Joseph Ladapo – School vaccine rules are not like slavery. Fact-checking Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo

Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said the state’s health department will end “every single” school vaccine mandate, which includes many routine children’s immunizations.

Ladapo, who has a history^[1] of spreading^[2] inaccurate vaccine claims^[3], equated the state’s vaccine requirements with slavery. 

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo said during a Sept. 3 press conference^[4] in Valrico with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “Who am I as a man standing here right now to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right.”

Ladapo mentioned enslavement again moments later: “If we want to move toward a perfect world, a better world, we can’t do it by enslaving people in terrible philosophies and taking away people’s freedoms. That’s not the path … we have to find alternative pathways.” 

Florida has exemptions^[5] from vaccine participation; enslaved people had no exemptions or options. (Some slaves were able to self-emancipate^[6] but this was rare. Self-emancipation was extremely difficult and dangerous; people who attempted risked severe punishment, enslavement or death.)

Experts in public health called Ladapo’s statement false and inflammatory.

“Slavery is the violent ownership of people,” Tony Yang, a George Washington University health policy professor, said. “School-entry vaccination rules are safety conditions for participating in shared spaces — and they include due-process protections and exemptions.” 

Dorit Reiss, a University of California-San Francisco law professor who studies vaccine policy issues, including mandates, agreed.

“Regulation in public health is not akin to slavery,” Reiss said. “The opposite of slavery is not ‘you can do whatever you want in a state regardless of the risk you pose to others.’ Free societies have many regulations to protect others — for example, we require people to drive on one side of the street; we regulate to keep our water clean. Both of these limit liberty — without being slavery.” 

Most public health experts agree that vaccines are most effective at halting disease spread when there is widespread uptake. Vaccines also have been used to eradicate or significantly reduce deadly and debilitating diseases, such as smallpox and polio.

Pediatricians told us that states have school vaccine requirements because they help maintain high coverage in places where contagious diseases spread easily, protecting those who are too young, or medically unable to be vaccinated.

The Florida Department of Health did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for comment.

Florida law on school vaccine requirements

State law^[7] currently requires students in public and private schools from daycare through 12th grade to have specific immunizations, unless they obtain a valid exemption. The list includes^[8] routine childhood immunizations such as DTaP, polio, measles-mumps-rubella, chickenpox and hepatitis B. 

Parents can obtain^[9] religious exemptions from their county health department if vaccination conflicts with their religious beliefs or practices.

They can also obtain medical exemptions from health providers who have to state that a child cannot be fully immunized with “valid clinical reasoning or evidence, according to the state’s health department website^[10]. This exemption can be temporary or permanent.

Around 89% of students entering kindergarten in the state are immunized, according to Florida health data,^[11] a decline from 94% in 2017. 

History and science of U.S. school vaccine requirements

Massachusetts required smallpox vaccines in 1855, becoming the first state^[12] to mandate vaccines.

Vaccine requirements for school admission have varied among states, but all now have policies requiring some vaccinations. By the early 1980s, most states, including Florida, had adopted more universal school vaccine mandates.

Florida’s Department of Education website^[13] says high immunization rates “increase the herd immunity of school populations in order to decrease the occurrence of vaccine-preventable diseases and to protect those at risk because of age, immunodeficiency or lack of vaccination.

Public health experts said school vaccines are aimed at reducing overall risk and disease outbreaks^[14], affecting everyone. “People can choose not to vaccinate themselves or their children, but the mandate reduces their ability to force that risk on others — co-workers, other people’s children, teachers,” Reiss said. 

In a Sept. 3 emailed statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics Florida chapter said ending vaccine requirements will put children in Florida schools at higher risk.

Our ruling

Ladapo said every school vaccine requirement “drips” with “slavery.”

Parents, including in Florida, can choose not to vaccinate their children by applying for exemptions. About 11% of Florida kindergarteners are not immunized, recent data shows.

People who were enslaved did not have other options or exemptions.  

The statement is not only wrong but ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

RELATED: Do pediatricians recommend vaccines to make a profit? There’s not much money there.^[15]

RELATED: DNA fragments in mRNA COVID-19 vaccines won’t harm you, as Florida surgeon general suggests^[16]