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Florida’s Anti-Vax Misogyny and Trump’s Hypocrisy
The Florida surgeon general believes you have sovereignty over your own body... unless you’re a woman!
Sep 11, 2025
On September 3, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo made news again. With a grinning Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at his side, he announced that his state would no longer require vaccines for children. Even more shocking were Dr. Ladapo’s subsequent admissions on national television.
Laced throughout were Republican hypocrisy and misogyny to which US President Donald Trump added an exclamation point a few days later.
“A Gift From God”
Describing Florida’s new anti-vaccine policy, Dr. Ladapo said, “Your body is a gift from God.” He added that the administration would be “working to end” all vaccine mandates. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
On September 7, he tried to defend his actions on CNN’s “State of the Union”:
Anchor Jake Tapper: “Before you made this decision to lift vaccine mandates for Florida, which include obviously public schools, did your department do any data analysis, did you do any data projections of how many new cases of these diseases there will be in Florida, once you remove vaccine mandates?”
Ladapo: “Absolutely not….There is this conflation of the science and sort of what is the right and wrong thing to do… I’m saying it’s an issue of right and wrong.”
Tapper confronted Dr. Ladapo with facts: 82% of Florida parents with kids in school wanted mandatory vaccines for children; every medical organization in the country (American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Florida Medical Association) urged mandatory vaccines for children; and even Florida Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) supported Florida’s existing vaccine mandate, which allows religious exemptions.
Tapper: “All of these people are wrong, and you’re right.”
Ladapo: “Casting it in that way is not what I would do. It’s not how I would look at it.”
Dr. Ladapo then explained why facts don’t matter: “I share what is the right thing to do. Whether it’s popular or not…. It’s really about ethics. Is it really appropriate for a government or any other entity to dictate to you what you should put in your body? It is absolutely not appropriate.”
Then came Dr. Ladapo’s money quote: “You have sovereignty over your body.”
He forgot an important GOP caveat: unless you’re a woman.
Hypocrisy and Mysogyny
Dr. Ladapo and Gov. DeSantis campaigned to defeat a Florida abortion-rights measure on the November 2024 ballot. During that effort, Dr. Ladapo signed a letter to Florida TV stations telling them to stop running an abortion rights ad, asserting that it was false and dangerous. His letter also said that broadcasters could face criminal prosecution.
A federal court enjoined Dr. Ladapo’s actions as a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech and barred him from taking any further action to coerce or intimidate broadcasters running the commercials.
The abortion-rights initiative received 57% of the popular vote, but failed to meet the 60% supermajority required for adoption.
And Then Came Trump
But when it comes to misogyny and hypocrisy among government leaders, Trump has few peers. The day after Dr. Ladapo’s appearance on CNN, Trump addressed his newly-created Religious Liberty Commission at the Museum of the Bible. He boasted that Washington DC’s crime rate was down 87% and asserted that it would be down even more—100%—if domestic violence wasn’t included in the city’s crime statistics:
Much lesser things, things that take place in the home, they call crime. You know, they’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, ‘This was a crime, see?’ So now I can’t claim 100%.
The federal government has long recognized domestic violence as a national public health and safety crisis.
Among homicides in the United States, intimate partners kill almost 50% of female and 10% of male victims, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Family Violence.
A national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 4 in 10 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced physical or sexual violence or stalking by an intimate partner.
An average of 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States—more than 12 million women and men over the course of a single year.
One in 4 women (24.3%) and 1 in 7 men (13.8%) aged 18 and older in the US have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
The same day Trump appeared at the Religious Liberty Commission, the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed E. Jean Carroll’s $83.3 million verdict against Trump for defamation. She had accused him of sexual assault in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman’s in Manhattan; he said that her claim was “totally false.” A jury found that Trump had acted with malice in defaming her.
The Epstein Story Gets Worse
Before September 8 ended, the dead hand of Jeffrey Epstein grabbed Trump again. For months, Trump had denied sending a signed sketch outlining a naked woman for inclusion in the child sex trafficker’s “50th-birthday book.” In addition to vehement denials, he sued The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for publishing the sketch.
