Florida's Department of Health announced this week that children can now attend public school without immunizations against chickenpox, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type B and pneumococcal disease, and expanded the religious exemptions available for the vaccines that remain mandatory. [1] State law still requires students to be vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella, polio, diphtheria and tetanus to attend Florida's public K-12 schools. [1] The rule, filed under Florida's regulatory notice process, now faces 21 days of public comment before final approval. [1]
The change is the first concrete regulatory step in a campaign Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced nearly a year ago, when he told a September 2025 news conference that he wanted Florida to become the first state to eliminate all public school vaccine mandates. "Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery," Ladapo said of vaccine requirements at the time. [1] That effort stalled for most of the past year before Ladapo approved this week's narrower rule — a partial version of the original goal that still leaves six vaccines mandatory.
What makes this rollback harder to read as simple alignment with the Trump administration's broader vaccine posture is that Trump himself broke publicly with Ladapo when the campaign was first announced. President Trump said at the time that some vaccines should remain required, warning that eliminating mandates entirely would mean "too many people will get sick." [1] Nearly a year later, with measles cases climbing nationally to their worst level since 1991 — a trend this paper covered Wednesday through Pennsylvania's first measles deaths in 35 years — Florida is moving in the opposite direction from the position the president staked out on the same issue.
Florida's own Catholic institutions are drawing a similarly awkward contrast with the state's exemption expansion. Catholic bishops in Florida have told the state attorney general there is no theological basis for religious vaccine exemptions, and the state's Catholic schools do not accept religious exemptions for vaccines at all. [1] That dispute runs in the opposite direction from the state health department's own move this week: while Tallahassee is widening the religious-exemption pathway other schools rely on, the state's Catholic school system is affirmatively rejecting the premise that faith provides grounds to skip vaccination. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier separately suggested in July that church schools' refusal to accept religious exemptions might disqualify them from state scholarships and vouchers, adding a funding dimension to a disagreement that was already about doctrine. [1]
What this week's rule leaves unresolved is Ladapo's stated next goal: eliminating the remaining six mandatory vaccines, including MMR, in the middle of the country's worst measles year in three decades. No timeline for that further step has been made public. [1] What this week's rule does confirm is that Florida is moving toward Ladapo's stated destination in stages, against the president's own stated position, and against the explicit objection of one of the state's largest religious school networks.
-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago