Florida’s surgeon general … announced plans to end all state vaccine mandates, including for children to attend schools, which would make it the first state to completely withdraw from a practice credited with boosting vaccination rates and controlling the spread of infectious diseases.
Speaking at a news conference outside Tampa with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo said that every vaccine mandate “is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery” and called the rollback “the right thing to do.”
U.S. school vaccination laws date to the 1850s and have always drawn controversy about the right of the government to compel people to inoculate themselves for the public good, said James Colgrove, a Columbia University professor of public health who has studied the history of vaccines. But he said debates in legislatures in recent years have focused on establishing or expanding exemptions, not lifting the mandates themselves, he said.
“It’s a very troubling development,” Colgrove said. “It’s probably going to be catastrophic. Anyone who knows anything about public health can see this is a train wreck.”
