From Medicine to Mysticism: The Radicalization of Florida’s Top Doc

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In early September, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo took the podium at a Tampa news conference to make an unprecedented announcement: He planned to eliminate “all vaccine mandates” in the state, he told the crowd. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.” 

“Who am I, as a man standing here now,” he asked, hand on his chest, “to tell you what you should put in your body?” He punctuated each “you” with a finger pointed at the audience. The crowd clapped, and he continued riding the wave of their enthusiasm. “Your body,” he added, “your body is a gift from God!” The audience roared its approval. 

A few days later, he appeared on the CNN program State of the Union, and host Jake Tapper asked him if state health officials had undertaken any analysis to determine how many new cases of hepatitis A, whooping cough, and chickenpox would arise after the ending of vaccine mandates. Ladapo seemed amused by the question. “Absolutely not,” he said, adding later, “There’s this conflation of the science and sort of, what is the right and wrong thing to do?” 

Ladapo’s supreme self-confidence and impeccable credentials—which include an MD and PhD from Harvard Medical School—have not muted the pushback that his announcement to end vaccine mandates has attracted. Both the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics issued statements condemning the move, and Ladapo’s predecessor, Scott Rivkees, said in a TV interview following the announcement, “This is a very, very confusing and really, potentially very, very dangerous decision from a public health lens.”

The vaccine announcement from Florida’s top doctor may have been his most controversial, but it wasn’t the first time he had flouted public health guidelines. Since Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) appointed him in 2021 during the height of the Covid pandemic, Ladapo has drawn increasing criticism from the medical community for rolling back the state’s pandemic protections, questioning the safety of Covid vaccines, and publicly challenging CDC measles quarantine guidelines amid an outbreak. 

For those reasons and more, he now has a reputation as something of a rogue public health official, even given his impressive résumé. From his research and clinical positions at NYU and UCLA medical schools, he has an extensive publication record on the cost effectiveness of public health interventions, and that includes work on topics as varied as the risks firearms pose for people with mental illness, opioid prescription patterns, and improvements of communication on sexual health between parents and teens. The handful of his former colleagues with whom we spoke remember him as once having been a capable, detail-oriented, and highly collaborative scientist. All of them were perplexed by the path he seems to have taken since the pandemic. One former research co-collaborator from Boston Children’s Hospital told us that he and Ladapo’s other former colleagues had, in recent weeks, found themselves asking, “‘How did this happen? Where did this come from?’” 

The answers to those questions may be found by taking a closer look at his journey of personal transformation that has paralleled some of his most controversial public health decisions. Burdened by a traumatic past, Ladapo has been deeply influenced by two charismatic people who seem to lack any training in Western medicine. The first is his wife, Brianna, an “Energetic Healer, Certified Naturopath, Movement Therapist, and Integrative Health and Wellness Coach,” according to her Instagram bio as of publication time. Brianna claims that despite her childhood trauma, she has been blessed with supernatural gifts, including the abilities to speak to angels and historical figures and read people’s auras. She also believes that people who have been sexually abused give off energy from their wounds that invites more abuse, and that people—even children—choose what happens to them, including their own suffering. 

His other major influence is a charismatic guru and former Navy SEAL named Christopher Maher, whom the couple credits with facilitating their individual and marital healing. During a recent appearance on the podcast hosted by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s former running mate, Nicole Shanahan, Joseph Ladapo referred to Maher as “a mechanic for the human spirit.” 

A record of how this all came about can be found in Ladapo’s 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear: A Blueprint for Mindful Leadership in Public Health. He recounts the story of how, through a series of mystical experiences with Brianna and Maher, he realized that fear was corrosive, and the driving force for too many public health decisions. Last year, while testifying at a congressional hearing on Covid-era decision-making, he recalled how during the pandemic, he was impressed when he saw how DeSantis “refused to let the fear that gripped our nation shape the State of Florida.” When he became that state’s surgeon general, in his remarks thanking DeSantis for the opportunity, he pledged to “make health policy decisions rooted in data and not in fear.” 

To understand the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings of Joseph Ladapo’s crusade against fear and evidence-based public health practices, you need to understand Brianna and Maher. After all, without them, as he said on Shanahan’s podcast, “I’d still be version 1.0.”

