All states, along with Washington, DC, require children to get certain vaccinations before they can attend school or daycare. These mandates date back decades and are considered by many public health experts to be a critical defense against infectious diseases.
Since the summer of 2025, Florida leaders have aimed to make the state the first to lift some of those vaccine mandates. Anti-vaccine rhetoric has often been positioned as a push for “medical freedom.” Related efforts to overhaul laws and regulations rumbled through the state health department and legislature for months.
But by late April the fighting seemed to have stalled.
In the first minutes of a special session on April 28, Republican Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez refused to bring the vaccine issue up for debate.
“There is some concern here, on my behalf, about children being in school without the measles, mumps, polio and chickenpox vaccines, which have been around for decades,” Perez told reporters afterward.
At least for now, the effort to end childhood vaccination mandates has failed in Florida, and that outcome could offer insight into the possibilities of such efforts in other states. An Associated Press analysis found that at least 350 anti-vaccine bills were introduced in state legislatures last year. Many focused on relaxing vaccine requirements in schools.
Ladapo: The mandates are a corporal 'slavery'
Last September, Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo set the stage for the anti-vaccine campaign. They held a news conference at a private Christian school east of Tampa, where Ladapo said the state would work to end all vaccine mandates under Florida law.
“Every single one of them is wrong and exudes disdain and slavery,” he said.
“Who am I, as a government or anyone else,” Ladapo said, “or who am I as a man who is here now to tell you what to put in your body?”
Political analysts say the prospects for efforts to reduce vaccine mandates are closely tied to the political prospects of Republicans trying to maintain their majorities at the state and federal levels. DeSantis is term-limited and his governorship ends in January. And the congressional midterm elections are in November.
“Republicans are a little leery,” said Aubrey Jewett, an associate professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. “They know we're in an election cycle. They know the political history. And it's pretty clear that the president's party tends to lose seats in the midterm elections.”
Although hundreds of anti-vaccine bills have been introduced in state legislatures, loud rhetoric and flashy headlines do not guarantee their passage, said Kelly Whitener, an associate professor of health policy at Georgetown University.
In many states, including Florida, “there is a disconnect between what we hear a lot from a potentially vocal minority about how they feel about vaccines compared to what the majority of people are actually doing,” Whitener said.
“Most people,” he said, “still support the idea of near-universal vaccination and still understand the importance of vaccinating children to protect people who cannot be vaccinated.”
A national poll conducted last year by KFF and The Washington Post showed that 81% of parents supported school vaccination requirements.
“They support these vaccines,” said Jen Kates, senior vice president of KFF, a nonprofit health information organization that includes KFF Health News. “They support protecting their children through these mandates. And that includes Florida parents.”
Undo mandates by law and regulation
To undo some of the vaccination mandates, the Florida legislature would have to pass new bills. Others could be changed through a rulemaking process at the state Department of Health, including those for chickenpox, hepatitis B, pneumococcus conjugate and Haemophilus influenzae type B.
At a Dec. 12 forum in Panama City hosted by the health department, public comment went on for hours, with those who wanted to keep the mandates slightly outnumbered those who opposed them.
“This is about freedom,” said one speaker, Larry Downs Jr. “The default setting should be freedom, not these corporate injections of chemical vaccines.”
Marion Fesmire, a school teacher from Florida, has worked abroad. He defended vaccine requirements in part because of the suffering he has seen.
“I've seen kids with polio. I've seen kids who are blind. I've seen kids die before they were 10 years old. It's heartbreaking,” Fesmire said.
Since then, the health department has not held any more public forums on vaccines.
The department also has not submitted the paperwork needed to change vaccination rules, including a statement of regulatory costs. In that, the department must estimate whether changing the rules could affect personal income, the number of visitors to the state or the size of Florida's workforce.
In an April 13 email, the health department said it is “currently in the rulemaking process” and that any updates would be posted to the Florida Administrative Register.
Pushing for a new exemption
During the winter legislative session, a vaccine-related bill, SB 1756, did not include removing mandates but did include a new type of exemption. In addition to a religious or medical exemption, a parent could exempt a child for reasons of personal conscience. This type of exemption is available in 17 states.
Democrats, the minority in the Florida Legislature, spoke out against it.
“It is very easy these days to opt out of school vaccines for religious reasons,” said state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D), while speaking from the chamber. “Why is this bill necessary? Given that context, is your bill simply about giving people more options to ignore school vaccines, or is it intended to solve a public health problem?”
Some Republicans also opposed the bill. State Senator Gayle Harrell (R) mentioned the measles outbreak. Florida is the state with the fourth highest number of measles cases this year, with 155 as of June 6.
“I truly believe this is a dangerous bill and I cannot vote for it,” Harrell said.
The bill also included a permanent ban on mandates for any mRNA-based vaccines and would have allowed the sale of ivermectin without a prescription. That antiparasitic drug gained popularity as an alternative treatment for Covid, although the Food and Drug Administration determined that available clinical trial data does not demonstrate efficacy against Covid in humans.
Former Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees condemned the ivermectin proposal, calling it “the equivalent of walking into a pharmacy and ordering amoxicillin for a self-diagnosed infection.”
Ultimately, the “medical freedom” measure died when the House version of the bill failed to make it out of committee.
However, people on both sides say the fight in Florida is far from over, especially given the lingering distrust in the medical establishment after the Covid pandemic.
“There are now many more people who are skeptical about the wisdom of public health policies and laws,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, an anti-vaccine activist who has been working to end the mandates since the early 1980s.
“I don't think that's going away,” he said. “I think it's going to grow.”
This article comes from a partnership that includes WUSF, NPR and KFF Health News.
