Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, plans to remove the state’s vaccine mandates—a move that will lead to more infections, hospitalizations, and likely even some deaths of young children in the state.

Lifting the mandate would almost certainly lead to lower vaccine uptake in Florida, and it will have implications for Americans more widely. Florida would be the first state to formally lift the vaccine mandate and may inspire other states to drop the requirement for children to get vaccinated before being able to attend school. It will also worsen the declining confidence in vaccines that a growing number of Americans are experiencing, influenced by the vaccine-skeptical rhetoric of Ladapo, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and other officials.

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The requirement for children to have vaccines in order to attend school has helped the U.S. maintain relatively high vaccine coverage against many terrible diseases, including measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, and more.

But that can quickly go away. The U.S. has already started seeing a growth in the proportion of parents requesting non-medical exemptions, where they can opt their children out of required vaccines on philosophical or religious grounds. The increasing number of non-medical exemptions is one reason why the national MMR rates for kindergarteners dropped below 95%—the recommended threshold for herd immunity—in 2023 and continues to

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