Florida’s Governor Plans to End All Childhood Vaccine Mandates

With the approval of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the state’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, MD, PhD, announced on Sept. 3, 2025 that all mandates for childhood vaccines should end in the sunshine state.¹ The call for elimination of vaccine mandates in Florida came just a week after the charitable National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) published a commentary by NVIC co-founder and president Barbara Loe Fisher on Aug. 27, explaining why vaccine exemptions are a “masquerade” and calling for a repeal of all state vaccine mandates.

The top health official in Florida said he will move forward with a plan to remove legal requirements for children to receive the diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP), polio, measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), chicken pox, Hepatitis B, haemophiles influenza type b (Hib), hepatitis B, varicella zoster (chickenpox), and pneumococcal conjugate (PCV15/20) vaccines to attend school.^{2 3 4}

Speaking about vaccine mandates, Dr. Ladapo said:

Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. Who am I as a government or anyone else, or 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? I don’t have that right.⁵

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Florida Attorney Jeff Childers applauded the extraordinary departure from the decades-long vaccine mandate, stating:

This is about a kind of fundamental human liberty. The sanctity of your body, or whether you can be considered property when the community requires it, that’s that kind of polarizing issue like slavery, that there is no in between. Either you’re the kind of person that thinks that all of us should be prepared to take one for the team if the community needs it, or you’re the kind of person that thinks that, no, you can never make somebody do something like that against their will.⁶

NVIC Leads Historic Public Call for Repeal of Vaccine Mandates

“No forced vaccination, Not in America” has been the mantra of Barbara Loe Fisher, the mother of a DPT vaccine injured son who co-founded the vaccine safety and informed consent movement in America in 1982 and has been a public proponent of informed consent rights for over three decades.⁷ In her Aug. 27 video commentary anchored with more than 150 references—“Repeal Mandatory Vaccination Laws. There Are No Exemptions to Informed Consent”—she reviewed the legal history of mandatory vaccination laws, which is rooted in the political ideology of utilitarianism. She explains why very restrictive medical vaccine exemptions “cruelly ignore genetic biodiversity, violate the ethical principle of informed consent, and deny right to life,” while government officials in many states judge the sincerity of a person’s religious beliefs or require affiliation with a church or religion with a tenet opposing vaccination to qualify for a religious exemption.⁸

“Individual human life is sacred, the natural right to life is unalienable, and there are no exemptions to the human right to informed consent to medical risk taking,” Fisher said. “It is time to allow biological products like vaccines to be subject to the law of supply and demand and be liable in civil court for harm done, just like any other product sold in the marketplace. It is time to repeal mandatory vaccination laws in every state and codify the ethical principle of informed consent to medical risk taking into U.S. law.”

Certain Vaccine Mandates Could End Within Three Months in Florida

While ending all childhood vaccine mandates requires the approval of state legislatures, Governor DeSantis and Dr. Ladapo can eliminate certain vaccine mandates through rule making authority that was assigned by the Florida state legislature to the Department of Health. The chicken pox, hepatitis B, pneumococcal conjugate and haemophiles influenza type b (Hib) vaccines are currently required by the Department of Health, while over the years lawmakers in the state legislature voted to add diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella and Hib vaccines to the list of childhood vaccines required for school attendance.

Katie Young, a spokesman for the Department of Health, said that state health officials will remove those vaccines adding through rule making from the state’s vaccination requirement list within approximately 80 days. Young has also confirmed that the Department of Health plans to expand vaccine exemptions for personal beliefs in addition to medical and religious belief exemptions.⁹

MAHA Commission to Expand Informed Consent

DeSantis announced that the MAHA Commission, chaired by first lady Casey DeSantis and Lt. Governor Jay Collins, will encourage nutritious food, examine the ethical principle of informed consent in medical decision making, and expand the scope of parental rights in the medical decisions affecting their children. The commission’s work reportedly will lead to a broader medical freedom legislation package that lawmakers will introduced into the state legislature in the next session.¹⁰

Summing up the state’s efforts to support and advance medical freedom over the last few years, DeSantis said:

I think that this is something that has great potential. We’ve already done a lot. I don’t think there’s any state that has done even close to what we’ve done.¹¹

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