Joseph and Brianna Ladapo, and spokespeople for both DeSantis and the Florida Department of Public Health, did not respond to detailed sets of questions for this story. Maher directed questions to the Ladapos.

A Black man in a suit speaks as he stands behind a lectern. A crowd of people stand behind him, listening intently, some with smiles on their face.
Florida Surgeon Gen. Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo speaks before a bill signing by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021.Chris O’Meara/AP

Joseph Ladapo moved from Nigeria to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with his parents in the early 1980s, when he was around 5 years old, he writes in Transcend Fear. (The book was published by Skyhorse, the conservative publishing house that also published First Lady Melania Trump’s memoir.) RFK Jr. wrote the foreword, praising the physician’s “tremendous courage in the face of extraordinary resistance on the part of the Big Pharma, corrupt government regulators, and his own colleagues” during the pandemic. Gavin de Becker, private investigator and so-called “security expert” for both RFK and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and author of a book called The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence, wrote the afterword.

Ladapo’s parents studied at Louisiana State University, where his father earned a doctorate in microbiology and his mother earned a bachelor’s degree in business. They later moved to Athens, Georgia, where they enrolled their son in a Catholic elementary school, and then to North Carolina, where he finished high school. 

In Transcend Fear, Ladapo describes himself as being “emotionally deadened” as a child, due mainly to his experiences of sexual abuse by a babysitter back in Nigeria that left him “numb” and emotionally disconnected from others. Ladapo earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Wake Forest University in 2000, and then continued to Harvard, where he earned MD and PhD degrees in 2008. 

He met Brianna after his first year at Harvard, when he was heading back to Boston from a vacation on the island of St. Croix. She was going home to San Diego from a trip with friends to St. Thomas and they talked throughout the flight. He later tracked her down in the airport to get her phone number. A long-distance relationship began, with phone calls that lasted up to eight hours, only ending as Ladapo watched the sun rise from his Boston apartment. But the experience of falling in love also set him on what he describes as “a spiritual and emotional roller coaster.” 

“As love opened up my heart,” he writes, “it also opened doors to the rooms that hid my emotional and spiritual injuries.” These were the metaphoric rooms into which Maher would eventually enter.

Brianna immediately felt a strong connection to Ladapo, yet she also perceived that a “dark entity” seemed to be attached to his aura.

Brianna also wrote a memoir, Emerging From Darkness, in 2023. In it, she recalls being a “joyful, sensitive” child who was the black sheep in a rigid, fundamentalist Christian family. She always felt a strong connection to the supernatural, hearing the voices of angels, seeing auras that told her about “the energy of other humans,” and noticing how certain patterns of numbers repeatedly popped up in unexpected places. As a young adult, she visited Egypt, where she had visions of herself as an ancient queen being embraced by the goddess Isis. During their first meeting, she immediately felt a strong connection to Ladapo, yet she also perceived that a “dark entity” seemed to be attached to his aura. Nevertheless, they married and had three children. While Ladapo was working on completing his education and securing his first jobs, Brianna was also embarking on her career. Like her husband, she started on a conventional path. After earning a master’s degree in English from Harvard, she went into academic communications, serving as the assistant director of annual giving at Harvard Medical School and the director of communications in New York University School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health, according to her LinkedIn profile.

After completing his residency in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Ladapo went to the NYU School of Medicine to begin working as an assistant professor of population health and medicine and a hospitalist physician at NYU Langone Medical Center. Brianna moved with him to New York City. When he wasn’t treating patients, he focused on research, securing grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the diagnosis and management of cardiovascular disease and smoking cessation strategies. In Transcend Fear, he describes securing his first NIH grant in 2013 as “an important threshold to cross.” (Given that the NIH has canceled billions of dollars in research funding under his friend RFK Jr.’s leadership, his past remarks contain some unintended irony.)

Brianna had long suffered from chronic migraines that worsened after she stopped taking medication to treat them when pregnant with the couple’s first child. The pain did not abate until the couple and their young son went to Orlando for an American Heart Association conference. There, under the Florida sun, Brianna became what Joseph describes as “a different person: no debilitating migraines, no severe pain, and tremendously more energy.” (Some medical research has linked extreme weather to migraines, though without establishing a definite causality.) 

