As a parent, I’m watching America’s anti-vax madness with horror

2 days ago 5

Opinion

September 12, 2025 — 12.00pm

In the days before he died in August, my father-in-law was most animated when recalling his childhood years on a sheep and wheat farm in the NSW Riverina region.

Conscious that death could be approaching, he was keen for us to record snippets of his 77 years, something to leave behind for his grandchildren, a doorway into a way of life that no longer exists. He recounted stories from the days when he rode horses to school and chased rabbits with his brothers, before becoming a shearer and meeting their grandmother at a country dance when they were teenagers.

US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s record of making debunked claims about vaccines was well documented before he was appointed to the position.

Although I already knew about the heartbreaking tragedy that scarred his early years, I couldn’t help but ask again about the woman who disappeared before he could walk, the mother he never knew. He could sketch only the barest of outlines, could not colour in the details to bring to life the woman who brought him into this world.

Just 10 months after he was born in 1948, his mother succumbed to polio at the age of 33, leaving behind four young sons. Eight years later, Australia began rolling out polio vaccinations, and was declared free of the disease in 2000.

Eradicating polio has been a great medical success story of modern times, with the disease now only considered endemic in two countries – Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A couple of weeks after my father-in-law passed away, we flew back to New York in time for the start of the new school year – and back into an alternate reality where facts like the life-saving power of vaccinations are increasingly on the chopping block.

All the usual back-to-school jobs were waiting for us – digging out lunchboxes and uniforms from the back of the cupboards, signing up for after-school sports, emailing the kids’ immunisation records to their school.

But this last job on the list is something parents in Florida would no longer be required to do under a new plan announced last week by the state’s health authorities.

My kids’ first day back in the classroom coincided with Florida’s surgeon-general declaring that his state planned to “end all vaccine mandates”, meaning children would no longer be required to receive vaccines which prevent diseases like measles, mumps, chickenpox and polio before attending school.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Joseph Ladapo said at a press conference.

Florida Surgeon-General Joseph Ladapo said mandatory vaccinations were akin to slavery.

Ladapo provided few clues to decipher the link between vaccines and slavery before continuing: “Who am I, as a government or anyone else, 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? Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God.”

The policy change had anti-vaxxers applauding and many doctors despairing. Florida’s health department later told Associated Press that the plan would lift mandates on school vaccines for hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib influenza and pneumococcal diseases such as meningitis, and would likely take effect in about 90
days. Removing vaccine mandates for other diseases like polio and measles would still require approval by the state’s legislature.

The American Medical Association said ending all vaccine mandates “would undermine decades of public health progress and place children and communities at increased risk for diseases such as measles, mumps, polio, and chickenpox resulting in serious illness, disability, and even death.”

“While there is still time, we urge Florida to reconsider this change to help prevent a rise of infectious disease outbreaks that put health and lives at risk,” the association’s Sandra Adamson Fryhofer said in a statement.

Even before the announcement in Florida, doctors across the US were sounding the alarm about falling vaccination rates, vaccine misinformation and scepticism.

They’re afraid that they will see children die from diseases they never expected to confront in their working lives, and that, as paediatrician Perri Klass wrote in the New York Times, “part of the horror will be knowing that these were preventable diseases”.

At a national level, the man charged with making America healthy again has done little to assuage these concerns. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose record of making debunked claims about vaccines was well documented before he was appointed to the position, came under fire last week for his vaccine policies.

During a combative senate hearing, he was accused of failing to uphold an earlier promise to protect access to vaccines, and grilled over his decision to fire the leader of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

You don’t need a crystal ball to see what’s likely to happen if vaccine mandates are thrown out; nor do you need to wind back the clock to the days before vaccines were developed. Tragedies are unfolding in real time.

In Texas, two unvaccinated children died earlier this year in a measles outbreak that saw more than 700 cases reported.

Time and again, in country after country, science has proven that vaccines save lives – at least 154 million in the past 50 years, mostly children – according to the World Health Organisation.

It seems unthinkable that authorities anywhere could disregard vast piles of medical research to play Russian roulette with people’s lives. And yet, in the US in 2025, this is where we stand.

Liz Gooch is an Australian journalist living and working in the US.