1,000 Doctors Challenge Florida’s Anti-Vax Surgeon General
Joe Ladapo ended vaccine requirements but not everyone is quietly accepting the dangerous policy change.
Last month, over a thousand Florida doctors signed a letter challenging a decision by their state’s anti-vax surgeon general to end school vaccination mandates.
In early September, Dr. Joe Ladapo announced that his state would be the first to end all immunization requirements. While the new policy won’t take effect until December, it means that school children will no longer need to be inoculated against preventable but potentially devastating diseases like hepatitis B and meningitis. Ladapo hailed the move as a victory for parental freedom.
“Who am I as a government or anyone else, who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body?” the state surgeon general said. “Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [their] body? I don’t have that right.”
Now, a group of medical doctors are speaking out against policy. In a letter sent September 15, they warned of the obvious dangers.
“As a group of over 1,000 Florida physicians, representing the medical community across the state, we urgently call on officials to preserve existing vaccine requirements for school attendance and in other high-risk settings,” the letter read. “The recent announcement by the Surgeon General proposing their removal jeopardizes the hard-won gains in community disease prevention and threatens to undo decades of progress.”
The letter noted that Ladapo’s policy changes could weaken community immunity many Florida residents depend on, including newborns, chronic illness sufferers, the immunocompromised, and healthy children and adults who are either unvaccinated or not up-to-date on their vaccines.
“Vaccine protection allows our children to safely attend school and daycare, participate in activities, and enjoy childhood without unnecessary fear of life-threatening infection,” it read. “Removing these protections would undermine public trust and create preventable risks.”
The message has thus far fallen on deaf ears.
For years, Ladapo has been on the medical fringes. His rise to power came out of an apparent political rivalry between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. In late August 2021, Trump had been booed at an Alabama rally for encouraging the crowd to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The political Right had increasingly been embracing the medical fringes as part of a larger campaign to undermine politically and economically inconvenient public health efforts to control the spread of the virus. DeSantis, who made a run for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2024 cycle, leaned in. Almost one month to the day after the booing, the Florida governor named Ladapo as his surgeon general.
The anti-vax doctor, who got his medical degree from Harvard, began his ascent as part of the pro-Trump medical group, America’s Front Line Doctors, which was organized with help from the secretive and influential Christian Right group Council for National Policy to lend legitimacy to the president’s push to reopen the country ahead of the election. Ladapo advised Trump in a closed-door Oval Office meeting the next month.
As Florida attorney general, Ladapo has been a steady source of medical misinformation, particularly around the COVID vaccines. In April 2023, he was exposed as having altered a study on the risks of the mRNA shots to make them appear dangerous for young men. As Important Context previously reported, he has appeared at multiple events—including one last week—hosted by an anti-vax group that has called the COVID shots “weapons of mass destruction.”
“Banning vaccine requirements is banning progress,” said letter signer Dr. Natalia Solenkova, a Florida-based intensivist and scientific advisor to the Accountability Journalism Institute. “It dismantles the achievements of science that have protected our communities for generations.”
Solenkova, an at-large member of the International Medical Graduates Section (IMGS) Governing Council, said she did not expect Florida to change course. She explained that the goal of the letter is to show politicians that there are dissenting doctors and to put pressure on the Department of Health to protect vaccines.
“Just a little over a century ago, one in five children died before the age of five,” she said. “Thanks to vaccines and public health, kids live longer, healthier lives. Instead of celebrating this progress, Florida is now choosing to fight it—and that will cost lives.”