Bulwark Takes - Measles Outbreaks Loom as Florida Scraps Vaccine Mandates

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Florida could become the first state to scrap vaccine mandates, and experts warn the fallout would be calamitous. Sam Stein and Jonathan Cohn examine the health risks and the politics driving this crisis.

Being active, playing with your kids, exploring the best trails, all these activities can lead to pain. Introducing Kalea, 6X Extra Strength Pain Relief Cream. It temporarily relieves aches and pains of muscles and joints associated with simple back ache, strains, sprains, and arthritis. Available online at Kalea.ca. Or find Kalea 6X Extra Strength Pain Relief Cream at your local shopper's drug mart. Get back to doing what you love. Kalea. Order online at Kalea.ca. This product may not be right for you.

Always read and follow the label. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the board, joined by Jonathan Cohn, author of The Breakdown. We are here with some breaking news from Florida. State that, are you from Florida? Are you, you have ties to Florida? What is your connection to Florida, Jonathan? Yeah, I grew up in Florida. I blame it's all on you then. Okay. Florida's, Florida's doing Florida things, folks. The announcement this afternoon from Governor Ronda Santis and the state's head of health, Dr. Joseph Lodapop. Supergeon General Florida, they are going to try to eliminate childhood vaccination mandates in the state of Florida. I repeat that. They are going to end vaccine mandates, including for school children, in the state of Florida.

If they do so, they become the first state to reject that practice, which has been, you know, basically medical doctrine for decades now, helping to reduce tons of diseases for children, prevent outbreaks and so on and so forth. I'm going to read a few quotes from Lidepo, and then I will get your take, Cohn. But look, let's just set up the scene here. This guy is a vocal, persistent vaccine skeptic. He has been on a mission to end vaccine usage or to diminish it. Since COVID, he came out of that COVID backlash era. DeSantis appointed him.

DeSantis himself is a vaccine skeptic. So the Surgeon General sends this. Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? Your body is a gift from God. He said the administration would be working to end all vaccine mandates, quote, every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. So it's unclear how this is going to happen. The legislature probably has to make some sort of move on this, although we'll see.

But what's your take on how calamitous this is for the state? Oh, I think it's pretty calamitous. I think it's definitely calamitous if they pass it. I think it's pretty worrisome, even if they don't pass it, because simply by saying this, he is increasing the likelihood that more people will not get their kids vaccinated. We are already seeing declining rates of vaccination. We are seeing a partisan split on that, which we can talk about it in a minute.

But, you know, we know what happens. when people aren't getting vaccinated, when kids aren't getting vaccinated. We just saw it in Texas. We had an outbreak. The two children died, the first children to die in this country of measles in decades. And that's what happens. When people don't get vaccinated, that is what happens. And that's the situation we're looking at the future in Florida and maybe beyond Florida.

All right. So let me ask you this, because a lot of people who watch this will say, well, what's wrong with the Surgeon General's proclamation that it's your choice to get vaccinated. If a parent wanted to protect their child, they can get him or her vaccinated before a single school. And that should properly give them the immunity and protection that they need. So what actually is medically wrong or morally wrong with that? Yeah. So it's not just putting your, it's not just a decision about your own child's risk. First of all, a lot of these vaccines are not perfect. You can get vaccinated against a disease, but you can still be healthy and still get the disease. You can still get measles. You can still get hooping cough. It doesn't happen

often, but you know, you are, you are at risk if you're exposed to it. So that's, that's number one. Number two, why with these childhood diseases where the immunity doesn't, it's not right away? It takes a few months or a few years to build up. Well, you've got kids coming home, bringing, you know, bringing a disease home to younger siblings, to babies who are at risk of these diseases. You have immunocompromised. You know, kids who maybe have been vaccinated, their parents chose to protect them, but now, you know, what if they're on chemotherapy for cancer and they have a weakened immune system. They're exposed. And then of course, you're reducing the level of herd immunity, which increases the circulation of these diseases, making it more likely

