“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.Credit: AP
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.
Loading
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.
