In the eight months since Florida’s leaders grabbed headlines by calling vaccine mandates “slavery” and prescribing that Florida become the first to eliminate such school-entrance requirements, 1,622 Floridians were diagnosed with potentially fatal, vaccine-preventable diseases.
The Sunshine State’s 2025-26 outbreak of measles — now more than double the total number of cases counted in 16 years, from 2008 to 2024 — made it one of the country’s top hotspots for the highly contagious and vaccine-preventable disease, but other vaccine-preventable diseases are ticking up too.
The current measles outbreak has likely proven a stumbling block to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s and state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s legislative goals.
House Speaker Daniel Perez, the father of three young children, said he felt “uncomfortable” that kids will be in school without vaccinations to stave off measles, mumps and chicken pox.
“Vaccines that have been working for decades,” he said at a press availability.
Still, despite two legislative defeats this year, the governor appears unbowed in his mission to loosen the rules requiring school vaccinations, which he calls part of the “medical industrial complex.”
“Typical political shenanigans,” DeSantis posted on social media after the House Speaker announced that the vaccine question wouldn’t be taken up, leading the Senate to temporarily postpone the issue.
On the question of whether vaccines would be on the agenda when DeSantis puts out the call to the special session that starts May 12, a governor’s spokesman answered, “Stay tuned,” in an email.
Is the COVID-19 outbreak related to decreasing vaccine rates?
Many experts tie the rise of vaccine hesitancy — and some politicians’ embrace of concerns about vaccines efficacy and safety — to the COVID-19 pandemic. And the declining rate of vaccinations among the state’s students bear that out.
Immunizations of the state’s students hit a high in 2019 — 97.4% of the state’s seventh-graders met the state mandates for vaccination. But that rate has continued to decline year after year, falling below the 95% rate generally regarded as the rate needed for community immunity. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that about 88% of the state’s students have gotten the required vaccination rates.
Doctors put the blame on the rise in vaccine preventable diseases to plummeting vaccination rates among school-age children.
What other diseases are Florida children vaccinated against?
Beyond measles, Health Department data shows dramatically higher counts of vaccine-preventable diseases when comparing 2025-2026 numbers to the last pre-pandemic year, 2018-2019.
Still, the governor continues championing legislation that would make Florida’s rules more like those of Utah, which recently became the center of the current measles outbreak, with 625 cases reported since cases started to pop up in the summer of 2025, according to that state’s website.
What is the medical freedom movement?
It’s a matter of “medical freedom” for those who support expanding the ways to opt out of vaccinations, supporters say.
“This bill supports the values we all hold dear, transparency, autonomy, educated medical decision making, the right to an education and the right of Florida’s parents to make decisions they believe are best for their children,” Republican state Sen. Clay Yarborough of Jacksonville, who filed bill the governor made clear he wanted passed this year.
The legislation fell short of DeSantis’s stated goal of making Florida the first to eliminate vaccine requirements to enter school, but it would put Florida in the company of 17 other states that allow skipping the shots required for school attendance because of personal reasons, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Florida, like most other states, currently allows parents to opt out of vaccinating their children because of medical and religious reasons.
And, under the chosen legislation, the process of opting out would be simplified to appeal to an even larger contingent: Parents pressed for time.
For what reasons can Florida parents opt out of vaccinating their children?
Yarborough’s bill would make it so that parents desiring a religious or personal exemption from the mandates would print out an online form, fill it out and bring it to school — just like a law in Utah that went into effect July 1, 2025. Statutes now require a visit to the local health department to get the religious exemption.
Without a requirement that parents visit the Health Department before getting the exemption, Dr. Lawrence Bergman, a Wellington pediatrician, predicts it would mean even fewer people getting their kids vaccinated to prepare for school.
“People won’t get the vaccines as a matter of convenience, without any sense of how important they are to the health of their child and the larger community,” he said.
When this year’s legislation was introduced, Republican state Sen. Gayle Harrell of Stuart noted the irony that people who opt out of vaccines would not be required to interact with a health professional telling about the risks of not being vaccinated, yet parents who do get their children vaccinated will get a sheet telling them about the risks of vaccines, which the mainstream medical community regards as minimal compared to the risks of the illnesses they prevent.
She wants to see anyone wanting an exemption for getting their child vaccinated get more information from a medical professional.
“Prior to COVID, Florida required parents to have a direct, consultative conversation with a qualified healthcare provider to opt out for nonmedical reasons,” she said in an essay that ran in Florida Politics.
Will the medical freedom movement end with DeSantis’s term?
Don’t expect to see the campaign against vaccines required for school entrance end when term-limited DeSantis leaves office.
Frank Russo, an independent candidate for governor who has put hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money into his campaign, lamented the defeat of Yarborough’s “Medical Freedom Bill” at the special session.
“It was shelved because the dollar is involved,” he said. “It should be the family’s choice.”
The leading Republican gubernatorial candidate, Rep. Byron Donalds, doesn’t list changing up vaccine requirements on his website, but he has said that he doesn’t think they can be ended entirely. A specific question to his campaign about Yarborough’s “medical freedom” bill went unanswered.
Where do doctors’ associations stand on vaccination requirements?
Meanwhile, Dr. Rana Alissa, a pediatrician and president of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, drove from her home in Jacksonville to Tallahassee, prepared to testify that loosening the vaccine requirements for school attendance would be a step backward to years when many fewer children reached their fifth birthday because of childhood illnesses.
Why the people in charge of public health, such as the state’s top doctor, Ladapo, are amplifying vaccine hesitancy, has her beyond puzzled, she said. It’s unprecedented that public health officials are not working hand-in-hand with doctors to get people to get their kids vaccinated, she said.
Vaccines are given much of the credit for how U.S. child deaths before reaching 5 years old have fallen four to five times in the last 70 years, which is about when vaccines came on the scene, according to the National Institute of Health.
“We are experts in the matter when we sound an alarm and when we tell everyone that this is not going to work and this is dangerous, this really is dangerous,” Alissa said. “This is going to kill people. We already have seen people dying. We are the experts. You need to listen to experts.”
She made it to Tallahassee and was relieved to be turning around without having to testify, she said.
Anne Geggis is statewide reporter for the USA TODAY NETWORK FLORIDA, reporting on health and senior issues. If you have news tips, please send them to ageggis@usatodayco.com. You can get all of Florida’s best content directly in your inbox each weekday by signing up for the free newsletter, Florida TODAY, at https://palmbeachpost.com/newsletters
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: As measles cases rage in Florida, vaccine resistance persists. Why?
Reporting by Anne Geggis, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
