Surgeon general Joseph Ladapo retreats on his plans after the US president says: ‘You have vaccines that work’

It took barely two days, and some huffs of disapproval from the White House, before Joseph Ladapo’s bold plan to eliminate all vaccine mandates in Florida began to deflate.

The action, the fervently religious state surgeon general had asserted at a fire and brimstone press conference in Tampa, came straight from the heavens: “Who am I, as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body?” he opined, framing the freedom to reject vaccines as a “reflection of God’s light against the darkness of tyranny and oppression”.

Mandates were akin to “slavery”, he said, in comments presumably intended to align with the ongoing anti-vaccination campaign of misinformation and myth of the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy.