Ron DeSantis Still Can't Get Floridians Excited To Bring About A Measles Outbreak

Do they hate fun? And joy?

Apr 27, 2026

There was a time not too long ago when everything was coming up Ron DeSantis. He was flying high, because of the lifts (allegedly!), but also because he was riling up anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria back to Bush-era levels, waging war against Mickey Mouse, turning the state’s colleges into right-wing propaganda factories and becoming a rising star in the GOP, only to ultimately find himself on the outs after daring to defy Donald Trump by running against him in the 2024 Republican primary.

These days, well, we don’t hear quite as much about him as we once did.

But that doesn’t mean he’s done. DeSantis is hoping to leave one last indelible pockmark on Florida before his term-limited tenure as governor is up in six months, by eliminating the state’s vaccine mandate for school children.

Weirdly enough, however, a new survey from McLaughlin & Associates, Donald Trump’s favorite pollsters, shows that even Floridians are having a hard time getting on board with that dream. Eighty percent, in fact, would prefer that public school vaccine mandates were not eliminated entirely. Probably for some crazy reason like not wanting kids to die or something.

Via Florida Politics:

Republican pollster Jim McLaughlin, a longtime GOP strategist and a pollster for President Donald Trump, said the latest survey confirms that voter favorability of vaccine policies in schools is not a shifting or fragile opinion.
“This is a durable consensus,” said McLaughlin. “You’re seeing nearly eight in 10 voters support the current law, a majority opposed to changing it, and large majorities moving even more strongly in that direction when they consider the consequences. That tells you this issue holds up with voters.”
Additionally, McLaughlin said an overwhelming majority of voters see no reason to modify current Florida school policies governing vaccines.

Awkward! I mean, you think Floridians would look around at states like South Carolina and Texas, both of which have experienced huge measles outbreaks over the last year, and get at least a little bit of FOMO, but apparently not. As of the most recent data, the state has had only 145 cases this year. While that may be higher than the number of cases in the whole of the United States most years before 2024 and more than the state of Florida has had in the last decade — Florida only had seven last year — it’s apparently not enough for Ron DeSantis or for Republican Florida state Sen. Clay Yarborough.

This comes barely two months after Republicans in the state legislature failed to pass Yarborough’s Medical Freedom Act bill, SB 1756, which would have eliminated the mandates and required physicians to provide families with “information” about the pros and cons of vaccinations.

The bill read:

Medical Freedom; Citing this act as the “Medical Freedom Act”; repealing a provison relating to the future repeal of the definition of the term “messenger ribonucleic acid vaccine”; prohibiting a vaccine manufacturer from offering or paying, and a health care practitioner from receiving, specified financial incentives for the administration of a vaccine; requiring certain health care practitioners and paramedics to, before administering one or more vaccines to a minor child, provide the parent or legal guardian with specified materials; providing that specified amendments made by the act to s. 456.0575, F.S., take effect on a specified date or within a specified timeframe after the Board of Medicine and the Board of Osteopathic Medicine adopt certain materials by joint rule, whichever occurs later, etc.

Now parents who hope to see their kids contract many vaccine-preventable illnesses will have to plan a road trip to Texas or wherever. The bill would have taken effect in July, conveniently right before the beginning of the next school year.

Sen. Yarbrough plans to introduce a nearly identical bill when the legislature comes back this week to do some gerrymandering, but with so much opposition, their dreams could be as dead as the 95,000 people who died of measles worldwide in 2024.

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“It’s very important that we do it now and not wait,“ Yarborough told the Miami Herald. ”It’s obviously something that the governor wants to see happen.”

But unfortunately for him, House Speaker Daniel Perez falls into the 80 percent.

“My concern with the vaccines is, in the middle of a measles outbreak, it’s tough for me to all of a sudden allow for children in schools to not have the measles vaccines, to not have polio, to not have chickenpox,” Perez, a fellow Republican, but a Republican whose wife is a pharmacist, told WPLG last week. He added that, for some reason, he didn’t want schools where “half of the children have chickenpox again.”

Where’s the fun in that?

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