Tallahassee pediatrician D. Paul Robinson was a medical resident while researchers were working in the 1980s to finalize a vaccine against a bacterial scourge that infected and maimed 1 in every 200 young children in the United States, most of them no older than 2. In his pediatric training, he was required to help diagnose the scourge – called Haemophilus influenzae Type b, or Hib — by performing spinal taps on severely ill babies and young children, one after another.
“We had to do painful procedures on these kids to keep them alive,” Dr. Robinson told the Florida Trident, adding he would not want to relive the experience. Hib-positive children were automatically hospitalized, often in intensive care, and treated with antibiotics.
Before Hib vaccination, about 20,000 children younger than five developed severe Hib disease each year in the United States, and about 1,000 died, according to History of Vaccines, run by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and Mutter Museum Historical Medical Library.
In 1985, the first vaccines against Hib were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. More Hib vaccines would follow. For Robinson and other pediatricians, a new day had dawned.
“It is one of the most successful vaccines I’ve seen in my lifetime,” said pediatrician Dr. Nectar Aintablian, who practices in Tallahassee. “I have seen only two cases of Hib since the vaccine.”
Before Hib vaccines, “Some children died. Some had serious complications.” The scourge has been stifled in the United States and other countries with sufficient uptake of Hib vaccine. But elsewhere, she said, “It still kills babies all over the world.”
Robinson and Aintablian are both on faculty at the College of Medicine at Florida State University. They and the state’s leading society of pediatricians are championing childhood vaccines and the merits of community immunity after Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced he intends to remove vaccine mandates for attending public and private schools, child-care facilities and family daycare homes.
Dr. Ladapo pledged to quickly lift mandates on four vaccines under Health Department administrative control and to lobby lawmakers this winter to repeal mandates on seven others prescribed in state law. If he has made progress, it is not readily apparent.
A Florida senator on Thursday broke the ice on this subject for the 2026 Legislature by introducing a bill to block Ladapo’s plans. Senate Bill 626, proposed by Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orange County, would add the four vaccine mandates under Health Department control to the list of vaccines already mandated by the Legislature.
Meanwhile, Florida pediatricians expressed outrage Friday that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are casting doubt on vaccine safety in general, most recently by reversing the CDC’s longstanding guidance that there is no link between vaccines and autism.
On Thursday, the CDC struck that statement from its website. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic and not a scientist, told The New York Times he personally instructed CDC authorities to make the change to add more credence to disputed claims that vaccines may contribute to autism.
“Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities,” the new CDC webpage says. “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
The Autism Science Foundation, a nonprofit corporation based in New York, immediately countered: “No environmental factor has been better studied as a potential cause of autism than vaccines. This includes vaccine ingredients as well as the body’s response to vaccines. All this research has determined that there is no link between autism and vaccines.”
The Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics on Friday called for removal of the new CDC language, calling it false and confusing. “Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than forty high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people. The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There is no link between vaccines and autism,” it said in a public statement.
Pediatrician Mobeen Rathore, chief of infectious diseases and immunology at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Jacksonville, said the new CDC language is dangerous.
“This is very dangerous and will unfortunately only increase vaccine hesitancy. To make claims about an unproven causation is [a] medieval way of doing things, not 21st century scientific methodology,” Dr. Rathore said.
Pediatricians say that if childhood vaccine mandates are repealed and vaccine uptake plummets, community wide immunity will dissolve, and communicable diseases such as measles, polio and Hib will be free to resurge.
“I won’t want to practice in that environment,” Robinson said.
Pediatrician Rana Alissa, who practices at UF Health in Jacksonville, fears that Robinson would not be the only pediatrician to switch to another specialty or retire early if his dreaded scenario unfolds. She worries, too, that new pediatricians may choose to practice elsewhere.
Pediatrician Rana Alissa, president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, with 2,800+ members.
“What’s worse than seeing a 2-day-old suffer?” Dr. Alissa said. “We’re going to have people not coming to Florida. Retire early? Yes, because we’re tired. We’re already short (too few pediatricians for the population). We’re battling misinformation. We’re exhausted.”