Ladapo resolved to leave the Northeast and began to apply for jobs in places where the climate was more temperate. He received an offer to be an associate professor at UCLA’s medical school, where, he writes, his “career accelerated.” He soon won four large NIH grants, to investigate weight loss strategies for low-income, obese adults; study how to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in adults with HIV; research strategies to end smoking by high-risk, hospitalized patients; and attempt to reduce racial disparities in hypertension among low-income residents of Los Angeles.

While her husband progressed in academic medicine and cared for her and their three children, Brianna set out on a very different path. Frustrated by her doctors’ failure to take her migraines seriously, she turned to naturopathic medicine, a diet of organic foods, and meditation. She gradually improved, but her husband became more distant and their marriage struggled. A friend recommended that she send Ladapo for a consultation with, as she wrote, “an extraordinarily gifted healer,” the former Navy SEAL Christopher Maher.

Maher is the author of the 2019 book Free for Life: A Navy SEAL’s Path to Inner Freedom and Outer Peace, which recounts his transformation through his discovery of alternative medicine. Maher also offers a $297 audio course that promises to “help you leave struggle, strife and suffering behind” and teach “how to upgrade into the life that you were meant for and reach effortless manifestation.” His online bio says he has training in traditional Chinese medicine, but the treatments he offers appear to be something else entirely. He describes one of them, “Body of Light,” as “a verbal, energetic, transmutation process that allows the body, brain, and nervous system to locate, transmute, and discharge negative generational stress, tension, and distortion-inducing patterns.” 

Another, which he calls “Sha-King” medicine, “directly addresses complex stress patterns by improving subtle energetic health by shaking (‘sha-king’) the entire body in random, non-specific movements that are out of syncopation.” Maher’s website notes, “You won’t find much online about Christopher, as his clients built his practice through word of mouth. With his help, his clients have succeeded at the highest levels in sports, entertainment, business, medicine, and international politics.”

In his book, Maher attributes much of his philosophy to his own mentor and guru, a healer whom he refers to only as “Roberto.” He recalls an intense few days of sessions where Roberto removed his tension and stress, causing him to laugh “like a hyena for 20 minutes, rolling around on the ground.” After working with Roberto, along with stints learning about Chinese medicine and Native American sweat lodges, Maher developed a belief system that is what appears to be a literal interpretation of the concept of generational trauma. He describes a hypothetical example of two children switched at birth, a prince and a peasant, where the poor child “will still be treated like a prince because that’s what his epigenetic markers dictate,” he writes. In contrast, the prince “may be handed the keys to the kingdom, but he will lose it because he has all the limiting beliefs that get expressed in survival-based thinking, feeling, and emoting.”

But this genetic determinism, Maher claims, can be broken through his healing techniques that can help free his clients from the sins of their ancestors. Maher also believes that when people mask their true emotions, the body “begins to fight back” with disease and physical suffering. Consider a breast cancer survivor who smiled through an intensely painful session of his bodywork. “My guess was this is what she had done through her entire life,” he writes, “and the reason why she was dealing with breast cancer.” 

Ladapo doubted that Maher possessed the key to solving his marital troubles and was put off by how much it would cost when Brianna asked him to go see the healer in 2019, a time when their relationship was at its “lowest point,” he writes. But she insisted, telling him, “He helps people with the type of trauma you went through as a child.” After reading Maher’s book, he agreed to try it out. “Thank the Lord I listened,” he writes, “because after working with him, I finally became truly free.” 

In mid-December 2019, Ladapo went to LA’s ritzy waterfront Marina del Rey neighborhood, where he was introduced to Maher. When that first day concluded, Ladapo felt nothing but “annoyance that I had probably wasted my money.” But that evening, Brianna noted that the “dark entity” she had long noticed in her husband’s aura was fading. 

Ladapo, too, felt a shift. In the middle of the night after that first day, he writes, he awoke and felt transformed, “as if something had been lifted out of my chest, leaving a lightness in its place, a felicity, an ease.” The next day, he had “a jolly morning” getting his three young kids ready for school, with no trace of his usual stress. Soon after, he hopped in an Uber to head to Maher’s. While talking with the driver, he had what he describes as “the very first conversation in my adult life in which I genuinely connected emotionally with a stranger. I genuinely and authentically cared about him, about his well-being, and about his relationship with his loved ones,” he writes of the Uber driver. “I had never experienced anything like this in my life.” The experience left him, as he wrote in capital letters, “STUNNED.”

