Seven months ago, Florida was poised to become the first state in the nation to make vaccines totally optional, after the state’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo decried mandates as “wrong” and dripping “with disdain and slavery.”
The state Department of Health “is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida law. All of them!” he announced to thundering applause at a September 2025 press conference alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis.
But an effort to change rules by the department appears to have stalled. And a watered-down version of an anti-mandate bill appeared in this year's legislative session, which ended in March, but failed to advance in both chambers.
“Maybe they saw this wasn't going to be as politically popular for them to do,” said Simone Chriss, a civil rights attorney with Southern Legal Counsel.
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Chriss attended a public workshop, hosted in December in Panama City by the Florida Department of Health, to discuss the proposed removal of four vaccines from the state’s rules for entry into daycares and schools.
The state health agency can remove requirements for varicella, hepatitis B, pneumococcal conjugate and haemophilus B influenzae. Other vaccines, like those against measles and polio, are written into state law and would have to be changed by the legislature.
Public comment went on for hours, as vaccine skeptics spoke of the right to medical freedom and claimed injury from vaccines.
Major medical groups and pediatricians spoke in favor of routine immunizations, warned of an upsurge in the diseases and deaths vaccines prevent, and the need for 95% of children to get their shots to maintain herd immunity and protect people with compromised immune systems.
At that meeting, when questioned by Chriss, department of health officials admitted they had not studied the regulatory costs of removing mandates, which is required by law and includes the costs of revising or updating all the systems used by schools and pediatricians across the state.
“Another thing they are required by statute to do is to hold workshops open to the public. And it specifically says in various regions of the state or the agency service area,” Chriss added.
Those should take place in areas like Tampa, Orlando, and Miami, with larger populations than Panama City. No further workshops have been scheduled. Chriss said the DOH also hasn’t filed a notice of proposed rulemaking, which is supposed to come within 180 days of the notice to initiate rulemaking.
“Nor have they responded to any of the requests for information about the impact on human lives and health and safety,” Chriss said.
Asked for an update, the Florida Department of Health told WUSF it is “currently in the rulemaking process,” but gave no details.
Soon after Ladapo’s announcement in September, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked if Ladapo had done any analysis of how many cases of illnesses could be projected by removing vaccine mandates.
Ladapo answered: “Absolutely not,” and framed the move as being about what's “right and wrong,” and “an issue of parents’ rights.”
Fast forward a couple of months, and a bill did appear in the Florida Senate. It didn't end vaccine mandates, but added another way to opt out, by claiming the shots go against personal beliefs.
Florida already allows religious or medical exemptions.
Democrats lined up against it.
"It's currently very easy to opt out for religious reasons from school immunizations. Why is this bill necessary?" asked Democratic Senator Carlos Guillermo Smith at a hearing. "Is your bill just about giving people more options to ignore school immunizations? Or is it intended to solve a public health problem?"
Opposition also came from some on the right.
Republican Senator Gayle Harrell brought up the measles outbreak. Florida has seen more than 140 cases so far this year.
"I truly believe that this is a dangerous bill, and I cannot vote for it," Harrell said.
In the end, the Senate passed the bill. But a House version never advanced, and the effort died in the annual legislative session.
"We were disappointed that we did not get a bill that was to eliminate all vaccine mandates here in Florida. Instead, we got a bill that did a few things that we liked," said Maija Hahn, who leads the Florida chapter of Children's Health Defense, a national nonprofit that was founded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
She still holds out hope that something could pop up in a special legislative session on the budget, which starts in April.
"If everything is dead, I can say that this year was a very big disappointment. Very big," Hahn said.
The Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics was involved in lobbying legislators against lifting vaccine mandates.
"There was a lot of lobbying, frankly, on both sides," said vice president of the FCAAP, Jennifer Takagishi.
The Senate debate, while heated at times, “felt very one-sided in that as a legislator, you should be representing the majority of your constituents, and instead, they're siding with a small minority," she added.
ALSO READ: Senate pushes vaccine exemption bill that is likely dead in the House
A variety of polls show broad support for vaccines, on the order of 8 in 10 people, largely across party lines.
"What we're seeing is, especially for certain childhood vaccines, like MMR (measles, mumps and rubella), parents want vaccine mandates for kids in schools,” said Jen Kates, a senior vice president at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy organization in Washington.
“They support these vaccines. They support protecting their kids through these mandates. And that includes Florida parents."
An Associated Press analysis found at least 350 anti-vaccine bills were introduced nationwide last year. Most haven’t passed.
The movement’s most powerful advocates in Florida include DeSantis, whose term as governor ends later this year. Ladapo, who was appointed by DeSantis, could soon follow.
But people on both sides say the fight is far from over, with mistrust of the medical establishment still running high after the COVID-19 pandemic.
"There are many more people now who have skepticism about the wisdom of public health policy and law. And I don't think that that's going to disappear. I think it's going to grow,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center. She has been working to end mandates since 1982.
“We've been seeing this movement in state legislatures toward protecting the informed consent ethic when it comes to vaccination. And how do you do that? With regard to vaccination, you allow people to make a voluntary decision. You either remove the mandate, or at the very least, you secure flexible medical, religious and conscientious belief exemptions in the law,” Fisher said.
Parts of the Senate bill that sparked discord among lawmakers included how it would have required parents who opt in to vaccines, as recommended by their doctors, to get additional “medical information” about the shots. Parents opting out would not be required to get any medical information or counseling.
“If it provided information both ways — we want you to just be educated period, whether you choose to vaccinate or not vaccinate — I would say, okay, maybe there's some validity here," said Chriss. "But to only require that information, seemingly to deter parents who have decided to vaccinate their children from doing so? It feels very disingenuous."
And there’s a lesson there, for people in other states, she said.
"I truly think the only thing that has maybe deterred, or maybe just slowed down this process in Florida is the overwhelming number of people that oppose this sort of anti-science removal of vaccine mandates," Chriss added.
Ladapo did not respond to a request for an interview from WUSF, but he briefly acknowledged the situation at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation in March.
"We have received a lot of pushback, and, you know, push as they might, the positions that we've taken here is absolutely the correct moral position," Ladapo said. "I think it's going to work out in the way that it should."
Ladapo's posts lately on social media have increasingly focused on healthy eating, testing candy and baby formula for toxins, and against pesticide use in agriculture.