The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Epstein estate for the “birthday book.” On September 8, the committee’s Democrats released the page of the book on which that sketch appeared. The signature “Donald” is remarkably similar to Trump’s other signed notes at the time, although the White House still denied that it was his.
Meanwhile, on September 4, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was trying to help quell Trump’s ongoing Epstein debacle when he said that Trump had been an “FBI informant to try and take this [Epstein] stuff down.” Three days later, Johnson was eating those ridiculous words.
It’s All About Faith… in Marketing
In his hour-long rambling before the Religious Liberty Commission on September 8, Trump urged, “We have to bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before.”
Trump also said that he was donating his personal family Bible for display at the museum.
News reports of his appearance don’t indicate whether Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bibles were on sale at the event. The autographed version is $1,000. The Presidential, First Lady, Vice President, Veteran, Platinum, Golden Age, and Inauguration Editions are $99.99 each. Trump earned $1.3 million from his Bible sales in 2024.
And don’t forget to check out Trump crypto, pumpkin spice, MAGA caps, jackets, tote bags, tumblers, gold sneakers, pickleball equipment…
If you don’t live near a Trump Store, those items and more are available at his online shop.
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'Cruelty': US Appeals Court Blocks Order to Shut Down Alligator Alcatraz
"The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening!" said Florida Immigrant Coalition's deputy director.
Sep 04, 2025
Two judges appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit by President Donald Trump issued a Thursday decision that allows a newly established but already notorious immigrant detention center in Florida, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, to stay open.
Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida sought "to halt the unlawful construction" of the site. Last month, Judge Kathleen Williams—appointed by former President Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida—ordered the closure of the facility within 60 days.
However, on Thursday, Circuit Judges Elizabeth Branch and Barbara Lagoa blocked Williams' decision, concluding that "the balance of the harms and our consideration of the public interest favor a stay of the preliminary injunction."
Judge Adalberto Jordan, an Obama appointee, issued a brief but scathing dissent. He wrote that the majority "essentially ignores the burden borne by the defendants, pays only lip service to the abuse of discretion standard, engages in its own factfinding, declines to consider the district court's determination on irreparable harm, and performs its own balancing of the equities."
The 11th Circuit's ruling was cheered by the US Department of Homeland Security, Republican Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who declared in a video that "Alligator Alcatraz is, in fact, like we've always said, open for business."
Uthmeier's communications director, Jeremy Redfern, collected responses to the initial ruling by state and federal Democrats, and urged them to weigh in on social media. Florida state Sen. Shevrin "Shev" Jones (D-34) did, stressing that "cruelty is still cruelty."
In a Thursday statement, Florida Immigrant Coalition deputy director Renata Bozzetto said that "the 11th Circuit is allowing atrocities to happen by reversing the injunction that helped to paralyze something that has been functioning as an extrajudicial site in our own state! The Everglades Detention Camp isn't just an environmental threat; it is also a huge human rights crisis."
"Housing thousands of men in tents in the middle of a fragile ecosystem puts immense strain on Florida's source environment, but even more troublesome, it disregards human rights and our constitutional commitments," Bozzetto continued. "This is a place where hundreds of our neighbors were illegally held, were made invisible within government systems, and were subjected to inhumane heat and unbearable treatment. The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening! The only just solution is to shut this facility down and ensure that no facility like this opens in our state!"
"Lastly, it is imperative that we as a nation uphold the balance of powers that this country was founded on," she added. "That is what makes this country special! Calling judges who rule against you 'activists' flies in the face of our democracy. It is a huge tell that AG Uthmeier expressed this as a 'win for President Trump's agenda,' as if the courts were to serve as political weapons. This demonstrates the clear partisan games they are playing with people's lives and with our democracy."
While Alligator Alcatraz has drawn widespread criticism for the conditions in which detainees are held, the suit is based on the government's failure to follow a law that requires an environmental review, given the facility's proximity to surrounding wetlands.
