All 50 states have required children to receive certain immunizations before allowing them to attend public schools since 1980. But if Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo get their way, the Sunshine State will be the first in 45 years to abandon vaccine mandates.
Florida Develops Resistance to Vaccine Mandates
DeSantis and Ladapo announced on September 3 the end of the vaccine mandates under their authority, and the potential beginning of the end for all the rest. It was a move praised by anti-vaccine and personal freedom advocates but panned by professional medical societies and many health experts.
“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right,” Dr. Ladapo said at the news conference. “Your body is a gift from God.”
So, has the Sunshine State ended vaccine mandates? Not quite – not yet, at least. According to Florida law, children must receive immunizations for polio, diphtheria, rubeola (measles), rubella (German measles), pertussis (whooping cough), mumps, tetanus, and other “communicable diseases,” as determined by the state Department of Health. So the DTaP (Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis), MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella), and polio vaccine requirements can’t be removed without a new act passed by the state legislature. The health department does plan to end requirements for the four vaccines it currently mandates, including the one for chicken pox.
There’s no timeline quite yet on when state lawmakers will get on board – or, for that matter, even really any solid indication of whether they will get on board. But it’s now up to them to decide whether Florida will develop an immunity to vaccine mandates.
Are They Necessary – Or Even Effective?
Are the vaccines kids must get for school enrollment effective? Will America succumb without them? Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1979 by the World Health Organization. The CDC declared elimination in the US for polio in 1994, measles in 2000, and rubella in 2004. Now, “eradicated” and “eliminated” aren’t necessarily the same thing and might not mean what we’re told they mean.
The CDC celebrated 20 years of measles being “eliminated” in the US in 2020 – but we haven’t had a year yet with zero cases. The CDC defines elimination as “reduction to zero of the incidence of a specified disease in a defined geographical area as a result of deliberate efforts.”
Yet the CDC also reports dozens of cases of measles each year, even before this year’s “resurgence.” In 2000, the year the CDC declared measles eliminated, there were 85 confirmed cases. There were 667 in 2014 and 1,274 in 2019. In the last 25 years, there have been a total of 5,916 confirmed cases of measles in the US. There have only been seven deaths, however, spread amongst 2003, 2015, 2019, and 2025, and the survival rate even in those years was typically better than 99%
There have been no known cases of smallpox anywhere in the world since 1977. That’s real – that’s eradicated. And smallpox was a truly deadly disease. The rarest type of the illness had a mortality rate of nearly 100% and the most common of about 30%. Polio was a crippling childhood illness – quite literally – that, thanks to worldwide vaccination, is down to a mere 67 cases globally (mostly in Africa) in 2025 so far.
Measles, on the other hand, has in modern medical history – even before mandated vaccination – been a remarkably survivable illness. An estimated one or two out of every thousand patients die, and typically due to complications rather than the basic illness itself, making it about as deadly as most strains of influenza – and considerably less so than others. Still, what parent wants their kid sitting next to others in school or on the bus who are contagiously ill with measles? So, necessary? That’s an open question. Effective? Well, that’s a spectrum that runs from absolutely for smallpox to almost entirely for polio, mostly for measles, and not really at all for influenza.
But Are They Safe?
Now what about safe? There aren’t any vaccines that don’t have some record of adverse reaction. Those are tracked by the CDC through the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), and the database’s numbers don’t paint the rosiest picture. Deciding what’s “safe” means weighing the total injuries and deaths against the total inoculated population and the severity of the disease the immunizations guard against.
Looking at measles specifically – an especially timely issue – a VAERS query attempting to find every report of adverse reaction in the quarter century that the illness has allegedly been eliminated in the US returns the following error message: “This request produces 173,103 rows, but 10,000 is the maximum allowed. Simplify this request, or send a series of smaller ones.”
Fair enough – let’s refine that to just “deaths,” “permanent disabilities,” and “life threatening.” That brings the total reports down to just 2,064. Deaths alone come up to 207 “events,” of which 121 were one- and two-year-olds – the age range in which most children receive their first MMR shot.
Who Decides?
So to recap, millions of children have been inoculated against measles (as well as dozens of other things) over the last 25 years, and only a couple thousand have been confirmed as suffering serious reactions, including death or permanent disability, afterward. But only several thousand people have contracted measles over that same span of time, and in comparing death rates, it’s measles killing seven, and the vaccine seemingly killing 207.
So, is the measles vaccine safe, effective, and necessary? Well, the numbers are far from one-sided, and various people will hold different opinions on the matter. Even for immunization in general, it’s a mixed bag. There’s no question that, for some illnesses, comprehensive vaccination campaigns have made a huge difference. But there have been hundreds of thousands of adverse reactions, as well – and a good many illnesses that have not been eradicated, eliminated, or, for that matter, even significantly reduced.
Perhaps that means immunization should be a personal decision. That’s the point Governor DeSantis and Dr. Ladapo made.
