Opinion
By Jeff Childers
9/4/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! And it’s a C&C special edition. Things are moving faster than we dreamed possible. Yesterday, Florida made the historic announcement that it would end its liberal vaccine exemption program by ditching vaccine mandates altogether. You can’t believe the apocalyptic meltdown the left is having. Let’s dig in to this spectacular story.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
💉💉💉
In Monday’s C&C post, headlined “Pharmapocalypse,” I discussed President Trump’s historic Truth Social post questioning the covid shots — for the first time— and considered the potentially epic implications. Well, it only took two days. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Florida plans to become first state to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates.” Surgeon General Ladapo and Governor DeSantis didn’t just push back against jabs; they re-framed the entire debate in moral terms instead of scientific jargon. The freakout was stupendous.
CLIP: Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo announces plan to end ALL state vaccine mandates (1:52).
The biomedical authoritarians went crazier than sprayed roaches. You’d think that Florida planned to ban vaccines instead of mandates. Eric Fingle-Dingle tweeted, “Florida is a now a pro-child-death state.” Stanford immunologist Jake Scott said Florida is “destroying one of humanity’s greatest public health triumphs for no reason.” No reason! Urologist and “sex med” doctor Ashley Winter (155K followers) called the announcement tragic and whined that students should be forced to swear oaths to take vaccines.
The American Medical Association promptly begged Florida to reconsider:
And so on, and on, and on, ad nauseum.
Until yesterday, no other state government has been brave enough to tackle the left’s most sacred of sacraments, its pinnacle public health ‘achievement,’ and its most rewarding profit center: vaccine coercion. And the reason they gave (yes, Jake, there was a reason) was rhetorical genius, a skilled lawyer’s tool for making an unloseable argument.
Let me teach you that technique.
💉First, I’ll steelman the pro-vaccine argument. In its most persuasive form, it goes something like this:
NOTIONAL PHARMA SALESMAN: Vaccines are a simple and low-risk way to prevent some illnesses and deaths. But some people who want vaccines can’t take them for one reason or another. So, to protect those folks, the rest of us should be coerced into taking them. True, the vaccines will also cause some deaths and disability, but fewer than the disease will. It’s basic math.
That argument contains a sneaky trick. The trick is that it disguises something we call a premise, which is an unspoken assumption underpinning the argument. The hidden premise allows the real argument to be distracted and derailed onto favorable ground for the arguer.
They hid the premise, but I won’t. Boiled down to its essence, the hidden utilitarian premise in the pro-vaccine argument is: it is morally permissible to kill one person if you can save two.
Because they shroud that premise, the pro-vaccine folks get to shift the argument away from the thorny issue of morality and plunge headlong into a bottomless black hole of jargon-rich scientific debate. In other words, they want to trick us into arguing about the numbers— about whether vaccine injuries are actually rare.
They want us to say, “you guys are fudging the facts about how dangerous these jabs are, either alone or when taken together.” Don’t take the bait.
The prevalence of jab injuries is a fair and important debate. But it is an unwinnable argument. Resolving it involves deliberately hard-to-get data, vast amounts of propaganda, built-in biases, bewildering risk-reward ratios, impenetrable statistics, and fathomless expert opinions on all sides. Thanks to their obfuscation skills, that smoggy scientific argument could last another hundred years, during which time they’ll just roll out new medical technologies and claim to have “fixed” any problems that can finally be proven.
But yesterday, Dr. Ladapo didn’t blink. He didn’t take the bait. Instead, he correctly challenged their underlying premise.
💉 Let’s consider Dr. Ladapo’s actual argument. Here’s what he said:
JOSEPH LADAPO: “Every last vaccine is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery! Who am I, or anyone else, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and God. Pretty much every state has mandates, but it’s wrong.”
