Florida’s announcement that it would scrap public school vaccine mandates next year hit Elizabeth particularly hard. Her 11-year-old daughter suffers from a rare immunodeficiency disorder that requires biweekly plasma infusions to provide some protection against disease.

But she can still be out of school for 50 days during the school year — and Elizabeth is worried that falling vaccine rates will make their situation far worse.

“By taking the mandate away, you're telling people that you don't care whether they get the vaccines or not. So why would a parent of a healthy kid want to do it?” she asked. “They need to do it for the other people in their lives who could be in danger.”

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado announced in September that, starting in January, the state would no longer require school-aged children to receive vaccines, such as those that protect against chickenpox, hepatitis B, HiB and Strep.

Epidemiologists have warned that the lack of mandate could prompt the resurgence of long-gone diseases and hurt the local economy.

Elizabeth, who asked to use only her first name due to privacy concerns, said she’d “love” to move back to Massachusetts, where she used to live, but that her extended family lives in the Lake Worth area.

“My child care support system is here at the moment,” she said. “We have to deal with living here.”

Sonja Rasmussen, an infectious disease doctor who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for 20 years, said vaccines are a victim of their own success, having effectively eliminated diseases ranging from measles to polio.

“I think vaccines, because they've been so successful, people think we don't need those anymore. And I think that's where the concern is,” she said.

“I'm worried [that] we're going to see this re-emergence of these diseases that we haven't seen for decades with the withdrawal of these requirements,” she added.

In a press conference earlier this fall, Lapado compared vaccine mandates to slavery, explaining that his rollback was meant to restore rights to parents. The surgeon........

© The Hill