that all of those people will get sick. And by the way, one other little piece of this, you know, there are, you know, some of these, you know, we think of most of these child diseases as viruses, but some are bacteria, some are, you know, we do treat with antibiotics. Well, they're becoming antibiotic resistant. That's been a problem with pertussis, actually, hooping cough. So, you know, much better to prevent it, if you can, with the vaccine, or at least reduce its incidence, than having to go back and treat it and increase the antibiotic resistance and make it harder for us to treat in the future. So it's not just your kid. It's everybody's kid. I mean, look, if it's just your kid, why not let parents send their kids to elementary school and smoke? Right? I mean, you know, this is your kid. If you want to let your kid, you know, be exposed to it. My mom, my mom, let me do that. And I ended up just fine. No, she did not. No, it's a disaster. And also, it's not just kids, let's be clear.

There are teachers in that classroom, too, who also have all these complications and can be immunocompromised and deserve protections. I will note, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, not related to this, but it was about restoring trust at the CDC. And if you read through it, it's really telling the word prevention is listed three times, preventing prevention, twice just to describe the title of the CDC, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, wants to talk about how they have a biothreat radar detection system to prevent catastrophe if they spot some pathogens overseas.

It's very clear in this op-ed that he does not view the mission of the CDC to do preventative health. It's reactive health. And I think that gets to the larger ethos here, which is what they don't, there's a view that vaccines are either problematic on their own right, cause damages, which they scientifically are disproven from doing but also that there's not really a need to be preventative in health care that you can be reactive to it and i think that's what's playing role here i mean look kennedy's philosophy seems to be and we've talked about this we've seen this um you should keep yourself healthy and if you keep yourself healthy you have a good chance of not getting sick but then once you get

sick you know you know then once you know the best thing you can do at that point is get yourself exposed to these disease and you make yourself stronger we should you know vaccines are this artificial intervention that somehow make you weaker. And, you know, that is just, that is just nonsense. And, you know, we know, I mean, what would the world be without the polio vaccine, without the measles vaccine? Well, we know what that world would be. It would be many more people dead, many more people disabled, many more people harmed. And that's just, you know, it's just not part of his playbook. Yeah, I want to talk about this in the broader context of what's happening here, which is just a souring on the importance of childhood vaccinations from primarily Republicans.

You flag this in our Slack channel, but in August of 2024, we had a Gallup survey that looked at how far fewer in the U.S. regard childhood vaccinations as important, but the decline really was among Republican and Republican-leaning independence, basically went from around 2019. There was about, you know, Republican and Republican leaners were about 52% in saying that when asked how important it is that parents get their children vaccinated, extremely important, very important, someone important, 52% were important. And now it's down to 26%. And I mean, that's just, that's a shocking number. People have really soured, not on, we're not just talking about the COVID vaccine. We're talking about childhood vaccinations. What accounts for that?

Yeah, I mean, this used to be a bipartisan cause. I mean, you always had some people who were anti-vaccine, but it was scattered. Including on the left. Yeah, you had a ton of people on the left. ton of bill, not a ton. You had your fringe in the left. You had your fringe in the right. And everyone else thought vaccines were a great thing. Partly, that was an age and memory thing. If you're old enough, you remember what it was like when polio, you know, killed large numbers of people and put, you know, you had kids, you know, sitting in iron lungs and you had thousands of kids dying from measles every year or a hooping cough. And, you know, because when those memories were fresh when those vaccines came. People were elated. They couldn't wait to sign up their kids.

And then, you know, let's just be clear, the majority of Americans still believe in vaccines. The majority of American parents still want to get their kids vaccinated. But, you know, the timing is, I mean, I don't think there's any mystery here, right? We, you know, there's been some, you know, over time, some erosion maybe, as those memories have faded, but not that much. but maybe it made people more vulnerable to other arguments, which we now see starting with COVID, we've seen it politicized, and we've seen people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services out there, constantly talking down vaccines, making up things about harms they cause, and that sinks in. And, you know, again, the more partisan this becomes, you know,

