It was a contentious week in the world of health policy, public health mandates, and political wrangling over the health of American citizens. A spate of firings and resignations from the Centers for Disease Control grabbed the headlines. A Senate hearing with Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr. devolved into chaos as Senators blustered, yelled, and misrepresented their way into the headlines as they grappled with the most popular cabinet member in recent years on the topics of vaccines, personnel decisions, and his alleged lack of fitness for the position.
It should come as no surprise that the most flamboyant theatrics in defense of the status quo were performed by those Senators most lavishly funded by the pharmaceutical industry, like Bill Cassidy, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Repeatedly, the claims of industry-funded mouthpieces such as the American Medical Association, the American Association of Pediatrics were held up by Senators like Ron Wyden to try to bully Secretary Kennedy into submission on several fronts.
Apparently ignorant of these organizations' blatant industry ties, the committee members almost seemed surprised when Secretary Kennedy pointed out that these organizations, like the Senators themselves, are directly subsidized by pharmaceutical lobbying efforts and campaign donations. Despite the dramatic outbursts from the members, when Senator Kennedy was allowed to speak uninterrupted, he was able to relate important information to the public.
At the same time, state-level progress is ongoing on the health freedom front.
Americans' health choices are not only informed and/or constrained by Washington DC's health research, regulatory, and recommendation-sharing agencies, but are also impacted at the state level.
In general, states control or regulate health choices through vaccination mandates in school systems, state medical standards and laws, pesticide and food regulations, and public health agency powers. Because the US Constitution does not explicitly permit federal control over health, those powers, are reserved to the states (the glaring exception being PREP Act emergency law for medical countermeasures and certain diseases, which blatantly erodes constitutional rights and protections to this day for covid-19, pandemic flu, and other conditions).
This week, an important shift in the health freedom landscape occurred in Florida. That state's Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo called publicly and unambiguously for the end of all vaccine mandates in the state. He was supported publicly and explicitly in this effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Interestingly, rather than engage on the very questionable and outright fraudulent scientific claims of those who argue for coercive mandates in terms of the alleged protection afforded by the vaccinations, or their supposed safety, Dr. Ladapo in his public speech cast this decision in moral and ethical terms—in the language of right and wrong—echoing HFDF’s messaging on this critical issue.
He stated that his health department will be:
"working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida law. Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. Who am I as a government [...] to tell you what to put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? Government does not have that right."
This quintessentially American statement set off a predictable firestorm of criticism from industry-funded academia, from pharmaceutical advertising-subsidized media personalities, and industry-endowed think tanks. While his goals explicitly embrace autonomy in health decisions particularly for parents, his detractors alleged he would take away medical options for children, with no evidence of such a prohibition.
Ridiculously, his critics also argue that allowing medical choice would usher in apocalyptic infectious disease scenarios that conveniently ignore that very few countries around the world have any coercive mandates, and industrialized nations without mandates have not experienced these predicted waves of death from measles, polio, tetanus, and whooping cough.
Dr. Ladapo's subsequent statement to the media that "[y]ou have sovereignty over your body" sounds like common sense to most Americans. The honesty and directness of such a statement, uttered by the Surgeon General of one of the largest states in the country, may represent a political turning point. HFDF is cautiously optimistic this is the case, as Idaho passed landmark legislation written and supported by HFDF’s president in the 2025 session outlawing almost all medical mandates and Utah, and now Florida move toward a legal and regulatory landscape that increasingly embraces the wisdom, informed skepticism, and instincts of the public rather than relying on fear, paternalism, and control.
This is not to say that the underlying scientific issues don't matter, as informed consent is not possible without high quality information presented in a coherent context. HFDF and our allies will continue to point out the weakness of the efficacy claims made by clinical research on vaccines that almost universally were not tested against the most basic component, an inert placebo. We will continue to question the lack of real-world effectiveness data as well, which relies on poor methods, research fraud, and misrepresentation of findings. We will continue to highlight the danger of unstudied or known toxic ingredients that are nonetheless included in mandated vaccines, and exempted from legal liability for injury under current vaccine law and PREP Act emergency law.
More fundamentally though, the issue at hand is the existence of coercion in medicine at all, as it violates the core ethical principles enshrined in the Nuremburg code of 1947, following the Second World War. As Dr Ladapo noted in a subsequent interview on cable news:
"[...]n medical ethics, you cannot obtain informed consent for a medical treatment if there's coercion. And a mandate is coercion, because a mandate indicates that, if you don't comply, [...] there's a punishment or some negative adverse effect. So, that you cannot obtain informed consent, which means you cannot provide ethical practice. So the vaccine mandates absolutely, positively should not be something that is part of our society."[i]
While there is much to be done to realize this vision of schooling without coercive medical mandates in Florida, and the legislative battle will be a difficult one, HFDF has led the way on establishing medical freedom as societal norm, wholeheartedly embraces the direction that Florida is moving toward, and calls for more states to join in the movement for health freedom and bodily autonomy.
[i] State of the Union, CNN: Interview, September 7, 2025
