By Brad Brooks, Helen Coster and Julia Harte
(Reuters) -Just one day after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his plan to stop requiring vaccines for grade-school children and others, the needed approval by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature is already showing signs of a heated battle to come.
DeSantis’ surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, who joined the governor in announcing on Wednesday the plan to scrap all vaccine mandates, said quite simply of what will be before lawmakers: “People are going to have to choose a side.”
On the opposite side of the aisle the state’s Senate Democratic leader, Lori Berman, said she will fight to “protect our kids from these reckless attempts to harm them.”
DeSantis’ action comes amid a controversial national debate, often led by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., over vaccines. Although multiple states in recent years have proposed banning or weakening vaccine mandates, only Idaho successfully introduced a ban on school vaccine requirements. If Florida, the third largest U.S. state with a population of roughly 23 million, is successful, it could open a new chapter in the vaccine wars.
While about a half dozen existing vaccine mandates in Florida can be ended immediately because they are enforced under administrative rules, another half dozen vaccines – including those for measles, mumps and polio – must be ended by the legislature because they are mandated in law.
“They’re going to have to make decisions,” Ladapo said of lawmakers when he announced the push to end vaccine mandates.
The next scheduled legislative session begins in January.
Republican leaders in the Florida House and Senate did not respond to requests for comment. None had issued any statements of support for the plan to end vaccine mandates by Thursday evening.
But Democrats sharply criticized the move.
“Republicans have gone from entertaining anti-science conspiracy theories to fully endorsing an anti-science health policy,” said Berman, the Senate Democratic leader, on Thursday. “As a member of the Senate Health Policy Committee, I’ll be doing everything in my power to protect our kids from these reckless attempts to harm them.”
“This is a public health disaster in the making for the Sunshine State,” Democratic Representative Anna Eskamani said in a statement.
In addition to protecting the individuals who get vaccinated, widespread vaccination in a community safeguards infants who are too young for the shots as well as people whose health conditions prevent them from being vaccinated.
The Florida Medical Association, which backed DeSantis when he first ran for governor in 2018, strongly rejected an end to vaccines mandates. “The Florida Medical Association unequivocally supports the vaccination and immunization of school-aged children against diseases that decades ago proved life-threatening to our kids,” it said in a statement Thursday.
The passage earlier this year in Florida of a more modest effort to address vaccine mandates might augur of what lies ahead in winning approval for DeSantis’ plan. The measure, which was championed by DeSantis, passed in both houses, but only after language was removed that would have applied a prohibition of services based on vaccine status to doctors and medical facilities.
Even strong supporters of ending vaccine mandates see challenges ahead.
Michael Kane, director of advocacy for Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, applauded the Florida move, but noted the difficulty of winning legislative approval. “They have to actually go through the whole process of repealing those laws, which isn’t always an easy trick.”
Kennedy, who was grilled in the U.S. Senate over vaccines on Thursday, has promoted the view that vaccines contribute to rising rates of autism, contrary to scientific evidence. Since taking office this year, he has fired expert vaccine advisers to the CDC, replacing them with people who more closely share his views.
Del Bigtree, founder of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network and former communications director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, said he was ecstatic about the Florida action, and forecast that several other conservative state legislatures would soon follow suit. “This is the pivotal issue in politics today,” he said.
Four Democratic-led states, California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii, have banded together in response to the move against vaccines, saying said this week they had created the West Coast Health Alliance to provide vaccine recommendations, even if they diverge from federal government recommendations.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado, and Helen Coster and Julia Harte in New York; editing by Donna Bryson and Leslie Adler)
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