Florida’s high-stakes public health experiment with vaccines – Orlando Sentinel

The elimination of vaccine requirements in Florida schools announced by the state’s surgeon general on Wednesday marks a significant shift in how the state has long protected children against contagious diseases.

Now, as the state potentially steps back from those safeguards, Florida finds itself at the center of what could be a high-stakes public health experiment — one with consequences that could ripple from the classroom to the community.

For more than 40 years, Florida law required children entering kindergarten to be immunized against a list of highly contagious diseases. Those rules helped push measles out of classrooms, contained outbreaks of whooping cough and chicken pox, and kept polio a distant memory. While Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo advocates freedom of choic