Florida is hot as hell, it gets hit with hurricanes constantly, half of the state is a swamp, there are alligators everywhere, and Republicans in the state’s leadership want to kill as many Floridians as possible. It’s like, pick a struggle. Under Gov. “Meatball” Ron DeSantis’s leadership, Florida has gone to war with the state’s biggest employer (Disney), gone to war with librarians, gone to war with public education, and enabled several high-profile Republican sex traffickers. Well, this is a new low for the dong of America. Florida’s Surgeon General has now ended all of the state’s vaccine mandates for children.

Florida will end all state vaccine mandates, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced Wednesday. Vaccines have prevented the deaths of tens of millions worldwide in the past 50 years — and Florida wants to become the first state in the U.S. to stop requiring them. The state already leads the southeast in non-medical vaccine exemptions among kindergartners, and the rollback could mean fewer school children are inoculated against deadly viruses like measles and polio.

Ladapo, a well-known vaccine critic, announced his plans to end the practice via an administrative rule at a news conference in Hillsborough County, comparing vaccine mandates to “slavery.” Gov. Ron DeSantis said that the state Department of Health can end vaccine mandates not written into state law, but any others will require action by the Legislature. He acknowledged neither he nor Ladapo has spoken with state lawmakers about pursuing those changes.

State statutes currently require school children to get immunized against seven illnesses: polio, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, mumps and tetanus. The statute allows the state Department of Health to add vaccines to the list, but not remove any. As of August, the state Department of Health required students to be vaccinated against four additional illnesses: chickenpox, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), hepatitis B, and pneumococcal disease.

“Who am I to tell you what you should put in your body?” Ladapo said at Wednesday’s press conference. “What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and God,” he added. The government does not have that right.”

“This is devastating news,” Jill Roberts, associate professor at the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health, told Axios. “You’re going to leave kids susceptible to diseases that are deadly and have lifelong consequences.”

[From Axios]

This reminds me of when one of the deep-south states – maybe Alabama, but I don’t remember – had Republican leaders trying to overhaul the state public education so that schools would basically only teach the Bible. As soon as Republicans really started to make those moves, all of the major employers in the state were like “absolutely not, if Republicans do this, we’ll move our businesses elsewhere.” Employers still have a vested interest in a healthy and educated workforce. It costs Disney and it costs all of Florida’s businesses long-term if a generation of Florida kids (maybe even more than one generation) aren’t vaccinated for polio and measles. It costs the state longterm if they have the highest number of children dying from preventable diseases. It costs the state longterm if there’s a generation of kids needing costly medical treatment for polio and whooping cough. “Who am I to tell you what you should put in your body?” from a PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIAL!! You are the state’s surgeon general, that is your whole job, to issue public health mandates, to be a scientist and a doctor. God, Florida just sucks.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.