it's like everything else in this country. Everything now follows from what political tribe you're in. you know, we got RFK who works with Trump, and Trump sometimes says one thing and says the other thing. That's the sort of anti-vaccine party. Well, you're going to see confidence in vaccines declining on the Republican side. Yeah, no, no doubt. And it gets to what I think is the real damage that's been done by the actual pro-vaccine voices within the Republican Party not standing up more forcefully, right? It's like when you have people like Bill Cassidy saying, I'm willing to see and work with RFK Jr., because I think I can control some of his worst impulses. when you have Mitch McConnell, who, you know, was limited, obviously, because of his age,

but not speaking more forcefully, he's a polio survivor. You know, that becomes a problem. And Trump, too, bears a lot of responsibility for this. This is the man who touted Operation Warp Speed, said it was, you know, God's gift to the world and that he deserved all the credit for, and then just ran away from it when he got a little bit of pushback for it. I think people, to your point about memories in how limited they are and why this might be playing role. I think people don't recall what happened in California in the winter of 2014, 2015, at a Disney World, which I think, or was it Disneyland?

Disneyland, it was California. I'm from Florida, so we pay attention to these things. Yeah, you know, quite. This was a big thing back then. I'm going to just read from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. You might have heard of the agency in the news a little bit recently. They did a retrospective on what was a serious measles outbreak at the Disney theme park. And what happened was a patient was hospitalized unvaccinated child aged 11 with a rash on December 28th. The only notable travel history during the exposure period was a visit to one of two adjacent Disney theme parks located in Orange

County, California. That same day was reported that four additional suspected measles cases in California residents and two in Utah residents, all of whom reported visiting one or both Disney theme parks. By January 7th, seven Californic measles cases have been confirmed. As of February 11th, a total of 125 measles cases with rash occurring during December 28th through February 8th have been confirmed in U.S. residents connected with the outbreak of these patients 110 were California residents. It went on from there. Almost all these cases were people who were either unvaccinated or had unknown or undocumented vaccinated status. this was a measles outbreak at a Disney theme park.

We are about to enter a period potentially in Florida home of another Disney theme park where they are going to stop or try to stop childhood vaccination requirements. Is it reasonable to say we can expect things like this to happen? I think it's virtually certain we're going to see things like this happen. We actually had another measles outbreak in Florida a couple years ago with the current administration in Florida where they advise, they, you know, the same surge in general for the state was saying he didn't want to sort of, you know, exclude, you know, he didn't want to quarantine kids at home if they had the measles and said, you know, getting your kid vaccinated should be, you know, is a personal decision. Yeah, I think we're going to see this at Disney World and Universal Studios and we're going to see the movie theaters and we're going to see it parks and we're going to see it at basketball games and theaters and we're going to see it at schools, which was the whole reason we established.

these vaccination mandates, if you want to send your kid to school, was to prevent that. Talk a little bit about the actual mandate itself and what it entails and what kids have to do. Yeah, I mean, typically, if you want to send your kid to school, you have to certify that they've gotten their vaccinations. If you're a parent, you've done this before, you know what it's like. Most states now have exemptions. I don't have to go through. I haven't actually gone through recently and looked at every state. Religious exemption. Now there's a religious exemption. Some are wider than others. I know Texas has a personal belief vaccination exemption. That's pretty broad. I think almost anybody can use it. And look, I don't, you know, I think that's not ideal. We do see, you know, with more people

becoming vaccine-sceptical, vaccine-hesident, we see levels going down again, creating a greater likelihood of the situations we see we just saw in Texas. But there's still a difference between a vaccine mandate that has lots of big exceptions in it and no mandate. I mean, that's taking things, you know, three or four more steps down the road. All right. Well, good times for your home state, buddy. Yeah, so always some news there. Always some news there.

Yeah, it's always exciting. I'll give him that. Thank you for doing this. Appreciate you getting on quickly talking about it. For folks who are watching this, we're going to be covering the RFK Jr. hearing tomorrow on the Hill. As Senate Finance Committee is having him up there, they're going to be talking about the CDC reorg that's happening, or I should say chaos.

I'm sure someone will ask about this too. Very curious to see what he says. Actually kind of scared to see what he says. Thank you guys for watching. Appreciate that. Subscribe to the feed. We have more talks like this, sadly. Till then, take care.