On Wednesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced their plan to eradicate all of the state’s vaccine mandates. DeSantis also unveiled a state-level Make America Healthy Again commission, reportedly committed to bolstering parental rights and promoting nutritious food. The event meticulously framed anti-vaccine rhetoric as a libertarian choice, not an anti-science one — but the potential for an outbreak of dangerous, preventable diseases would undoubtedly bring catastrophic harm to children and school systems in Florida.
For children born between 1994-2023, routine childhood vaccinations in the United States will have been responsible for preventing around 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations and over a million deaths, leading to $540 billion in direct savings and $2.7 trillion in societal savings, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the numbers are technically speculative, they’re unambiguous proof that childhood vaccinations lead to much lower infection levels in and out of the classroom, allowing children to attend school and grow up unimpeded by debilitating diseases.
Nevertheless, the champions of this new anti-vaccine initiative tout it as a step forward in individual rights — with Ladapo likening vaccine mandates to a form of slavery. Keep in mind that this is the same individual who, on appointment to his position, said that “Florida will completely reject fear as a way of making policies in public health.”
The MAHA commission will be chaired by Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins and the governor’s wife, Casey DeSantis — a former TV reporter under investigation for misappropriating $10 million in charity funds to help fund a political committee run by Governor DeSantis’ chief of staff at the time. They’re joined on the board by antivax medical professional Ladapo, who was formally rebuked by the CDC due to his comments on the overblown nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and support of alternative coronavirus treatments like Ivermectin and Hydroxichloroquin — both proven to be at best ineffective and at worst, flat out dangerous to COVID-19 patients. In case that’s not enough, Ladapo’s also notable for spreading an anonymous and highly flawed pseudoscientific research paper advising young men aged 18 to 39 not be vaccinated for COVID-19 based on the purported potential for cardiac failure.
Oncologist David Gorski decried Ladapo’s unethical spread of misinformation as “the first time that we’ve seen a state government weaponize bad science to spread anti-vaccine disinformation as official policy, a dangerous new escalation in anti-vaccine propaganda.” A former Ladapo supervisor also refused to recommend him to lead Florida’s health department, stating 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.”
All this is to say that the people meant to lead this new era of public health for Florida have no credible, research-backed leg to stand on that justifies their stewardship. This is especially dangerous, as the act of eliminating these vaccine mandates is only a couple moves away thanks to the state’s lack of checks against vaccine deregulation. Some vaccine mandates, like for chickenpox and hepatitis, were issued by the state Department of Health — meaning Ladapo has the capability to remove them fairly easily. The rest would require larger legislative changes, but given the Trump-idolizing, Republican-controlled legislature, this too is within easy grasp.
The decision to repeal such ubiquitous mandates like the polio vaccine reveals just how far removed our society is from the dangers of these preventable diseases. We are more worried about fabricated risks of cognitive conditions than the possibility of paralysis or death. Even if vaccines were miraculously proved to have cognitive side effects or other unforeseen health consequences, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t prefer that outcome to their child being paralyzed by polio.
What adds an insidious and manipulative layer is the choice to couch this anti-vaccine move in religious talk, like when Ladapo said he or the government has no right to mandate what goes in a person’s body because “your body is a gift from God.” Preying on the religious beliefs of ordinary citizens to push an anti-science agenda isn’t just unscrupulous and dangerous — it’s downright sacrilegious. This is on top of the Republican Party’s inherent hypocrisy in the bodily autonomy debate: being the ones to say that the government has no right to tell you to get vaccines, while still statutorily mandating that women can’t terminate a non-sentient fetus growing in their own bodies.
DeSantis’ move against vaccines comes as part of the Trump administration’s broader push to supplant medical expertise with pseudoscientific rejection of vaccination. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired every expert from the CDC’s vaccination panel, and framed scientific expertise as the purview of elitist “ivory towers science.” Framing medical professionals as out-of-touch, malevolent elites further erodes trust in credible health experts, and will only lead to more children contracting avoidable diseases.
In the face of this new level of medical freedom, it’s imperative that more people choose for themselves and their children to be vaccinated. The freedom to choose whether you receive lifesaving vaccinations or succumb to infectious disease pales in comparison to the freedom from these diseases that vaccines allow. Otherwise, we risk an unprecedented rise in potentially fatal and completely preventable diseases among the children of the United States. In a way, DeSantis and his anti-vaccine enclave are on the forefront of medical innovation — except their only innovation is publicly using unscrupulous, debunked pseudoscientific junk to stoke an anti-vaccination panic and systematically endanger the lives of every child in Florida.
WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Noah Zaldivar at [email protected].
