Today, the Florida Legislature will vote on a bill that would make it significantly easier for parents to skip their children’s routine childhood vaccinations. The bill would allow exemptions “based on the parent’s religious tenets or practices or conscience,” meaning essentially that parents would no longer need to demonstrate medical or religious reasons for exemptions. Any ideological objection would be considered a valid reason to forgo shots that prevent potentially deadly diseases such as polio, tetanus, and measles.

The proposed changes are the latest salvo in Florida’s war against public health doctrine, from its chafing against pandemic restrictions to its flouting of guidelines around water fluoridation, restrictions for SNAP benefits, and erosion of vaccine requirements. The driving force behind this crusade is state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, whom I wrote about with my former colleague Julianne McShane last year.

Ladapo’s approach to vaccine policy may also be informed by a set of beliefs that sit somewhere between libertarianism and new age mysticism.

During the pandemic, Ladapo quickly made a name for himself with his contrarian approach. On his first day in office in September 2021, he formalized a rule that allowed parents to choose whether to follow school mask guidelines. Later that year, he issued a report recommending against Covid vaccines for healthy children, which flouted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. In 2023, he asked the Food and Drug Administration to stop all Covid vaccines, components of which he claimed could “transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell.” (The FDA called those statements “misleading.”) In 2024, during a measles outbreak, he........

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