Dr. Joseph Ladapo Leads a Reformation

The Florida Surgeon General pledges to end vaccine mandates, thereby affirming the primacy of liberty in the United States.

On Wednesday, September 3, 2025, the Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, announced at a news conference that, “The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida law.”

This is a historic moment in cultural and political history, akin to the American Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 and to Martin Luther posting his 95 Theses on the door Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517.

I mention the latter because it’s clear that vaccination has become more of a religious than a scientific enterprise. In pledging to end vaccine mandates, Dr. Ladapo challenged a key tenet of vaccine orthodoxy—namely, the insistence that all children must be vaccinated to protect the community, including the vaccinated community.

Because the diseases and populations are similar, differences among countries on this issue imply it is indeed a problem of vaccine ideology, not infectious disease public health practice. Dr. Drew Pinsky pointed this out in a recent tweet:

Votaries of the Vaccine Cult believe that salvation from infectious diseases can only be attained by participating in the sacrament of vaccination. This strange notion was expressed in a silver coin issued by the Vatican in 2022, commemorating COVID-19 vaccines.

The Numista catalogue describes the coin as depicting “a young person who is ready to receive the vaccine.” Note that this verbal formulation is identical to that of describing a communicant “who is ready to receive the host”—in Italian “pronto a ricevere l’Eucaristia.”

Votaries of the Vaccine Cult reacted just as we expected—with extravagant expressions of outrage and dire warnings that the dragon of infectious disease mortality would come charging back into Florida as soon as vaccine mandates are rescinded.

These reactions were identical to those in the U.K. and U.S. when the city council of Leicester, England announced in 1885 that it would no longer enforce Parliament’s 1853 smallpox vaccine mandate. As we relate in our new book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality:

By 1887, only about ten percent of newborns in the city were vaccinated. Prominent vaccine advocates issued grave warnings that Leicester would suffer from this precipitous decline of vaccine coverage. However, in the decades that followed, precisely the opposite proved to be the case, with Leicester enjoying one of the lowest rates of smallpox morbidity and mortality in Great Britain.

In 1914, almost thirty years after Leicester implemented its new policies, New York Times still warned that people of the city were in “for a dreadful reckoning.” It never happened. In 1948, Parliament rescinded the Vaccine Act, which prompted C. Killick Millard, MD, DSc to write a paper for the British Medical Journal on “The End of Compulsory Vaccination” in which he remarked:

. . . in Leicester during the 62 years since infant vaccination was abandoned there have been only 53 deaths from smallpox, and in the past 40 years only two deaths. Moreover, the experience in Leicester is confirmed and strongly confirmed by that of the whole country. Vaccination has been steadily declining ever since the “conscience clause” was introduced, until now nearly two-thirds of the children born are not vaccinated. Yet smallpox mortality has also declined until now quite negligible. In the fourteen years 1933–1946 there were only 28 deaths in a population of some 40 million, and among those 28 there was not a single death of an infant under 1 year of age.

In his 1980 paper, the medical historian Stuart Fraser observed:

Leicester stands as an example, probably the first, where measures other than total reliance on vaccination were introduced success- fully to eradicate the disease from the community. . . . A system of immediate notification, isolation, and quarantine of contacts is one which has proved particularly effective in containing and limiting smallpox.

I think it’s a marvelous twist of history that we needed a young man from Nigeria to remind us that, here in the United States, we value individual liberty over the protections promised by a paternalistic state. Being a free citizen necessitates making well-informed decisions, rational tradeoffs, and weighing the risks and benefits of injecting substances into our children. Bravo, Dr. Ladapo!

On Friday, I called Mrs. Brianna Ladapo, who happens to be a friend, to ask how she and her husband are holding up. She exclaimed that my call was a coincidence, as she had just published an essay on her new Substack newsletter about her reflections on this historic moment. Please click on the image below to read Brianna’s inspiring and poignant essay, and be sure to like and share it with your friends.