SANFORD, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES – 2024/04/08: Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo speaks at a press conference in Sanford, Florida (Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced on Wednesday that he plans to have the state eliminate all vaccine mandates.
This decisiion is shocking for a number of reasons and feels like he is opening Pandora’s box. Over my 40 years of infectious disease practice, I stopped seeing sepsis from Haemophilus B or pneumococcus, as more people got vaccinated. I even had two patients with tetanus who hadn’t been immunized. Before meningococcal vaccines were more often recommended, we had a small outbreak of meningococcal meningitis in our town, killing two teens and leaving one deaf.
There has been absolutely nothing worse in my 40 years of infectious disease practice than seeing children die of vaccine-preventable disease. I am still haunted by them.
Those who want to undo public health have no personal experience with these diseases.
Vaccines have been one of the greatest public health successes, saving 154 million lives globally since 1974. This is equivalent to approximately six lives every minute.
This graphic about measles vividly illustrates the dramatic effect vaccines have had. Measles was considered eliminated in the U.S. until this year, with the outbreak that began in Texas causing a resurgence. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr has had a tepid response to that outbreak. While he has acknowledged that vaccines are the most effective in preventing measles, he has promoted the use of cod liver oil, saying he had heard of “almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery” from it. Instead, cod liver oil, which neither prevents nor cures measles, caused some hospitalizations from liver damage.
As of September 2, 2025, there have been a total of 1,431 confirmed* measles cases reported in the U.S., with three deaths, two of them in unvaccinated children.
The public health success of the measles vaccine. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/childhood-vaccination-has-saved-millions-of-lives-but-rising-hesitancy-could-reverse-decades-of-progress/
This material was published by the Center for American Progress.
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The cost of an earlier measles outbreak was $3.14 million, or $47,479 per case. Future outbreaks are likely to be more expensive, as newborns infected with measles virus are more likely to experience serious complications, according to the report. The Center for American Progress notes that vaccination carries large savings. Each dollar spent on routine immunizations of children against infections saves $3 in direct medical care and more than $10 in costs to society such as lost wages due to disability, and parents’ lost wages.
In his announcement, Ladapo likened the state’s vaccine requirements to slavery. He continued, “Who am I, or anyone else, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your CHILD should put in their body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and God?” Then he said that the growing skepticism of vaccines was “reflections of God’s light against the darkness of tyranny and oppression.” One might ask whose G-d wants children to die painfully or be permanently disabled from vaccine-preventable deaths? Or who wants a child to infect a pregnant woman or others who are vulnerable?
This year, we have had 266 children die from influenza, the highest since the 2009 swine flu pandemic. Ten babies died from whooping cough.
Who Is Joseph Ladapo?
While he is the Surgeon General of Florida, Ladapo was trained in cardiovascular diseases. He is not trained in epidemiology or virology. Ladapo has appeared in a video for America’s Frontline Doctors and was a signatory of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which promoted the idea of herd immunity rather than vaccines and isolation. He’s said vaccines have been treated almost like a religion, and that’s just senseless.”
Besides his support of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, Ladapo personally altered a Florida Department of Health Covid vaccine study to exaggerate the risks of cardiac death and discourage mRNA vaccine uptake. He further falsely claimed that mRNA vaccines could contaminate a person’s DNA and called for a halt to using mRNA coronavirus vaccines.
Current Florida Law
Now, Florida law requires immunizations for polio, diphtheria, rubeola, rubella, pertussis, mumps, and tetanus.
The Department of Health also requires vaccinations against Varicella, or chickenpox, Hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b, and Pneumococcal conjugate, or PCV15/20. These are not required by law and are likely to be quickly rescinded.
Parents can get exemptions for religious beliefs—except that the major religions support vaccination. They will expand that to include “personal beliefs.”
The state legislature will need to approve the changes proposed by Ladapo and Gov. Ron DeSantis, so they will encounter a slight delay.
How Will This Affect You?
