Florida Moves to End Vaccine Mandates: Gov. DeSantis and Dr. Ladapo Champion Informed Consent

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced that the state will work to end all vaccine mandates and will form a state-level Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission. Dr. Ladapo explained that the DeSantis administration, along with himself, will remove the “handful” or “maybe half a dozen” vaccines that are mandated in schools by administrative rule. The rest of the vaccine mandates will require legislative effort, which will be a part of the broad “medical freedom package” that will be introduced.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Dr. Ladapo said. “Who am I as a government or anyone else – or who am I as a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body?  I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God. Government does not have that right. They want you to believe they have that right, and unfortunately, they’ve been successful. Pretty much every state has them. It’s wrong. It’s immoral. They do not have the right to tell you what you put in your body.”

Florida will be the first state in the nation to remove all vaccine mandates if the effort is successful. In addition, the DeSantis administration will seek to provide evidence-based data regarding the safety, efficacy, and potential harms of pharmaceutical interventions, enabling patients to make informed decisions about their medical choices.

“I’m pleased to announce the establishment of the Florida MAHA Commission as a working group which will recommend state level integration of these Make America Healthy principles,” Governor Desantis said. “And those principles are individual medical freedom, informed consent, parent rights and also market innovation.”

Casey DeSantis, the First Lady of Florida, will chair the new MAHA Commission. “We also look forward to empowering Floridians to make the best-informed decisions as it pertains to vaccines and pharmaceuticals,” First Lady Desantis said. “And understanding what is the upside to potentially taking a drug or a vaccine, but also what do the studies and the evidence show? And be forthright and transparent about what the studies may be lacking or the fact that there might not even be a study at all.”

Governor DeSantis praised Dr. Ladapo for his courage to speak out against issues even when he wouldn’t receive a “warm embrace” from others in his profession. Dr. Ladapo acknowledged the governor for his leadership in standing up against COVID-19 vaccine mandates during the pandemic.

“What was exceptional is how Governor DeSantis basically single-handedly saved the country. And frankly, maybe the world by serving as a single example of something that was completely oppositional to the hegemony that the rest of the world was either succumbing to or bowing down to or being threatened into bowing down to, into subduing to,” Dr. Ladapo said. “We came so close. He said that if it weren’t for what Florida did, we may have had vaccine mandates throughout the entire nation. And it’s absolutely true.

On the same day, the three governors for the West Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California announced the creation of the West Coast Health Alliance as a counter to the public health policy issued by the Trump administration under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“President Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists — and his blatant politicization of the agency — is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said. “The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences. California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk.”

The HighWire has reported about the shake-up at the federal health agencies under Secretary Kennedy, including the removal of all 17 ACIP members. Secretary Kennedy explained that the reasoning was to root out conflicts of interest within the vaccine advisory committee. The announcement from the West Coast governors does not mention these conflicts of interest, but alleges that the decisions within the health agencies during the Trump administration are political in nature.

“Our three states share a commitment to ensuring that public health recommendations are guided by safety, efficacy, transparency, access, and trust,” the press release said. “The Alliance will help safeguard scientific expertise by ensuring that public health policies in California, Oregon, and Washington are informed by trusted scientists, clinicians, and other public health leaders. Through this partnership, the three states will start coordinating health guidelines by aligning immunization recommendations informed by respected national medical organizations. This will allow residents to receive consistent, science-based recommendations they can rely on — regardless of shifting federal actions.”

Secretary Kennedy and others in the administration have also called out national medical organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) for conflicts of interest with pharma companies and vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, and Sanofi.

Lead attorney for The Informed Consent Action Network, Aaron Siri, Esq., reacted to the news on X by stating, “For anyone freaking out about Florida’s announcement today to end all vaccine mandates, you can still get as many vaccines as you want! All Florida is doing is giving everyone the freedom and liberty to make their own medical decisions—it is called informed consent. Inform, try to persuade, and then let the person decide whether to consent—if they don’t, that is called informed consent, and coercing over that decision is immoral, tyrannical, and illiberal.”

Florida was also the second state to ban community water fluoridation earlier this year, which is one of the many goals of the MAHA agenda led by US HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.