Dr. Ladapo ripped out the hidden utilitarian premise and held it up to the light. He leapt right over the scientific jargon and even the legality of mandates, and grabbed the issue of morality by the necktie. In essence, Ladapo argued it is ‘wrong’ —immoral— to coerce a human being into taking an injected substance that they don’t want.
Challenging that basic utilitarian premise simplified and refined the argument to its essential core. The mistake would be to take the bait of arguing about relative rates of adverse events compared to risk ratios of preventable disease at population levels … and more academic-sounding word salad and scientific mumbo jumbo.
In other words, this isn’t a scientific question at all. It’s not even a legal question. It’s a basic question of right and wrong. In philosophical terms, it’s the difference between deontological (rights-based) versus utilitarian (numbers-based) world views.
Deontologically, some things are just wrong regardless of the numbers. Just like owning people, forcing injections on them —as if you did own them— violates an absolute right.
Utilitarians argue that some people are too dumb or incapable of caring for themselves, like cows, antivaxxers, or black Africans. Thus, masters are needed to ensure a proper social order. And the ‘rightness’ of a coercive act depends only on maximizing society’s outcomes. Minority autonomy (freedom) may legitimately be sacrificed for the greater good of society.
The splendid rhetorical force behind Ladapo’s moral argument was its framing the issue in terms of slavery. People aren’t herds of cows. Mandates and slavery both rely on the unspoken premise that individuals are instruments of society rather than sovereign beings.
Today’s mandate crowd just swaps the plantation for “public health.”
💉 Unsurprisingly, the Washington Post ignored Ladapo’s reference to slavery, even though they could have swooned in disbelief, feigned outrage, mercilessly mocked him, or ginned up some progressive fury about it. How dare he? Racism! They could have demanded an explanation. HOW are vaccines like slavery??
Instead, they just ignored it. And none of the other big platforms grappled with that reference, either— which proves it terrifies them.
On Monday, in Pharmapocalypse, I explained the surprising connection to slavery in detail. Let’s dig further. George Washington was the pharma lobby’s first attempt to bypass the morality debate. General Washington, we were often reminded, commanded his soldiers to take smallpox vaccines— and the nation was saved.
So, the logic goes, if the morality of coerced jabs was good enough for George Washington, it should be good enough for us.
But not so fast, mon ami! Sure, George Washington was the Father of the Country, a Great Man, and he owned a surprising number of quite fabulous wigs, but he also owned people, which suggests his moral understanding of bodily autonomy was, well, complicated. (Nor, during the Revolutionary War, was there yet a Constitution, never mind a country or even a Supreme Court. But never mind.)
Consider the humble cow, Bessie. Farmers can vaccinate their cows as much as they want— since cows are property. (That’s where the term “herd immunity” comes from, by the way. It was a veterinary idiom.) Vaccinating cows isn’t right or wrong, it’s a morally neutral commercial decision about safeguarding the farmer’s investment.
Similarly, George Washington could vaccinate his herds of humans if he wanted, and the slaves had no say. He could hang cowbells on them. That choice was also morally neutral— so long as slavery was morally neutral.
So George Washington never actually resolved the moral dilemma. He sidestepped it. He could vaccinate his slaves the same way he vaccinated his cows, because his premise was that both were his property. Lincoln fought a Civil War to end that premise; the mandate crowd wants to resurrect it in the form of syringes instead of shackles.
When the government mandates vaccines to protect the communal herd, the assumption is clear: the state owns us. The state is just protecting its herd. Since cows are dumb (and they fart too much), they need owners (masters) to care for them and keep them out of trouble. We don’t let cows decide what shots to take or refuse.
Always remember: pro-vaxxers don’t want to debate morality, because they’ll lose. And they know it. Which is why we should jam the immorality of coerced medical treatments right down their sickening throats. (See also, e.g., the Nuremberg Code.)
💉 In his announcement yesterday, Dr. Ladapo correctly explained that the Department of Health can unilaterally end vaccine mandates now by just removing all the vaccines from the state’s school schedule, providing time for the Governor and Legislature to codify it into law in the upcoming legislative session.
