04/09/2025
In late 1800s England, smallpox vaccination had already been available for decades, and, by then, most towns required it. But, in a town called Leicester, anti-vaccination activists gained political power by railing against “government tyranny.”
The city council stopped enforcing vaccination laws and promoted quarantine instead.
As you may guess, within a few years, Leicester became a hotspot for smallpox epidemics, and it was often children who paid the price. Other towns looked on in horror as the Leicester community, convinced it was bravely defending freedom, learned too late that germs don’t care about slogans.
There’s a famous photograph from Leicester’s smallpox isolation hospital of two brothers, one vaccinated and one not. That is what vaccine-preventable disease looks like up close.
Vaccines have been so effective that we’ve forgotten the scale of suffering they erased.
In 1850, the average life expectancy was barely above 40 years, and 10-15% of children died before their first birthday.
Fast forward to 2025. Today, Florida’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, stood at a podium and declared that vaccine requirements for children “drip with disdain and slavery.”
Governor Ron DeSantis backed him up, saying Florida will move to eliminate all state vaccine requirements - including the school immunizations that have kept children safe from polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, whooping cough, and hepatitis B for decades.
The outcome would be so catastrophically obvious, it seems like the type of thing that you could only find in a history book: “…Back in the early 21st century, Floridan politicians dismantled the vaccine safeguards that had nearly eliminated childhood polio and measles. Shockingly, the diseases came back...”
If they follow through, Florida will create a natural experiment for the world to watch in disgust, counting down the months or years until outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases return.
To be clear - this is not guaranteed. While Surgeon General Ladapo and Governor DeSantis seem to prize their opinions over medical evidence, the process of actually rolling back children’s vaccine requirements would require approval from the Florida legislature. There’s still a chance lawmakers will be clearheaded enough to recognize it for what it is: a guaranteed public health disaster
If they do go ahead, the only question is how many preventable cases of polio, measles, and whooping cough it would take - over how many years - before they admit this was a politically clouded mistake. How many children would needlessly suffer or die because it has become politically chic to spurn childhood vaccines?
I’ve spoken about Ladapo before. He is a quack doctor, hand-picked by DeSantis in the run-up to his failed presidential bid, when Florida was being branded as the “medical freedom” state. Ladapo has little grasp of vaccine biology or infectious disease, and has even been accused of manipulating conclusions in a COVID vaccine manuscript to exaggerate risks. In Florida, facts don’t seem to matter.
If Florida chooses to embrace the very diseases that once filled children’s hospitals and graveyards, I can say with confidence that I would not live there if I was planning to start a family1. I would be packing up and leaving the Pathogen Peninsula in the dust, watching from a distance with sadness in my heart for the children left behind.
History already wrote this script. We know how it ends.
-.noc
