Florida Gets Closer To Being a 'Free State' With Plan To End School Vaccine Mandate

Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo proposed ending the requirement that public school children be vaccinated, calling the mandate "slavery."

It's an extreme, albeit predictable, irony that the years of imperious, novel public health mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic are giving way to a backlash against once-routine, noncontroversial vaccination requirements.

This was evidenced yesterday when Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo said at a press conference with Gov. Ron DeSantis that he would work to end all vaccine mandates in the state, including the default requirement that children be vaccinated in order to attend public schools.

"Who am I as a government or anyone else or…[as] a man standing here right now to tell you what you should put in your body?" said Ladapo, making the extreme libertarian case for what was until a few years ago a seemingly fringe libertarian policy.

Ladapo said he would use what rule-making power he had as surgeon general to eliminate vaccine mandates. He said he'd also work with lawmakers to amend the state law that currently requires school children to be vaccinated.

In response to reporters' questions at that press conference, DeSantis said he'd also push lawmakers to adopt a "medical freedom" package that would extend antidiscrimination protections to the unvaccinated.

"I think you should not ever be discriminated against regardless of these choices," said the governor.

Despite the radical language Ladapo used (he referred to vaccine mandates as "slavery") and some of the panicked reactions from critics, the surgeon general's proposed policy is somewhat more modest than meets the eye.

Should lawmakers pass Ladapo's proposed policy, Florida would in fact be the first state to have no vaccine mandate for school children.

But the Sunshine State does already allow for religious exemptions to vaccine requirements, as do another 28 states according to the National Conference of State Legislature's policy tracker. 

Another 16 states allow public school children to opt out of vaccine mandates for "personal" or "philosophical" reasons as well. Both predominantly conservative and predominately liberal states allow for these personal exemptions—a reminder that the politics around vaccines was not as neatly polarized and partisan as it is today.

All states allow school children to claim a medical exemption to vaccine requirements.

In other words, unvaccinated school children in Florida and across much of the country can and do attend public schools today. The innovation of Ladapo's proposed policy is that unvaccinated children with a secular reason for not being immunized can attend school and do so without filling out any additional paperwork.

It's worth noting too that there are plenty of other environments where children interact, from the park to karate class to Sunday school, that uncontroversially don't mandate vaccines.

It's a more marginal change. But it's a marginal change in the direction of liberty nonetheless.

There are few choices more personal, and few freedoms more fundamental, than what people decide to put in their bodies. The same is true of parents making the same decisions for their children.

To force vaccinations on people is clearly a major intrusion on that fundamental freedom. Conditioning access to universal public services like education on immunization is only marginally less coercive.

Some libertarians will argue that forced vaccination is different than other medical mandates because it prevents the spread of disease. Vaccine mandates are therefore just another ban on harming others, similar to laws against assault. Read Reason's Ron Bailey make that case for our debate issue on vaccine mandates from 2014.

I instead agree with Bailey's debate opponent in that issue, physician Jeff Singer, who argued that the risks (however minimal) of vaccination and the uncertainty about whether an unvaccinated person will spread disease from one person to another means that vaccine mandates can't probably be considered a ban on aggression. Rather, the mandates are the aggression.

What will be the practical effects of Florida's ending of vaccine mandates?

Certainly, the presumption is that if you make something easier to do, more people will do it. Should Florida schools make vaccination voluntary and make it paperwork-free to decline them, you can assume that on the margins, fewer parents will get their children vaccinated.

Indeed, this has been the trend during and after the pandemic, regardless of any policy change by states on vaccine mandates. The Kaiser Family Foundation notes that claimed exemptions from school vaccine mandates are on the rise and rates of vaccination (while still very high) are falling in the aftermath of the pandemic.

This is hardly a positive development, given the immense benefit and minimal risk of routine childhood vaccines.

But it is, as mentioned, a direct, obvious backlash to the massive pandemic-era government overreach.

During COVID, the government vastly expanded the freedoms it was willing to restrict in the name of public health, while simultaneously lowering the standards of evidence it used to justify those restrictions. Debate about appropriate public health measures was stifled, condemned, and in some cases, literally censored.

All of this did great damage to the public's trust in public health generally. With that trust eroded, fewer people are willing to tolerate policies (like required vaccination for school children) that were once broadly accepted.

But public health officials aren't going to rebuild that lost trust by clinging to the mandates that still exist. Regaining it will require supporting people's right to make decisions for themselves and their children about vaccination.

The less vaccine proponents put themselves in a position of forcing people to get vaccinated, the more people might trust their attempts to voluntarily persuade them it's a good idea to do so.

The fewer mandates there are, the less room anti-vaccine activists have to claim that they are silenced freedom fighters. Their crankery will have to stand on its own merit.

Lapado and DeSantis are both obviously imperfect messengers for the cause of making free and informed decisions about what to put in one's body.

Lapado has pushed a lot of exceedingly dubious claims about the COVID vaccine. At his press conference, he referred to it as "poison." While there's reasonable debate to be had about the benefits and risks of the COVID vaccine given one's age and health status, calling the shot poison is false, inflammatory, and just plain fearmongering.

Meanwhile, DeSantis' support for your bodily autonomy naturally doesn't extend to your decision to eat lab-grown meat or smoke marijuana. He said at yesterday's press conference that he wants to extend "antidiscrimination" policies that require businesses to transact with the unvaccinated. That violates freedom of association.

Nevertheless, you go to war with the army you have. Should the two succeed in ending vaccine requirements for public school children, the Sunshine State would actually be a little closer to earning the title of the "free state of Florida."