Republican state lawmakers in Florida rejected Gov. Ron DeSantis’s latest push to loosen vaccine mandates for schoolchildren on Tuesday, once again rebuking the Republican governor on one of his legislative priorities.
Mr. DeSantis had called lawmakers into a four-day special session this week, in part to consider a bill that would allow more children to opt out of certain vaccines. But as soon as Daniel Perez, the Republican speaker of the State House and Mr. DeSantis’s chief legislative foe, opened the session on Tuesday morning, he made a surprise announcement that his chamber would not take up the proposal at all, effectively ending its chances.
Mr. Perez, who is from Miami and who has three young children, said he was concerned about “children being in school without measles and mumps and polio and chickenpox vaccines that have been working for decades.”
“That was something that I was uncomfortable with,” Mr. Perez told reporters shortly after his announcement.
When the State Senate convened two hours later, Republican leaders in that chamber said that they would table the vaccines legislation backed by the governor.
The proposal would have allowed families to seek exemptions from certain vaccination requirements based on their personal beliefs, or “conscience.” The state already allows exemptions for medical or religious reasons. The bill had come up during the regular legislative session earlier this year, but passed only in the Senate.
Mr. DeSantis has said the bill would promote “medical freedom,” likening it to the state’s ban on mask mandates and other policies that his administration adopted during the coronavirus pandemic. Critics have said that broadening Florida’s existing vaccine exemptions law was unnecessary and would allow a dangerously high proportion of children to attend school unvaccinated.
The House’s rejection of the bill was the latest show of Republican defiance toward the term-limited governor, who has faced more pushback from his own party over the past two years than at any other time during his nearly eight years in office. Mr. Perez in particular has challenged him on issues including immigration enforcement and regulating artificial intelligence. Republicans hold supermajorities in the State House and Senate.
Mr. DeSantis responded by calling the decision not to act swiftly on the bill, as well as another regulating A.I. that Mr. Perez also rejected, “typical political shenanigans.”
“Will be interesting to see these guys campaign as Big Tech enthusiasts and guardians of the medical industrial complex,” he wrote on X.
Last year, Mr. DeSantis and his surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, blindsided Republican lawmakers when they announced that they wanted to eliminate all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, even though doing so would require legislative approval for most immunizations. Florida would have been the first state to make such a change, and many lawmakers appeared leery of going that far.
Instead, the Florida Department of Health, which Dr. Ladapo oversees, began working toward repealing its requirement that children be vaccinated against four infectious diseases: varicella (chickenpox); hepatitis B; pneumococcal bacteria; and Haemophilus influenzae type B, or Hib, a bacterium that is distinct from the influenza virus and that on rare occasions can be deadly.
The health department held a single public hearing on its proposal in December, and it is still working on the repeal.
Other mandatory childhood vaccines in Florida — including those against measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis (whooping cough), diphtheria and polio — are under the purview of the Legislature.
