Florida Drops Four School Shot Mandates by Rule. The Legislature Never Touched Them.
Florida's health department is moving to strip four vaccines off the school-entry list: hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib, and pneumococcal. Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo signed the proposed rule August 20. Public comment runs 21 days, then DOH can file it.
Those four were never in statute. They were agency rules, so the department can repeal them without the legislature. MMR, polio, and DTaP still sit in Florida law — and nobody even filed a bill in 2026 to touch those.
The rule also widens exemptions from religious-only to moral and ethical beliefs, and lets parents and college students keep their records out of the state vaccine database.
Ladapo last September, standing up the broader repeal push: "Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don't have that right. Your body is a gift from God."
If the shot is worth getting, parents can still get it. What's ending is the school-as-enforcer model for four vaccines the legislature never wrote into law.
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