Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced yesterday (Sept. 3) that the state would eliminate all vaccine mandates. Not merely COVID-19 mandates, which don’t exist in the land of alligators, but all mandates regarding any vaccines.
“All of them. All of them. Every last one of them,” he declared to applause. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. … It’s wrong. It’s immoral.”
The stunning move by Ladapo fits with his trajectory as an anti-vax doctor-turned-controversial public policy maker. He rose to political prominence in 2020 as he penned Wall Street Journal editorials about the COVID pandemic, even though he wasn’t an infectious disease specialist. He pushed unscientific (and sometimes dangerous) treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin while also opposing mask mandates and criticizing the COVID vaccines. And he did all of that while falsely claiming he was treating COVID patients. While his writings were slammed by scientists and infectious disease experts, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis liked them. In September 2021, DeSantis named Ladapo the state’s surgeon general.
Once in office, Ladapo was accused of altering data about COVID vaccines. And he not only criticized mask mandates but also refused to wear a mask even when asked to while meeting with a state senator about to undergo radiation therapy. A Black Baptist pastor, who had given the benediction at DeSantis’s 2019 inauguration, blasted Ladaop’s refusal to wear a mask as “disrespectful and dishonorable.” The pastor added that he was so “extremely alarmed and saddened” that he would change his voter registration from Republican to independent.
Ladapo’s COVID denialism came out in his anti-vaccine remarks yesterday as he claimed “many people” were misled to get a COVID vaccine and thus “put that poison in their bodies.” But now he wants to stop not just COVID vaccines but all such life-saving measures. And he alluded to Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians (or is it “One Corinthians”) to justify this anti-vax position.
“Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God,” Ladapo declared. “You don’t want to put whatever vaccines in your body? God bless you and I hope you make an informed decision. And that’s how it should be. That is that is a moral, ethical universe, not this nonsense where people who don’t know you are telling you what to put in your temple, the temple of your body. That is a gift from God. They don’t have that right.”
Screengrab as Joseph Ladapo announces he wants to end vaccine mandates in Florida on Sept. 3, 2025.
Ladapo doesn’t actually have the power to end vaccine mandates for public schools as state law currently requires children get immunized against diphtheria, measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, and whooping cough. State lawmakers would have to act to change those requirements. The Florida Department of Health also requires school children be vaccinated against chickenpox, Haemophilus influenzae, hepatitis B, and pneumococcal disease. Ladapo and the DeSantis administration could eliminate those rules without lawmaker approval.
If all of the vaccine mandates are removed, it would make Florida the only state in the nation to not require vaccinations to attend public schools. And doctors and medical experts are already warning about the deadly consequences this could have, rippling out far beyond the porous borders of the Sunshine State. So this issue of A Public Witness dons a mask before carefully treading into the dangerous medical — and religious — anti-vax world of Ladapo.
Freedom Over Community
In a 2022 book Transcend Fear: A Blueprint for Mindful Leadership in Public Health, Ladapo described personal liberty as a divine channel. As he argued in the book, for which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote the foreword, “Freedom is our connection to God and the lifeblood of our souls.” For him, the epitome of faith is an extreme version of individualistic liberty.
Such a radical libertarian philosophy wouldn’t have made sense to Paul as he wrote to the church in Corinth about them being the temple of God. In their collectivist worldview, the idea of prioritizing one’s individual freedom over the rest of the community wouldn’t have been held up as a godly value. Yet, Ladapo takes a line from Paul out of context to justify his politics despite other biblical passages that suggest a more community-focused ethic. And even what Ladapo cites doesn’t work the way he thinks. When Paul in 1 Corinthians 3 and 6 says “you are God’s temple” and “your body is the temple,” the “you” is plural, incorporating the whole congregation into this temple concept. Additionally, in the more individualistic of the two passages (chapter six), Paul makes clear that he’s separating sexual sins from other sins, which would make application to an issue like vaccines problematic.
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