’s speech. “People who don’t know you are telling you what to put in your temple, the temple of your body,” Ladapo said at the press conference. “It is a gift from God!”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.