Florida’s Vaccine Rollback Would Put Children and Communities at Risk

In a reckless move that endangers public health, Florida’s Surgeon General announced Wednesday that the state will work to eliminate vaccine requirements for schools and businesses. This shift undermines decades of scientific consensus and poses real risks to children, vulnerable communities and public safety nationwide.

Florida’s effort to roll back vaccine requirements marks a pivotal moment. If successful, the state’s leaders will be ignoring the hard-earned lessons of past epidemics and erasing the memories of children who suffered from measles, polio and other once-common diseases we now know how to prevent. Before these routine vaccinations were available, numerous diseases stalked our nation’s children and haunted their parents’ nightmares. Forgetting these lessons doesn’t make us freer; it makes us more vulnerable.

By stepping back from well-established science, Florida risks weakening the protections that have long defended our communities—and the freedoms we all value. Ensuring that children receive routine childhood immunizations before entering school isn’t just sound public health policy—it’s a reflection of core American values: responsibility, community, and a shared duty to protect one another. Just as the government regulates drugs, bans smoking in indoor public spaces and sets speed limits to keep people safe, vaccination is a long-standing, common-sense safeguard to protect children and the communities they live in.

Just a generation ago, measles sickened up to 4 million Americans a year, hospitalized tens of thousands and killed hundreds—including children. Thanks to vaccines and strong public health policies, measles was declared virtually eliminated in the U.S. by 2000. But that progress is now unraveling. In 2025 alone, the country has already seen 35 measles outbreaks, 1,431 confirmed cases and three preventable deaths—fueled by a surge in anti-vaccine misinformation and growing resistance to childhood immunization that has been safe, effective and life-saving for decades.

A Life-Threatening Trend

The push to dismantle these protections hasn’t happened overnight. It has been a slow, deliberate erosion: first by expanding medical exemptions beyond what science supports, then by easing religious exemptions and now by proposing to eliminate vaccine requirements altogether. In Louisiana, for example, the Department of Health has announced it will no longer offer vaccine clinics or promote flu, mpox or COVID-19 vaccines. To dismantle vaccine safeguards is to sabotage our future for short-term political gain. This escalating war on vaccines is, at its core, a war against the nation’s own prosperity—an assault on the very foundation of collective progress. No country thrives by turning against its own health, its own children or its own scientific achievements. Vaccines are not just a medical tool; they are a marker of civilization and proof that we can use knowledge to protect life, prevent suffering and build a stronger, more resilient society.

Right now, Florida law protects children by requiring all students attending public school to be vaccinated against highly contagious diseases like polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), measles, mumps, and rubella—with narrow exemptions for medical or religious reasons. Rolling back these protections would take an act of the state legislature. But alarmingly, the Florida Department of Health could unilaterally eliminate requirements for other critical vaccines—including those for hepatitis B and chickenpox—which would put thousands of children at needless risk.

Florida’s push to eliminate all vaccine mandates isn’t about freedom—it’s about abandoning responsibility. It prioritizes individual choice over public safety and strips parents of the right to send their kids to school in a safe, healthy environment. Cloaked in the language of liberty, Florida’s leaders are fueling an anti-vaccine agenda with deadly consequences.

And the risks aren’t limited to Florida’s students and other residents. Florida is America’s most visited state, welcoming millions of families every year. If children are less likely to be vaccinated there, preventable outbreaks won’t stay contained—they’ll travel home with visitors across the country. Within the state, an aging population is particularly vulnerable to diseases like measles or pertussis.

What Americans Want

Despite vocal opposition by anti-vaccine activists, polling shows that most Americans—across party lines—support routine vaccine requirements for schoolchildren. According to a recent survey from the Harvard Opinion Research Program and the de Beaumont Foundation, 79% of U.S. adults said they support vaccine requirements in schools. Among Republicans and self-identified MAGA Republicans, majorities said they back mandates for diseases like measles and polio. In another survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 83% of U.S. adults said some vaccines should be required by schools, including 93% of Democrats, 85% of Independents and 75% of Republicans.

Protecting public health transcends politics; it’s about safeguarding the progress that has kept millions of Americans safe and healthy. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician who represents Louisiana, called the effort to end vaccine requirements in Florida “a terrible thing for public health. We’re going to start having vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks at school, you’re going to have children who come to school with measles and infect other people who either have not been vaccinated or have some sort of disease, like cancer.” The day after the announcement in Florida, former Florida Governor and current US Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) spoke out against the proposal in an interview with Axios, saying, “Florida already has a good system that allows families to opt out based on religious and personal beliefs, which balances our children’s health and parents’ rights.”

Governor DeSantis often presents himself as a champion of children—supporting legislation to protect them from the dangers of social media, sexual predators and online exploitation. Yet by pushing back on routine immunizations, his administration is dismantling one of the most fundamental protections for our kids. The same “pro-children” stance that restricts minors’ access to social media is being used to justify stripping away vaccines that have historically spared generations of children from paralysis and death. It doesn’t make sense to safeguard children from online dangers while increasing their risk of physical danger.

What’s Next

In the coming months, Florida may gut vaccine requirements that have protected generations of children from deadly disease. The legislature reconvenes in January—and what happens next won’t just shape Florida’s future, but set the tone for the nation. The stakes are simple: Will we stand by proven protections, or surrender to misinformation and political theater?

Rolling back routine school vaccinations won’t just bring back preventable outbreaks—it will unravel one of the most basic responsibilities of a civilized society: keeping children safe. Parents deserve choice, yes—but they also deserve classrooms free from polio, measles and whooping cough.

Florida’s governor and surgeon general claim that vaccine mandates are “un-American.” But what’s truly un-American is turning our backs on science, endangering children and abandoning the idea that we owe something to each other. This isn’t about liberty. It’s about whether we still believe in the power—and the promise—of public health.