“The discomfort I experienced as he stomped on me was intense, and I went from feeling acute pain to feeling a sense of enjoyment, and—as incredible as it must sound—at one point, I even felt like a tiger,” recalled Ladapo.

Day two of his work with Maher consisted of more of the same, plus “a technique called Ma Xing,” which featured Maher walking up and down the backs of Joseph’s thighs. (On his website, Maher writes that “Ma Xing means horse stomping.”) In Transcend Fear, Ladapo recounts the experience in detail:

The discomfort I experienced as he stomped on me was intense, and I went from feeling acute pain to feeling a sense of enjoyment, and—as incredible as it must sound—at one point, I even felt like a tiger. Christopher explained that this was my spirit animal. As I learned from him, Ma Xing engages the urinary bladder channel, which is the master channel in Chinese meridian theory. Further, he explained that this channel has access to every aspect of a human being’s behavior and thoughts, including their mind, brain, physical being, spiritual energy, and emotional intelligence.

What, exactly, the rest of his week working with Maher consisted of is left to the reader’s imagination, but they are assured that it was “the closest thing to a ‘miracle’ I have ever experienced in my life.” When it was over, Ladapo writes, he “felt euphoria, as if I had been granted a new state of being.” And Brianna no longer saw the “dark entity” lurking, replaced by a lightness and lack of stress.

Encouraged by her husband’s success, Briana scheduled her own week of sessions with Maher. During her first session, Brianna described a traumatic childhood incident in which she was sexually assaulted by another child. Maher informed Brianna that her history of sexual assault was causing her body to act “like a lighthouse, energetically blasting” her “sexual trauma far and wide for others to pick up on” and causing her to attract “unwanted sexual attention.” Brianna then had a vision of her many female ancestors, she writes, sensing that all of them had been sexually assaulted.

After the session, Brianna was astounded when, instead of catcalling her, a construction worker she passed on the street politely told her she was beautiful, and a group of drunk young guys respectfully moved aside instead of harassing her. That night, she became violently ill and “purged all of the dark sexual energy from not only my body, but from my entire ancestral line.” That experience was key, she writes, to shaping her new belief that people inherit from their ancestors “emotional deficiencies, like a tendency toward violent behavior or susceptibility to sexual abuse.” 

Even children, Brianna writes, choose the harm that they experience. In fact, some children opt for “lives of sacrifice.”

“By repeatedly attracting the experience of sexual assault,” she learned that “we are electromagnetic beings who attract the same frequencies we emit.”

During one session, Maher performed his “Ma Xing” treatment, walking on the backs of her thighs, just as he had done with her husband. It was excruciatingly painful and, eventually, she claims, caused her to levitate while he stood on her. Over the course of many sessions, she recalls developing a new ability to communicate with “divine presences,” including “Archangel Michael, Mary Magdalene, and many other beings of light.” She became convinced that the numeric sequences she had noticed since childhood were “angelic messages.”

The “most profoundly important” lesson she learned from Maher, though, was the revelation that people choose all the things that happen to them, both positive and negative, to fulfill the divine purpose of their soul. “I chose to incarnate into an unhappy family,” she writes, because “that situation best supported the lessons my soul was seeking this time around.” Her family, she realized, “volunteered to play their respective roles in my life for the purpose of triggering my reawakening.”

Even children, she writes, choose the harm that they experience. In fact, some children opt for “lives of sacrifice,” an insight that emerged from a vision she had of herself as a young mother with three children, each of whom she was forced to watch get burned alive at the stake. She and her daughters had chosen for that to happen to them “in that specific way, in order to highlight the atrocity of that practice [of burning people at the stake] and encourage its retirement.”  

Just weeks after the couple had finished their individual sessions with Maher, the pandemic began and marked a dramatic turning point in Ladapo’s career. From the start, Brianna felt “dark energy and nefarious intention behind the emerging narrative” from the government. Later in the memoir, she returns to this theme, which has echoes of the QAnon conspiracy theory that was popularized during the pandemic (although there is no evidence that she is an adherent of QAnon). Humans, she writes, “have been controlled for ages by an elite, concealed group of dark actors who have a keen interest in keeping humanity’s collective vibration low.” The media is not to be trusted because it is “merely a propaganda vehicle at this point.” Ladapo writes that working with Maher prepared him to respond to the pandemic, by “removing the emotional and spiritual clutter that filled my life and clouded my judgment.”

