Florida’s top health official said last week that the state will start dismantling school vaccine mandates, something no other state has done in modern U.S. history. On Sunday, in a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo confirmed that his department did no data analysis or projections on how the change could affect outbreaks of diseases like measles, polio or whooping cough.
When Tapper pressed him, Ladapo said he didn’t think modeling was needed. “Ultimately, this is an issue very clearly of parents’ rights,” he said. “So do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what goes into their [child’s body]? I don’t need to do an analysis on that.”
The rollback, announced on Sept. 3, starts with rule changes that drop vaccine requirements for hepatitis B and chickenpox. Other vaccines — like those for measles, polio and whooping cough (pertussis) — are written into state law, so lawmakers would have to vote to remove them. Ladapo said he also wants those gone, calling vaccine rules a violation of “bodily autonomy.”
Without projections about the potential impact, hospitals can’t plan for enough staff, beds or children’s ICU care if there are outbreaks of preventable diseases. Between 2008 and 2022, the U.S. lost about 20% of children’s hospital beds, especially in rural areas, which means many families must travel farther to get care. Children’s hospitals aren’t built to handle big waves of sick kids. During the influenza, COVID and RSV surges in 2022 and 2023, hospitals quickly ran out of space.
School vaccine rules have long been the best way to prevent such outbreaks by keeping vaccination rates high and protecting both children and the wider community. In addition to the decision by Ladapo and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to roll back childhood vaccination mandates, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s CDC vaccine advisory panel has questioned the need for COVID and RSV shots to protect infants and kids.
Ladapo singled out whooping cough, arguing that pertussis vaccines are “ineffective at preventing transmission.” Research shows that immunity from pertussis vaccines does wane within a few years, but the shots still provide critical protection against severe illness. A large study of U.S. children found that unvaccinated kids were 13 times more likely to contract pertussis than those who were fully vaccinated. Maternal vaccination during pregnancy reduces infant hospitalizations by more than 90%.
For more than 100 years, U.S. Supreme Court rulings have supported vaccine requirements. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts, in 1905, the Court said a state could mandate smallpox shots during an outbreak. The justices explained that personal freedom has limits when public safety is at risk and that states can enact reasonable health regulations to protect the public. Seventeen years later, in Zucht v. King, the Court ruled that schools could keep out children who weren’t vaccinated, even if there wasn’t an outbreak. This confirmed that school vaccine rules are a legal way for states to keep students safe.
“The courts have been clear and powerful for over a century, ruling consistently that vaccine mandates are a reasonable and lifesaving public health tool,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “For decades, every state has required school-based vaccinations and no court has even questioned it. But all that settled law is unraveling.”
Gostin explained that courts usually let states decide their own health rules. This means states may require vaccines, but they don’t have to. Because of this, Florida may be able to drop vaccine rules without violating old Supreme Court decisions. The bigger risk, he warned, is that today’s courts might change the rules: they could demand that states provide stronger reasons for vaccine mandates or force all states to allow religious exemptions — which several states, like California and New York, don’t currently do. Either step would make vaccine laws weaker around the country.
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