‘A victim of our own success’: Vaccine mandate purge worries Florida pediatricians

By early December, Florida’s health department could revoke several vaccine requirements for school children. 

The state’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, MD, PhD, said Sept. 3 the Florida Department of Health plans to scrap all vaccine mandates. The department said mandates on school vaccines for chickenpox, hepatitis B, Hib influenza and pneumococcal diseases may be lifted within 90 days.

If Florida’s vaccine rate falls as a result, severe illnesses and deaths from preventable diseases will likely increase, said Jennifer Takagishi, MD, vice president of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and division chief of general academic pediatrics at USF Health in Tampa.

The threshold for herd immunity varies by disease, and the threshold for many common diseases range between 85% and 95%. Florida’s vaccine rate currently stands at 89%, Dr. Takagishi said. 

Some counties have lower vaccination rates. For example, among the 617 children between the ages 4 and 18 in Pinellas County, 294 — 47.65% — have a registered religious exemption to vaccination. Other counties have an exemption rate below 2%, according to the Florida health department’s dashboard, which was last updated in 2023. 

“For us, it feels like we’ve become a victim of our own success,” Dr. Takagishi told Becker’s. “Because vaccines have been so successful, a lot of people have never seen a lot of the diseases that will come back.”

As Florida officials mull whether to remove some school-based vaccine requirements, parents and pediatricians are flooding the AAP with questions, according to Rana Alissa, MD, president of the AAP’s Florida chapter and a pediatrician at UF Health in Jacksonville, Fla. 

One bright spot is that, “in the chaos and confusion,” Dr. Alissa said, “I’ve never seen the medical community so united.”

A reduction in the list of school-based vaccine requirements will endanger children and adults alike, Drs. Alissa and Takagishi said. Transplant recipients who take immunosuppressants, for example, will be at a higher risk for infectious diseases. 

Dr. Takagishi said removing these requirements could cause more unnecessary admissions in emergency departments, which are already overcrowded across the U.S. 

“The only thing that we can do to protect ourselves is to vaccinate,” Dr. Takagishi said. “And it just hurts my heart to think that we’re going to go back to the days before vaccines, where people died of measles and whooping cough and polio.”

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