JACKSONVILLE, Florida — Emily Frattarelly was chasing her 18-month-old daughter around a jungle gym in the San Marco neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida, the day after Florida surgeon general Joseph A. Ladapo announced plans to end all of the state’s vaccine requirements.
She wholeheartedly supported ending the mandate, which Ladapo compared to slavery. “Every last one is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” the surgeon general said. Frattarelly’s views sounded just like Ladapo’s.
“No one except family should have a say over medical things,” said Frattarelly, 24, who called herself a Republican and told me that politics was one of the biggest reasons why she and her husband decided to move to Florida from St. Louis. “I think that, to me personally, is so much more American than what we had in place: just the right to choose that for your own children.”
At parks, playgrounds, and soccer fields across Florida, the announcement that parents could get full control over which vaccines their kids get—and no longer need to vaccinate them at all to send them to public school—provoked a wide range of reactions. While opinions about vaccine mandates were divided along ideological lines, many parents told me that they feel torn about how to reconcile their views on parental rights with their responsibilities as citizens.
