Florida plows ahead with push to roll back certain vaccine mandates for
schoolchildren
[December 13, 2025]
By KATE PAYNE
PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Florida officials are plowing ahead with
a proposal to roll back certain vaccine mandates for the state's
schoolchildren, after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called for the state
to become the first in the nation to eliminate all school vaccination
requirements.
Pediatricians, infectious disease physicians and teachers have decried
the push to undermine vaccines, which for generations have been a
cornerstone of public health policy for keeping children and adults safe
from potentially deadly — but preventable — diseases.
Experts have warned that doing away with the mandates could allow for a
dangerous resurgence of preventable childhood diseases and deaths,
amounting to a reversal of one of the greatest advancements in public
health history.
Dozens of parents, physicians, educators and advocates crowded into a
hotel conference room in Panama City Beach on Friday to testify on a
rule change proposed by the Florida Department of Health that would
eliminate requirements that Florida children receive the hepatitis B,
varicella and Haemophilus influenzae type b or Hib vaccines in order to
attend public or private K-12 schools. The proposal also does away with
a requirement for the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine for children
attending child care facilities.
Other state mandates related to vaccines for polio, mumps, tetanus and
other diseases are enshrined in Florida law and would require
legislative action to be rolled back.
Pediatrician Eehab Kenawy, who practices in Panama City, detailed two
unvaccinated children his hospital has cared for in the past six months,
both of whom contracted Hib, which can cause severe infections and brain
swelling.
“One child unfortunately succumbed at four months of age. No vaccines,"
Kenawy said.
The mother of another Hib patient, a two-and-a-half-year-old, begged to
have her child vaccinated after the child developed a grave brain
infection, Kenawy said.
"Quote unquote, mother's words: ‘please give my child every vaccine you
can,' " he said. “This is what we're seeing.”
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has long clashed with the
medical establishment, has cast current requirements in schools and
elsewhere as “immoral” intrusions on people’s rights that hamper
parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.
All U.S. states and territories require that children attending child
care centers and schools be vaccinated against a number of diseases,
including, measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and
chickenpox.
All states allow exemptions for children with medical conditions that
prevent them from receiving certain vaccines. Most also permit
exemptions for religious or other nonmedical reasons.
Emotional public hearing
Friday's public hearing grew emotional at times, as parents and
activists opposed to the mandates heralded the importance of personal
freedom, while longtime physicians recalled hospital wards full of
gravely sick children in the years before the widespread availability of
vaccines.
When pediatrician Paul Robinson trained at Vanderbilt University in the
1980s, he cared for countless children “suffering from diseases we now
prevent,” including Hib.
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Vaccines are advertised outside a pharmacy in Miami, Thursday, Sept.
4, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)
 “It didn't cause mild illness. It
caused children to die,” Robinson said, recalling the survivors who
were left with “deafness, paralysis or lifelong neurologic injury.”
The policy being pushed by the state's surgeon general is
“dangerous,” he added.
Jamie Schanbaum's legs and fingers were amputated
after she contracted meningitis as a 20-year-old college student in
Texas. She traveled from Brooklyn, New York, to testify in support
of vaccines, recounting her seven-month hospital stay as she battled
the vaccine-preventable disease and the challenges of living without
her limbs.
“No one should go through this experience,” Schanbaum said.
“How about the relearning to use my hands? Feed myself? Wipe myself?
This is the reality of what it’s like to survive something like
this,” she added.
Rise of vaccine skepticism
Vaccination efforts across the country and around the world have
stalled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw an explosion
in vaccine skepticism. Florida's proposal comes as U.S. Department
of Health Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked
to reshape the nation’s vaccine policies to match his long-standing
suspicions about the safety and effectiveness of well-established
shots.
Mary Helms, a mother and grandmother from Apalachicola, Florida,
referenced Kennedy as she voiced her “full support” for rolling back
the mandates.
“Medical choice and medical freedom in all ways is a God-given and
sovereign human right,” Helms said.
Susan Sweetin's voiced filled with emotion as she described her
then-newborn son being rushed off for a hepatitis B shot that she
said “injured” him. Sweetin is a marketing executive for the
National Vaccine Information Center, a group connected to Kennedy.
“This is not informed consent. That is coercion. Vaccines should
never be tied to a child’s education,” Sweetin said.
Asked if the state consulted national medical experts such as the
American Academy of Pediatrics on the rule development, a department
representative declined to answer directly, stating: “the rule
language is grounded in policy based on considerations that favor
parental rights and medical freedom.”
Measles outbreak in South Carolina
Florida's push comes as a monthslong measles outbreak continues in
South Carolina, almost entirely among school-age children.
State health officials there have said 116 of the 126 cases have
been in children under 18, with two-thirds of them in children from
age 5 to 17.
The outbreak has been centered in Spartanburg County, where just 90%
of students have all the vaccinees required to be in school — one of
the lowest rates in South Carolina. The state has a religious
exemption for vaccines, and almost all of the unvaccinated students
use it.
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