Some likely scenarios: A parent takes an unvaccinated child with a rash to the pediatrician. All the kids in that office are exposed to measles, and some become quite ill. Some are too young to be vaccinated. They may take the infection home to others. Some kids may appear to recover and then, approximately 1 in 600 develop Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a fatal brain inflammation.
Think you or your child are safe because of “herd immunity?” No! Said Dr. Paul Offit, a leading vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “You were better off being unvaccinated living in a highly vaccinated community, meaning in terms of your chance of getting measles, than being vaccinated and living in a highly unvaccinated community, because in that situation, you’re much more likely to be exposed, and no vaccine is 100% effective.”
Immunocompromised people will likely be homebound, not being safe in shared public spaces if many become unvaccinated.
We might see a comeback of congenital rubella, which occurs when a mother becomes infected with rubella and passes it on to her unborn fetus in the womb. The baby can have problems including heart defects, deafness, cataracts, neurologic problems or autism. The infant can shed infectious virus in secretions and urine for more than a year.
Perspective On The Future
Offit shared his views about the course of these current events as a “rejection of expertise, rejection of science, loss of trust and and people. As RFK Jr says, You don’t need to trust the experts, just trust yourself. But so in the medical freedom movement, it is I’m going to do what I want for myself or my child, independent of how it affects other people. Whereas public health, you actually do have to, at some level, care about other people. You do and because it’s really not your right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection, because there are people who can’t be vaccinated because they depend on you to protect them. And that’s that’s the current tension.”
He notes we’ve always had a social compact to take care of each other and the community, and we saw this with World War II, the 9/11 attacks, and the polio epidemic in the 1950s. “With polio, we saw ourselves as that, the victim of a shared tragedy. But something has happened where we just don’t see ourselves as part of a whole,” he observed.
Ladapo has also said he wants to eliminate quarantines. Offit responded that Ladapo’s going to take away the two major arrows we have in our quiver. “One is quarantine, and two is vaccination.”
Looking at the future, Offit notes that we’ve had three major coronavirus pandemics in the past 20 years. Presumably, there will be another one, and he thinks “we are far less prepared now for the next pandemic, given what just happened.”
Ironically, today, the The Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network issued an alert about “Eight deaths including three in healthcare workers in Bulape, DRC; Ebola virus disease or other viral hemorrhagic fever suspected.”
Without vaccine mandates or the authority to quarantine, we have lost our major public health tools.
Others also reacted to Ladapo’s announcement with dismay. Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD, is a retired epidemiologist and co-founder of Defend Public Health. She said, “
Florida Surgeon General Ladapo’s decision to end childhood vaccine requirements for school entry will cause immediate harm to the children, elderly, and immunocompromised in the United States.
Jacobs also noted, “It is likely that other Republican-led states will soon follow suit, in a pathological race to the bottom of vaccine coverage.
It’s not just diseases that will spread from Florida to other states and around the world. The false concept that vaccination coverage should be optional will also spread, taking out herd immunity like dominoes.”
Teri Mills, MS, RN Emeritus, Nurses for America, echoed Jacobs’ concerns that “Soon these serious and preventable diseases will be crisscrossing the country.
There is NO cure for these childhood diseases, but there are many serious life-long consequences that occur with all too often frequency, including brain damage, becoming deaf or blind, damage to the immune system.
Los Angeles, CA-ORIGINAL CAPTION: Iron lungs line up in all-out war on polio at the new Ranchos Los Amigos Respiratory Center after being rushed from the Los Angeles County Hospital in specially-constructed ambulances. So well organized is the movement that 35 persons take part in the removal of each patient. Photograph ca. 1950.
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Mills also raised the question of who will care for the children. “We aren’t living in the 1950’s which was the last decade before most safe and effective vaccines were available. Today’s household most likely includes 2 working parents. This means even if a child has a minor sequale of events, either the mom or the dad will need to be home as a caregiver, because schools and day care facilities prohibit attendance.”
We also don’t have the hospital beds, or nurses, physicians, lab and radiology techs and supplies to care for people in an outbreak or with long-term disability like from polio.
After reading all this, please ask yourself why anyone would want to go back to the pre-vaccine days and destroy public health?
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Original source: US