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America’s third most populous state plans to end all vaccine mandates, including for children, with Florida’s top doctor comparing the requirements to slavery and saying they violate the relationship between individuals and their god.
Standing behind a podium that said “the Free State”, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis pledged to protect people’s medical freedom, decrying paediatricians whom he said would not treat children unless they took vaccinations, and querying why a baby would need a hepatitis shot.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, will establish a state version of the Make America Healthy Again Commission.Credit: AP
“We ought to be empowering parents rather than trying to take away the rights of parents,” DeSantis said at a news conference while also announcing the creation of Florida’s Make America Healthy Again commission, a state version of the Trump administration’s initiative.
“There’s been an effort – and I think COVID really exposed this – to say, ’You have to do this’
“If you look back when I was growing up [at] what they would recommend, now they’re recommending, like, way more stuff. My view is unless there’s a really clear reason to put something in [your body], then I wouldn’t do it.”
Florida’s Surgeon-General Joseph Ladapo said the state would become the first in the US to remove all vaccine mandates, including for minors.
Florida Surgeon-General Joseph Ladapo said mandatory vaccinations were akin to slavery.Credit: AP
Florida has for decades required vaccines for children attending school, the Miami Herald reported, including measles, polio, chickenpox and hepatitis B – though exemptions were already available on religious grounds.
“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,” Ladapo said to sustained cheers and applause at a school in Valrico.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. 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. I don’t have that right. Government does not have that right.”
A child receives a COVID-19 vaccine in Miami, Florida, in 2021.Credit: Bloomberg
Vaccine scepticism and medical freedom have been particularly potent in Florida since DeSantis positioned the south-eastern state as a bulwark against COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates, which also spurred Americans to move to Florida to escape restrictions elsewhere.
Ladapo said on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) that by standing up to the pandemic “tyranny and oppression”, DeSantis had “single-handedly saved the country and, frankly, maybe the world” from even more restrictive policies.
He said the Florida Department of Health would start by eliminating its own rules compelling a handful of vaccinations – “those are gonna be gone” – and DeSantis would work with lawmakers to remove the rest.
“We need to end it, it’s the right thing to do, and it will be wonderful for Florida to be the first state to do it,” Ladapo said.
US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jnr’s controversial views on vaccines are being openly disputed by experts.Credit: AP
Florida’s stance comes at a chaotic time for vaccination policy federally after the US sacked the leader of the nation’s top public health agency just weeks into her tenure, prompting other senior leaders quit.
The ousting of Susan Monarez as director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention followed a confrontation she reportedly had with US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr in which she pushed back against his stance on vaccines.
Hours later, the centre’s chief science and medical officer resigned, as did the head of the National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases, Demetre Daskalakis.
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“I only see harm coming,” he later told ABC News America. “I may be wrong, but based on what I’m seeing ... they’re really moving in an ideological direction where they want to see the undoing of vaccination.”
This week, nine former directors or deputy directors of the CDC authored an opinion piece for The New York Times in which they warned that Kennedy’s actions – including the sacking of Monarez – were “unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced”.
Just as potent on the other side of the debate is the contention that health agencies were politicised during the COVID-19 pandemic and embraced the vaccine mandates and school closures preferred by leaders of Democratic states.
“A lot of people lost trust in science because what happened during the pandemic was so terrible for so many people,” National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya, a Donald Trump appointee, told Fox News.
“Schools closed, people were forced to wear masks when it didn’t seem to make any difference, and then of course the vaccines didn’t stop you from getting and spreading COVID.”
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