State-mandated vaccinations are on their way out on Florida.
Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo made the announcement Wednesday, according to NBC.
“All of them. All of them,” Ladapo said to applause during a news conference. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
The Florida Department of Health will work with Gov. Ron DeSantis to achieve that goal, he said, denouncing vaccine mandates as “wrong” and “immoral.”
“Who am I as a government or anyone else? Who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body?” Lapado said. “Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [their] body? I don’t have that right.”
Students in Florida schools currently must have a number of vaccinations.
Lapado made it clear that vaccinations are not banned, only the compulsion.
“You want to put whatever different vaccines in your body? God bless you. I hope you make an informed decision,” Ladapo said. “You don’t want to put whatever vaccines in your body? God bless you. I hope you make an informed decision. That’s how it should be.”
Is Florida the freest state in the country?
Ladapo said that the state Department of Health can remove “half of dozen” vaccine mandates and that elected officials will need to “get rid of the rest,” according to The Hill.
The medical establishment pushed back.
“We are concerned that today’s announcement by Gov. DeSantis will put children in Florida public schools at higher risk for getting sick and have ripple effects across their community,” said Dr. Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, according to NBC.
“This is a public health disaster in the making for the Sunshine State,” Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani said, according to the Associated Press.
Florida has become the national model for medical freedom. Today we established the Florida Make America Healthy Again Commission to recommend state-level integrations of MAHA principles and expanded protections for parental choice regarding childhood vaccines.
Chaired by First… pic.twitter.com/9daT0SuYM8
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) September 3, 2025
However, Florida drew support from Dr. Mehmet Oz, currently the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“I would definitely not have mandates for vaccinations,” he said, according to The Hill.
“This is a decision that a physician and a patient should be making together,” he said. “The parents love their kids more than anybody else could love that kid, so why not let the parents play an active role in this?”
Oz said, doctors “shouldn’t feel pressure from the government to decide what to do with the vaccination schedule.”
Doctors, he said, “should do what’s the best interest of the person in front of them, let’s say it’s a child, and what those parents desire. That’s how the system’s supposed to run.”
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