PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. — The Florida Department of Health on Wednesday took a step toward eliminating four childhood vaccine mandates — a move the department can take without the Legislature’s sign-off or the governor’s signature.

The proposal, which was debated during a Friday workshop in Panama City Beach, is the first tangible step in Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s plan to eliminate all vaccine mandates in Florida.

Florida statute requires vaccinations for diseases like polio, measles and tetanus. Changing those requirements takes the Legislature’s action.

But the Department of Health has for years required four additional vaccines for school attendance: Varicella, or chickenpox; Hepatitis B; Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib; and Pneumococcal conjugate, or PCV15/20.

At Friday’s meeting, a panel from the Department of Health heard a mixed response from the public about the state’s plan to strike those four vaccine mandates.

Those in favor of the state’s proposal expressed a lack of trust in major pharmaceutical companies, saying the companies were pushing immunizations for profit or being dishonest in their studies.

Preston Judd, a Republican candidate for the Florida House, said that if vaccines were so important, pharmaceutical companies should offer them for free.

“Would hospitals be jamming vaccines down our throats? Would they be treating our children as pincushions?” Judd said. “Break away from the sway of Big Pharma and think critically and honestly.”

But the panel also heard from several doctors who said striking the mandates would undo public health advancements that have helped save and protect children’s lives.

Several public commenters said they were old enough to recall how diseases terrorized children and families before the widespread availability of vaccines.

One pediatrician with four decades of experience, Dr. Paul Robinson, said he can still picture a 2-year-old who was left partially paralyzed by a Hib infection. But he said after the Hib vaccine was introduced in the late ’80s, he stopped seeing cases.

“Let me be clear,” said Robinson, who practices medicine in Tallahassee. “Vaccines eliminated one of the most devastating childhood infections of my career. This is not about parental choice, it’s about the public health and protecting the children that cannot be vaccinated.”

Jamie Schanbaum, a Brooklyn resident who spoke at Friday’s meeting, asked panelists to be patient with her, noting it was difficult to flip through notes with her amputated fingers.

Schanbaum said she knows “what it’s like to survive a preventable disease” after getting infected with meningitis in college in 2008. She said she spent seven months in the hospital watching her limbs “rotting and decaying before my eyes.”

“This is the reality of what it’s like to survive something like this,” she said.

Experts say the vaccines under review by the state now have helped nearly eradicate the spread of diseases that can be debilitating or deadly.

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, said that infections from Hib or pneumococcal disease can lead to meningitis, which can kill kids or leave them with serious brain disorders and developmental delays.

But since the spread of vaccines, Sharfstein said those cases have been essentially “wiped out.”

“None of these are pathogens that have been eliminated from the face of the earth,” Sharfstein, who did not attend the meeting, said. “These are all around. It’s more than just playing with matches, it’s setting a fire that’s going to harm children.”

The state Department of Health on Friday also proposed expanding the state’s vaccine opt-out form.

Parents can already exempt their children from vaccine requirements based on religious grounds. Under the proposed rule, a parent would be able to cite their personally held belief as a reason to exempt their child.

But some speakers said broadening the exemption wasn’t enough, and that vaccines should not be required at all.

Laura Hartman, a former registered nurse, told the panel that she became a minister in 2022 to assist families who wanted religious exemptions from vaccines but were having a hard time getting exempted for other reasons.

Florida‘s childhood immunization rates are already on the decline. The number of immunized kindergartners dropped from about 94% in 2020 to about 89% this year.

Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said that when vaccines are mandated, use increases. When New York and California limited their acceptable vaccine exemptions, there was a dramatic increase in the vaccination rate.

Offit, in a call with the Times/Herald, said there has been an erosion of trust in vaccines, and said that “in the midst of all this, our Florida surgeon general has decided we should make vaccines even less used.”

“It’s hard for me to understand how he thinks,” he said.

Ladapo was not present at the meeting.

Once the Department of Health’s final rule is filed, it can take around three to four months for that rule to be initiated, meaning the four vaccines could be out of the state rule by the spring.

Emma Spencer, a division director with the Department of Health, said people can share their input by emailing vaccinerule@flhealth.gov. Spencer said the department is encouraging people to submit their thoughts by Dec. 22.

Ladapo announced his plan to strike down all state vaccine mandates this September, likening vaccine mandates to “slavery” and promising to end “every last one of them.”

His plan has been fiercely opposed by public health experts across the U.S., who warn it could lead to a dangerous spike in preventable disease.

It has also faced some hesitancy from President Donald Trump, who said in September that “you have vaccines that work, they just pure and simple work.”

“When you don’t have controversy at all, people should take it,” Trump said.

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