In response to the ruling, Elise Bennett, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Associated Press that "this is a heartbreaking blow to America's Everglades and every living creature there, but the case isn't even close to over."
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As Florida Ends All Childhood Vaccine Mandates, Doctors Fear Preventable Diseases Will 'Come Roaring Back'
"Florida's decision to erase school vaccine requirements will cause preventable illness and death," said one immunologist. "Not just for kids in Florida, for whole communities, of all ages, across the country."
Sep 03, 2025
In a decision that has terrified medical professionals, Florida's surgeon general announced Wednesday that he would seek to end all childhood vaccine requirements in the state, which he compared to "slavery."
Currently, Florida requires children to be immunized against deadly diseases like measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, and hepatitis in order to attend public school.
At a press conference alongside the state's anti-vaccine Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida's surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, said that he believed the decision to make these vaccinations optional would receive the blessing of "God."
"Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery," Ladapo said of the mandates. "People have a right to make their own decisions. Who am I, as a government or anyone else, to tell you what you should put in your body? Our body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God."
Many Republican-led states have rolled back requirements for residents to receive the Covid-19 vaccination and, in some cases, restricted access to it. But Ladapo, who has in the past been caught personally altering data to exaggerate the risks of the Covid-19 vaccine, is treading new ground with his pledge to eliminate "every last one" of the state's childhood vaccine mandates, something no state, red or blue, has done.
While Ladapo's decision is unprecedented, it is in step with the position of the current Republican Party, which is making health policy under the stewardship of longtime anti-vaccine influencer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who is the secretary of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump.
Kennedy has limited who is eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine and is reportedly considering pulling it from the market altogether. And alongside a handpicked panel of anti-vaccine activists, he has also launched an effort to revise the entire childhood vaccine schedule.
In April, as a measles epidemic swept through pockets of Texas with low vaccination rates and killed two unvaccinated children, Kennedy downplayed the disease's severity and hyped long-disproven claims about the dangers of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine, which virtually eradicated the disease in the US for over 20 years.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of parents declining to vaccinate their children has soared across the US. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, during the 2019-20 school year, just three US states had rates of MMR vaccination lower than 90%. In 2025, that number had increased to 16.
As of July, 1,280 measles cases had been reported in the US—the most cases since 1992, before the MMR vaccine became part of the standard childhood vaccine schedule. In 92% of cases involving children and teenagers, the people who became infected were either unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination statuses.
Following news of Florida's decision to end childhood vaccine requirements, Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told the Washington Post: "We can expect that measles will come roaring back. Other infectious diseases will follow. This is an unprecedented move that will only put our children at unnecessary risk."
Measles is not the only vaccine-preventable illness experiencing a resurgence. After the rate of whooping cough vaccinations dropped below the 95% threshold required for herd immunity during the 2023-24 school year, the number of cases of the disease doubled, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"Florida will repeat what happened in West Texas, where immunization rates are low," said Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, a pediatrician who serves as Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. "All for health freedom propaganda, and lousy Fox News sound bites."
According to CDC data, Florida has one of the lowest rates of childhood vaccination in the country, with just over 88% of kindergarteners receiving the required shots in the 2023-24 school year. But just as they did in Texas, the effects may harm people across the country.
"Florida's decision to erase school vaccine requirements will cause preventable illness and death. Not just for kids in Florida, for whole communities, of all ages, across the country," said Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist, who writes a newsletter responding to medical misinformation. "Pathogens don't follow state lines."
Dr. Robert Steinbrook, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, called the plan "a recipe for disaster and exactly the wrong approach to protecting state residents from infectious diseases."
"High immunization rates against dangerous infectious diseases such as measles and polio protect individuals as well as their communities," Steinbrook said. "If this plan moves forward, Florida will terminate one of the most effective means of limiting the spread of infectious diseases and embolden [Kennedy] to wreak even more havoc on vaccinations nationally. The Florida Legislature and state residents must vociferously reject these plans."
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