Florida’s plan to drop school vaccine rule won’t start for 90 days, won’t cover all diseases
Florida’s plan to abandon academic vaccination mandates will probably have no effect for 90 days and only understand chickenpox and some other diseases unless the legislators decide to extend it to other diseases, such as polio and measles, the Department of Health said on Sunday.
The department responded to a request for details, four days after the Florida general surgeon, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, said that the state would become the first to make voluntary vaccinations and let families decide on their children’s inoculation.
It is a retirement of decades of public policy and research that showed that vaccines were safe and the most effective means of stopping the spread of transmitted diseases, especially in children. Despite these evidence, the Secretary in the United States of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expressed deep skepticism in terms of vaccines.
Florida’s plan would increase mandates on school vaccines for hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib flu and pneumococcal diseases, such as meningitis, said health service.
“The ministry launched the change of rule on September 3, 2025 and provides that the change of rule will not be effective for approximately 90 days,” the state told the Associated Press in an email. The public school year in Florida began in August.
All the other vaccinations required under Florida’s law to frequent the school “remain in place, except news through legislation”, including vaccines for measles, polio, diphtheria, darling, mumps and tetanus, said the department.
The legislators do not meet before January 2026, although committee meetings begin in October.
Ladapo, appearing Sunday on CNN, repeated his free choice message for infant vaccines.
“If you want them, may God bless you, you can have as much as you wish,” he said. “And if you don’t want it, parents should have the capacity and power to decide what is happening in their children’s body. It’s as simple as that.”
Florida currently has a religious exemption for the requirements of vaccines. Vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives worldwide in the past 50 years, the World Health Organization reported in 2024. The majority of them were infants and children.
Dr. Rana Alissa, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics Florida section, said the creation of voluntary vaccines puts students and school staff in danger.
It is the worst year for measles in the United States in more than three decades, with more than 1,400 confirmed cases nationwide, most of them in Texas and three deaths.
Pek killed at least two babies in Louisiana and a 5 -year -old child in Washington state since winter because it is also spreading quickly. There were more than 19,000 cases in August 23, almost 2,000 more than the period last year, according to preliminary CDC data.
