Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said Sunday that his team didn’t study the impact eliminating vaccine mandates would have on the spread of preventable diseases before announcing the policy change.
Ladapo said that projections on the impact of ending the mandates are unnecessary and that ending them is a moral issue about parental rights.
“Absolutely not,” Ladapo told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday when pressed by host Jake Tapper about whether his team did a data assessment of how many new cases would emerge from the mandates going away.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo discusses COVID-19 vaccines on CNN. CNN
Vaccines being offered at a Florida CVS Pharmacy. Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 (L) and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines seen in syringes. Getty Images“There’s a conflation of the science and what is the right and wrong thing to do,” he added. “It’s an issue of right and wrong.”
Last week, Ladapo publicly vowed to end “every last one of” the vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, without outlining a timeline or a specific plan for doing so.
“Parents should always be able to decide what goes into their kids’ bodies. It’s not complex at all,” he later added. “We don’t need to do any projections; we handle outbreaks all the time.”
Prior to the announced policy shift, Florida trailed the US average for immunization among kindergarteners for key diseases with well-established vaccines.
For example, the Sunshine State has an 88.7% vaccination rate among kindergarteners for measles, mumps and rubella, below the 92% national average, per data from state and federal health officials.
Driving that gap appears to be a growing number of religious exemptions from vaccination requirements in the state.
Florida’s “Vaccine-Preventable Disease Surveillance Report” indicates that cases of Hepatitis A, chickenpox and whooping cough are all on the rise in the Sunshine State.
Data from that report was released on May 29.
When pressed about the rising cases of diseases that are widely seen as preventable via vaccination, Ladapo singled out whooping cough in particular and called that vaccine “ineffective” at stopping transmission.
He then reiteration his contention that the issue is about personal choice and freedom.
“Ultimately, this is an issue of parents’ rights. So do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what goes into their children’s bodies?” he said. “I don’t need to do an analysis on that.”
Ladapo previously likened vaccine mandates to slavery.
His plans to end vaccine mandates have drawn criticism from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and unease from President Trump.
“I think we have to be very careful. You have some vaccines that are so amazing,” Trump said last week. “You have some vaccines that are so incredible.”
Ladapo noted that he has “tremendous respect” for Trump and stressed that the issue is “nuanced.”