During those early pandemic days, every Tuesday over a picnic lunch date, the couple discussed what they saw as disproportionately harsh public health measures, and vented their frustration with the reluctance of dissenters to speak out. Eventually, Ladapo wrote (and Brianna edited) a series of op-eds for the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. In them, he argued that fear of the spread and severity of the virus was wrongfully driving the pandemic response. Mask mandates were oppressive, school closures were unnecessarily prolonged, and doctors were being too cautious by not recommending the since-discredited therapies of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. 

The backlash was swift and harsh. Old friends and colleagues reacted as if the couple were now “insane and evil,” Brianna writes. Still, Ladapo was undeterred. He joined a group of anti-vax physicians to form a group called America’s Frontline Doctors. Ladapo describes America’s Frontline Doctors as a group of “free-thinking physicians who valued good health and freedom.” The group was founded by Simone Gold, an emergency room physician and Stanford-educated lawyer who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and was sentenced to two months in prison and a year of supervised release. Gold was imprisoned when Transcend Fear was published, but it does not mention her role at the Capitol or her conviction. His seventh chapter, “My friend Simone Gold,” praises “her courage and willingness to be vocal and stand for the ideas in which she believed.” (When we asked America’s Frontline Doctors to clarify its position on hydroxychloroquine as a Covid treatment, a spokesperson directed us to a website where the group collected studies of varying quality that showed favorable outcomes.) 

A black man in a suit stands on a stage outdoors underneath a tree. The stage is layered with American flags, the Florida flag and signs that read "We the People."
Joseph Ladapo speaks to anti-vaccine protesters in April in Sarasota, Florida. The rally was organized as counterprogramming to a speech given that day by Dr. Anthony Fauci at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall.Dave Decker/Zuma

In July 2020, America’s Frontline Doctors staged a so-called White Coat Summit on the steps of the Supreme Court, where they rallied against lockdowns and mask mandates and falsely claimed the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for Covid. In a section of his book in which he alleges that physicians’ aversion to Trump drove their refusal to support hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment, Ladapo writes, “who knows, maybe I would have been one of those ‘the end justifies the means’ doctors had I not worked with Christopher Maher and rid myself of the fear that was compromising my judgment.”

A month after that press conference, Ladapo was invited by Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, to join a small Oval Office meeting with Trump, during which they discussed “how health officials and the media were misinterpreting—and sometimes misrepresenting—what we had learned about the epidemiology of the coronavirus,” Ladapo writes. The meeting, he adds, “ended up running much longer than planned” and “was a ‘hit’ both because of the meaningful subjects we covered and because all five of us had a genuinely nice time together.” (The task force’s coordinator, global health specialist Dr. Deborah Birx, protested the meeting before it occurred, writing in an email that the attendees “are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.”) 

A year after the White House meeting, Ladapo was contacted by the office of DeSantis, who had been an outlier in leading his state’s response to Covid. He had read his op-eds and wanted Ladapo to become his new surgeon general, replacing Dr. Scott Rivkees. Brianna recalls experiencing a tingling sensation that told her it was a good idea. Premonitions aside, given their increasing alienation from their Los Angeles community, the Ladapos’ decision to leave their life in California and start over in Florida might have been an easy one.

Brianna’s memoir doesn’t go into detail about her husband’s tenure as Florida surgeon general, but it does provide some insight into how their beliefs have harmonized with Kennedy’s so-called Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, which rails against chemicals, food additives, and medications. “Chemical pesticides, herbicides, hormone disruptors, and antibiotics,” she writes, can “lower your vibration,” as can caffeine, alcohol, pharmaceutical and recreational drugs, and “everything you watch, read, and listen to.” She recommends that “instead of listening to angry death metal, consider listening to enchanting, ethereal music.”