Still, Alissa said she is routinely working extra hours on patient education and vaccine advocacy as president of the Florida pediatricians, and she has conducted roughly 100 interviews in the last two months defending and promoting childhood vaccines atop her regular duties in the newborn nursery.
Alissa said she is less worried about anti-vaccine sentiment and more worried that if vaccines are not mandatory for school entry, busy parents will simply not get around to having their children fully vaccinated. The result, she said, would be lower vaccination rates and higher disease risk.
The debate over vaccine safety, long waged on social media, is now being waged between private medical societies and official U.S. health agencies led by Trump appointees.
Two mothers, two viewpoints
A Florida native and mother-to-be in St. Petersburg said it leaves her and her partner – expecting their first baby in January – wondering about their child’s future. They plan to vaccinate their child according to pediatric recommendations, but they worry that other parents will not.
“When we say, OK, go do your research, there’s so much misinformation out there. How do people actually know what they’re looking at and where to go, in that it’s validated and it’s real?” said Aubrey, a businesswoman who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid being harassed. She said she tends to believe that decades of vaccine science and vaccine use have suppressed communicable diseases in this country and worldwide, but she is worried about recent reports of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable measles and whooping cough in Florida – and even polio, in New York City in 2022.
“You’re going to have outbreaks, which is exactly what we’re seeing today. It is scary,” Aubrey said. “If this was to go through (repeal of mandates), do I feel safe raising my child or putting my child in school here? Probably not. It would probably push us to look elsewhere to live, because there’s no reason to subject our family to that.”
On the other hand, Amber Revels, who practices holistic and chiropractic medicine in Sarasota, is not worried at all. A mother of five children, ages 11 to 1, she said only she and her first child have received any childhood vaccines. Since then, she has secured religious exemptions from vaccination for her school-age children. It was easy to do, she said, suggesting that parents already have freedom of choice through religious or medical exemptions. She says she is skeptical that potential side effects from vaccine ingredients such as aluminum have been fully disclosed.
Dr. Revel’s older four children have had whooping cough, she said, and she was hospitalized with COVID-19 while pregnant with her youngest. She said she treated her sick children with herbal medicine and nutritional therapy, and she insisted on customizing her own treatment while hospitalized. Everyone’s fine, she said.
“I’ve treated chicken pox, measles, mumps,” Revels said of her practice. She advises parents, “Look at each one” – each disease, each vaccine– “and make a decision. Are the possible side effects worse than possibly getting the illness? Maybe do some of the vaccines. Maybe don’t do any.”
For example, if increased vaccine avoidance produces a resurgence of polio, which she has read was deadly, crippling and pervasive, she said she would continue using natural medicine to fend it off but she would reconsider vaccinating her family.
“That’s a tough one for me,” Revels said. “I wasn’t around then.”
Pediatricians say the success of vaccines in shielding the world from some of its worst diseases for so long is part of why people don’t perceive what’s at stake. Unlike veteran pediatricians such as Robinson, they haven’t seen first-hand what such diseases can do.
“Vaccines are victims of their own success,” Robinson said.
No repeal yet proposed
In Florida, the Hib vaccine and 10 others are mandated by law or by administrative rule for attending public and private schools and day-care programs. While not questioning their safety or efficacy, Ladapo made national headlines Sept. 3 by announcing at a Christian school in Valrico that vaccine mandates amount to “slavery” from which he would grant “freedom” by repealing the mandates on all of them. He said he would start right away with four vaccine mandates under his administrative control and filed notice that day that new draft rules would be forthcoming.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo said there. “Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis stood with Ladapo that day to announce creation of a Florida MAHA — Make American Healthy Again — Commission. Neither of them had anything negative to say about the 11 “legacy” vaccines mandated for school attendance in Florida. Their beef, articulated at length that day by DeSantis, is with COVID-19 vaccines and COVID-era policies toward masks and school shutdowns. Unlike the legacy vaccines, the COVID-19 vaccine is not mandated for school entry or otherwise.
