The heated debate over Florida’s plan to revoke some school vaccine mandates was on full display Friday when state officials held a meeting for the public to weigh in on the proposed changes.
The current plan, according to officials at the Florida Department of Health, is to eliminate requirements that children be vaccinated against hepatitis B, chickenpox and haemophilus influenza type B (Hib) in order to attend private or public schools in the state, including prekindergarten. Admission to day cares would not require those vaccines, either, nor the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. There is no set timeline yet for when the changes will be implemented.
The meeting, held at a small conference room in Panama City Beach, Florida, showcased the ever-widening gulf between pediatricians and opponents of vaccines, some of whom used their moments at the microphone to voice outlandish conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Two attendees falsely suggested that this year’s measles outbreaks didn’t happen. (The U.S. has recorded more measles cases this year than in any other since it eliminated the disease in 2000.) Another made inaccurate claims about mRNA vaccines, even though none of the shots in Florida’s plan uses the technology. And one attendee argued that giving children more than one vaccine in a 30-day period “accounts to attempted murder.” (Children often get multiple vaccines at a time to minimize doctor’s visits and because the recommended schedules overlap. Evidence does not suggest the practice is more harmful than spreading them out.)
The event offered a glimpse into the entrenched nature of anti-vaccine beliefs, especially when it comes to school requirements. A growing number of U.S. adults support ending vaccination requirements in public schools: An October poll from Axios and Ipsos put the share at 26%, compared with 19% in March.
Although Florida is the only U.S. state attempting to do away with school vaccine mandates, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made scrutinizing vaccines and sowing doubts about their safety a key pillar of his agenda as the country’s top health leader. Kennedy has suggested that children receive too many shots, that many routine vaccines weren’t properly safety tested and that there is insufficient evidence to say they do not cause autism — a stance that vigorous medical studies have thoroughly and repeatedly debunked.
Northe Saunders, president of the pro-vaccine group American Families for Vaccines, said Kennedy has energized vaccine skeptics at the state level.
“The secretary has a bully pulpit and is certainly driving messaging down to his anti-vaccine supporters,” Saunders said. “We’re definitely seeing that echoed in comments like we heard today.”
Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, emerged during the Covid pandemic as a prominent skeptic of coronavirus vaccines. In September, he equated school vaccine mandates to slavery and pledged that his health department would work to eliminate them. (State law already allows parents to claim religious and medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates.)
However, the Florida health department only has the authority to repeal mandates for hepatitis B, chickenpox, pneumococcal and Hib vaccines. School mandates for vaccines that protect against polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, measles, mumps and rubella must be repealed through legislation, and no law to revoke them has been proposed.
At the two-hour meeting on Friday, doctors implored Florida’s health department not to repeal mandates for the four vaccines.
“I feel very sad to hear the distrust of physicians in the medical community. We only have our patients’ welfare in mind,” said Dr. Frederick Southwick, an infectious disease specialist.
Several doctors recalled harrowing experiences treating kids for vaccine-preventable illnesses, including Hib and meningitis (inflammation of the brain and spinal cord that the pneumococcal vaccine protects against).
“When I trained at Vanderbilt, our wards were filled with children suffering from diseases we now prevent,” said Dr. Paul Robinson, a pediatrician. “I can still picture a 2-year-old girl whom I treated with Hib who was left partially paralyzed.”
Jamie Schanbaum, who said a case of meningitis that she came down with in college led to multiple amputations, emphasized that the disease can be prevented through vaccination.
“No one should go through this experience. Excuse me as I try to go through my notes without fingers,” she said.
Florida’s health department is still accepting written comments on the proposed changes; a final decision is not likely to come until next year. When asked about when the mandates could be repealed, the department said it was “committed to moving forward with the rule change process” according to state law.
