(NewsNation) — As Florida moves to become the first in the United States to drop all childhood vaccine requirements, critics have warned of the plan’s potentially deadly public health consequences.
The move would scrap all required vaccine mandates for children, including those required for school attendance, such as polio, diphtheria, rubeola, rubella, pertussis, mumps and tetanus.
The state’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic, on Wednesday compared school vaccine mandates to slavery, calling them “immoral” intrusions on parents’ rights.
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“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God,” he said.
Ladapo said his department will repeal the mandates under his control, and the state Legislature will be behind scrapping the rest. It was not yet clear when the ban would go into effect.
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Critics of Florida’s plan to end all vaccine mandates include the American Medical Association, which warned repealing the mandate would lead to sickness and death.
“This unprecedented rollback would undermine decades of public health progress and place children and communities at increased risk for diseases such as measles, mumps, polio and chickenpox, resulting in serious illness, disability, and even death,” the AMA said in a statement.
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The American Academy of Pediatrics told NewsNation the change would “put children in Florida public schools at higher risk for getting sick, and have ripple effects across their community.”
Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, said Florida is “pandering” to the anti-vaccine movement.
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Amid Florida’s latest move, the Democratic governors of Washington state, California and Oregon have created an alliance aimed at preserving vaccine access.
“Vaccines are among the most powerful tools in modern medicine; they have indisputably saved millions of lives,” Oregon Health Authority director Sejal Hathi said. “But when guidance about their use becomes inconsistent or politicized, it undermines public trust at precisely the moment we need it most.”
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The alliance said its decision to establish vaccine recommendations comes as the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control has become a “political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science” under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy has restructured and downsized the CDC during his tenure, including the dismissal of all 17 members of the agency’s vaccine advisory panel.
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More than 1,000 current and former employees of the Department of Health and Human Services have demanded that Kennedy resign following his ousting of the director of the CDC and other actions they say are “compromising the health of the nation.”
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“Should he decline to resign, we call upon the President and U.S. Congress to appoint a new Secretary of Health and Human Services, one whose qualifications and experience ensure that health policy is informed by independent and unbiased peer-reviewed science,” reads a letter signed by the staff.
The letter builds on an effort from last month, when HHS staff called on Kennedy to do more to protect public health professionals following the Aug. 8 shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
NewsNation’s Anna Kutz and partner The Hill contributed to this report.