Ladapo offered no public-health guidance on how parents should exercise their freedom to vaccinate or not, if given the choice, and he has since told reporters he sees no need to model how disease outbreaks might impact Florida if mandates go away.
Since making his announcement, Ladapo has made no progress eliminating even the four vaccine mandates over which he said he has administrative control and promised swift action. His Health Department communications team did not explain that nor make Ladapo available to answer questions, despite Trident inquiries daily over the course of a week.
“At this time, my office does not have a copy of the proposed rule text,” wrote Administrative Code and Register Director Alexandra Leijon in a Nov. 14 email response to the Florida Trident. She said the state Health Department filed a “notice of development of rulemaking” on Sept. 3 but has not developed or proposed anything. Through Monday, there was no additional information.
“I cannot say when a new version of the [vaccine mandates] rule will become effective because a Notice of Proposed Rule has not been published yet and a rule adoption packet has not been filed with my office. I also do not know the Department of Health’s plans regarding the publishing of a Notice of Proposed Rule,” Leijon wrote.
The four school-entry vaccines mandated by administrative rule protect against Hib disease, varicella (chickenpox), Hepatitis B, and pneumococcal bacteria (which causes bacterial infections, including ear infections). The seven set in state law protect against: measles, mumps, and rubella (combined into an MMR shot); diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis (combined into a DTaP shot); and polio. Pertussis is whooping cough.
Meanwhile, no proposals have emerged to remove the seven vaccination mandates set in law by the Legislature, though there is still plenty of time if Ladapo can enlist lawmakers as sponsors. The regular 60-day 2026 session starts Jan. 13. Hundreds of proposed bills are already filed.
Florida Senate President Ben Albritton is not fired up about lifting school-entry mandates on the 11 “legacy” vaccines, which have been used for decades to tamp down horrendous diseases such as polio, whooping cough and Hib.
House Speaker Daniel Perez’s communications team did not respond to inquiries about his stance on repealing any vaccine mandates.
Two days after the Ladapo-DeSantis press conference in Valrico, President Donald Trump voiced support for the vaccines from which Ladapo wants to set parents free.
“From President Albritton’s perspective, he wants to proceed cautiously, with a full understanding of exactly what rule changes are coming, so the Senate can determine next steps,” Senate spokeswoman Katie Betta wrote in an email reply to the Trident. “As you know, he is fond of saying we should ‘measure three times and cut once.’ Understanding what changes are coming to Department of Health Rules is an important part of the Senate’s evaluation of this issue.”
“Look, you have vaccines that work. They just pure and simple work. They’re not controversial at all,” President Trump told reporters in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 5 when asked about Ladapo’s proclamations in Florida. “I think those vaccines should be used. Otherwise, some people are going to catch it and they endanger other people. When you don’t have controversy at all, I think people should take it.”
Meanwhile, pediatrician Jennifer Takagishi, who practices at USF Health in Tampa, noted that many Florida parents have secured exemptions from school vaccines with little or no fuss.
“It’s already very easy to get an exemption in Florida. I don’t know why we need to make it even easier,” Dr. Takagishi said.
Even with those exemptions, if enough children and adults continue to be vaccinated, dangerous diseases can be held at bay, she said. Vaccines do not provide 100 percent protection, but they increase resistance and reduce the severity of symptoms if one does become sick, Takagishi said. Further, to the extent that widespread vaccination reduces the incidence of disease in a community, even unvaccinated people face less risk, she said.
As to cost, she said, if state and federal public-health authorities continue to recommend the vaccines, they will remain accessible and affordable, more so than if insurers can choose to drop coverage.
“We use vaccines to teach our own body’s immune systems how to fight these diseases,” Dr. Takagishi said. “The more people who are vaccinated, the fewer diseases that are out there. We have not removed these diseases completely from the world. We have just sent them back into the shadows, and they are waiting there for the opportunity to come back.”
Laura Cassels is a veteran Florida journalist and former Capitol Bureau chief who specializes in science, the environment, and the economy. The Florida Trident is an investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was created and first published in 2022 by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a non-profit organization that facilitates local investigative reporting across the state.