That’s exactly how Florida handled mask mandates. First, Ladapo’s DOH made a rule allowing opt-outs for school mask mandates; later, the legislature passed a law outright banning compelled masking. Done and done. Rinse and repeat.
Florida lawmakers, get ready: Pharma and its allies are about to unleash the biggest lobbying blitz you’ve ever seen— money, media, “experts,” hysteria, protests, crisis actors, and false flags. Don’t take the bait. This fight isn’t about medicine, it’s about mandates. Vaccines will remain available. Parents who want them can still get them. Nobody’s banning vaccines.
What’s at stake is whether the state recognizes children as citizens with inalienable rights, or as livestock in a managed herd. Hold the moral line: frame every question, every hearing, every floor debate around right versus wrong, and coercion versus freedom. If you let them drag you into arguing about “science,” you’ve already lost.
It’s irrelevant whether vaccines save lives. Either way, it’s wrong to force them on people.
Taken together, Kennedy’s HHS wrecking ball and Florida’s declaration of medical independence signal that the age of “herd management” is ending. The federal government is re-orienting from above (Kennedy), while Florida is ripping mandates out from below. Both fronts converge on the same Civil War battlefield: the moral legitimacy of coercion.
💉 Some readers thought I stretched to call this vaccine dispute a new Civil War. But also yesterday, the same day as Florida’s announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story headlined, “As CDC declines, California will join West Coast public health alliance.” In short, California, Oregon, and Washington have formally broken with the CDC, forming the “West Coast Health Alliance” to issue their own vaccine guidance.
This isn’t just policy—it’s two rival moral philosophies, finally colliding in the open. It represents an irresolvable moral binary. Blue states are hewing close to the utilitarian ethos (numbers > rights), while Florida is planting its flag in deontological soil (rights > numbers).
This isn’t just another red/blue squabble. It’s a massive collision of moral universes. It’s matter and antimatter.
These two world views cannot peacefully be reconciled. They cannot coexist. They ask different questions. The utilitarian West Coast Alliance asks, “what result?” Florida’s deontologists ask, “what right?” To the utilitarian, refusing mandates is reckless disregard for public health. To the deontologist, imposing mandates is reckless disregard for freedom.
This is the same kind of binary that split America over slavery: can you ever treat people as means rather than ends? One side said yes, the other no. There’s simply no middle ground where both can be “a little bit right.” There’s no halfway position that both camps can live with. You can’t “slightly” own a person, and you can’t “sort of” force shots into them. Compromise is becoming impossible.
Like America before 1850, we’ve tried negotiating a tenuous middle ground, with states offering various degrees of exemptions to mandates, from “medical only” to liberal “check the box” exemption schemes like Florida’s. This allowed just enough wiggle room to preserve a fractious peace, without openly admitting that deontological values were at stake.
However, the unsteady truce of exemptions was always philosophically incoherent. It was just a weak attempt at pragmatic compromise. Utilitarians got their herd coverage; dissenters got carve-outs. And just like the Mason-Dixon line, that compromise only held so long as both sides avoided pushing it to its logical extreme. Once either camp demands logically coherent maximalism —all mandates or no mandates at all— the uneasy middle must collapse.
That’s where we are now. It’s 1850 again, and Kansas is bleeding. Florida has effectively said, “No more Missouri Compromise. Freedom is the law.” Blue states, by forming their own vaccine alliances, are saying: “We’re doubling down.” The Pax Vaccina has ended; the binary lay bare.
You could even call this moment the Vaccine Secession Crisis.
Assuming Florida’s move sticks, and the states begin coalescing into two camps, the rhyme of history will intensify. One can easily imagine “fugitive child laws” to punish parents who move to red states to avoid mandates. Red states could counter with “safe harbor” statutes protecting families who flee mandate regimes. And so on, just like last time.
🔥 Finally, we should not overlook the larger context. Dr. