Florida officials push to roll back vaccine mandates for schoolchildren

PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. — Florida officials are plowing ahead with a proposal to roll back certain vaccine mandates for the state's schoolchildren, after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called for the state to become the first in the nation to eliminate all school vaccination requirements.

Pediatricians, infectious disease physicians and teachers have decried the push to undermine vaccines, which for generations have been a cornerstone of public health policy for keeping children and adults safe from potentially deadly — but preventable — diseases.

Experts have warned that doing away with the mandates could allow for a dangerous resurgence of preventable childhood diseases and deaths, amounting to a reversal of one of the greatest advancements in public health history.

Dozens of parents, physicians, educators and advocates crowded into a hotel conference room in Panama City Beach on Friday to testify on a rule change proposed by the Florida Department of Health that would eliminate requirements that Florida children receive the hepatitis B, varicella and Haemophilus influenzae type b or Hib vaccines in order to attend public or private K-12 schools. The proposal also does away with a requirement for the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine for children attending child care facilities.

Other state mandates related to vaccines for polio, mumps, tetanus and other diseases are enshrined in Florida law and would require legislative action to be rolled back.

Pediatrician Eehab Kenawy, who practices in Panama City, detailed two unvaccinated children his hospital has cared for in the past six months, both of whom contracted Hib, which can cause severe infections and brain swelling.

“One child unfortunately succumbed at four months of age. No vaccines," Kenawy said.

The mother of another Hib patient, a two-and-a-half-year-old, begged to have her child vaccinated after the child developed a grave brain infection, Kenawy said.

"Quote unquote, mother's words: ‘please give my child every vaccine you can,' " he said. “This is what we're seeing.”

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has long clashed with the medical establishment, has cast current requirements in schools and elsewhere as “immoral” intrusions on people’s rights that hamper parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.

All U.S. states and territories require that children attending child care centers and schools be vaccinated against a number of diseases, including, measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and chickenpox.

All states allow exemptions for children with medical conditions that prevent them from receiving certain vaccines. Most also permit exemptions for religious or other nonmedical reasons.

Emotional public hearing

Friday's public hearing grew emotional at times, as parents and activists opposed to the mandates heralded the importance of personal freedom, while longtime physicians recalled hospital wards full of gravely sick children in the years before the widespread availability of vaccines.

When pediatrician Paul Robinson trained at Vanderbilt University in the 1980s, he cared for countless children “suffering from diseases we now prevent,” including Hib.

“It didn't cause mild illness. It caused children to die,” Robinson said, recalling the survivors who were left with “deafness, paralysis or lifelong neurologic injury.”

The policy being pushed by the state's surgeon general is “dangerous,” he added.

Jamie Schanbaum's legs and fingers were amputated after she contracted meningitis as a 20-year-old college student in Texas. She traveled from Brooklyn, New York, to testify in support of vaccines, recounting her seven-month hospital stay as she battled the vaccine-preventable disease and the challenges of living without her limbs.

“No one should go through this experience,” Schanbaum said.

“How about the relearning to use my hands? Feed myself? Wipe myself? This is the reality of what it’s like to survive something like this,” she added.

Rise of vaccine skepticism

Vaccination efforts across the country and around the world have stalled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw an explosion in vaccine skepticism. Florida's proposal comes as U.S. Department of Health Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked to reshape the nation's vaccine policies to match his long-standing suspicions about the safety and effectiveness of well-established shots.

Mary Helms, a mother and grandmother from Apalachicola, Florida, referenced Kennedy as she voiced her “full support” for rolling back the mandates.

“Medical choice and medical freedom in all ways is a God-given and sovereign human right,” Helms said.

Susan Sweetin's voiced filled with emotion as she described her then-newborn son being rushed off for a hepatitis B shot that she said "injured" him. Sweetin is a marketing executive for the National Vaccine Information Center, a group connected to Kennedy.

“This is not informed consent. That is coercion. Vaccines should never be tied to a child’s education,” Sweetin said.

Asked if the state consulted national medical experts such as the American Academy of Pediatrics on the rule development, a department representative declined to answer directly, stating: “the rule language is grounded in policy based on considerations that favor parental rights and medical freedom.”

Measles outbreak in South Carolina

Florida's push comes as a monthslong measles outbreak continues in South Carolina, almost entirely among school-age children.

State health officials there have said 116 of the 126 cases have been in children under 18, with two-thirds of them in children from age 5 to 17.

The outbreak has been centered in Spartanburg County, where just 90% of students have all the vaccinees required to be in school — one of the lowest rates in South Carolina. The state has a religious exemption for vaccines, and almost all of the unvaccinated students use it.

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Associated Press writer Jeffrey Collins contributed from Columbia, South Carolina. Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.