State surgeons general don’t often make national news—in fact, only six states even have such a position. But it didn’t take long for Ladapo to grab headlines. He was confirmed despite a negative review from his former supervisor at UCLA, who told Florida law enforcement during his background check that “the people of Florida would be better served by a Surgeon General who grounds his policy decisions and recommendations in the best scientific evidence rather than opinions,” according to records related to his confirmation. (In a 2022 Politico interview about his former supervisor’s comments, Ladapo said, “It’s OK to disagree, and I’ve had no problem with disagreement, but what has been really disappointing is how disagreement has become a ticket or a passport to activate personal attacks.”) On his first day in office in September 2021, he formalized a rule that gave parents sole discretion over whether to follow school mask guidelines, despite soaring Covid cases; it was a pivotal moment in the parental rights movement that would take off over the next few years. That same year, he issued a report recommending against Covid vaccines for healthy children under age 16, which flouted CDC guidelines and led to accusations that he had cherry-picked the data. The state adopted his recommendations anyway.

The following fall, Ladapo claimed that Covid shots caused a heart condition called myocarditis in young men, a conclusion that scientists later determined was based on faulty data. In 2023, he asked the FDA to stop all Covid vaccines, components of which he claimed could “transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell.” The FDA responded by calling Ladapo’s statements “misleading.” In 2024, amid a measles outbreak in the state, he again flouted CDC guidelines. Instead of enforcing the agency’s rule advising that children suffering from measles be quarantined for 21 days, he issued a statement announcing that the state would be “deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”

Ladapo’s approach to health care for trans people was as draconian as his approach to infectious disease was lax. In 2022, he issued guidelines against gender-affirming care for minors; in 2023, under his guidance, Florida enacted a law that forbade Medicaid to cover gender-affirming care, joining several other states with similar laws on the books. A handful of other states have since passed similar laws. This year, when Ladapo announced his intention to ban school vaccine requirements, he had evidence that his crusade against vaccines was already working. Florida’s rates of routine childhood vaccination had declined since he took office, with only 88 percent of the state’s kindergartners fully vaccinated last year. That’s the lowest rate in a decade, and below the 95 percent threshold required to prevent the spread of measles. 

Brianna’s memoir offers a possible explanation for the kind of thinking that led to Ladapo’s recent decision to end school immunization requirements in Florida. If you believe that people—including children—choose their own suffering for obscure reasons connected to reincarnation and energetic vibrations, you might not be so concerned with the potential harms of ushering in a new age of infectious disease. Ladapo’s book also helps explain his thinking. If vaccines and masks are not considered prudent treatment and prevention efforts but, instead, manifestations of fear, it’s much easier to disparage them.

Laurel Bristow, a science communicator and host of the radio show “Health Wanted,” based at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health, said she sees an internal contradiction in Ladapo’s critiques, “given that he has spread messages about the dangers of mRNA vaccines that are definitely coming from a fear.” 

Bristow recalls most pandemic-era public health messaging, including her own, was focused on “community support” and information-sharing rather than sowing panic. “I would say that fear is not a good motivator for public health policies,” she said, “and I also don’t feel like fear was the guiding message.”

It’s not yet clear whether Ladapo will make good on his vaccine elimination—he will need the support of the state health department, which he oversees, and the legislature. But should that happen, scientists and physicians worry that the move could undo decades of public health work to stamp out the diseases that once injured and killed so many children.

Even if his vision does not become the official policy of Florida, it appears that the messaging he champions is already making a difference. Jennifer Takagishi, a practicing pediatrician and the division chief of the department of pediatrics at the University of South Florida’s medical school, says that among the families she treats, “we are starting to see more and more who are refusing vaccines or only allowing the ones that are absolutely mandated for school.” 

Without school vaccine requirements, she says, more families likely will skip the shots entirely, and she worries that once-eradicated diseases will again take hold. That could be a particularly dangerous development for her immunocompromised and newborn patients, but also for everyone else. Even otherwise healthy people can get sick enough to be hospitalized or die from vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles and polio. “What we’re all concerned about is that we’ve become a victim of our own success,” she says. “Just because we aren’t seeing these diseases anymore or very little, doesn’t mean that they’re gone.”

In the weeks since Ladapo’s announcement, some Florida parents have echoed those concerns, emphasizing their fears of raising children in a new era of infectious disease. As the mother of a 4-year-old with kidney disease in Palmetto, Florida, put it in an interview with the BBC, “It’s just scary.” 

But apparently not for Dr. and Mrs. Ladapo, who have, as he wrote in his memoir, cast off the chains of fear. “Public health leaders who are as free as possible from fear and have undertaken the journey to achieve freedom from their own inner challenges are those in whom we can place the most trust,” he writes. “Those individuals will make the best public health decisions.”

This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.

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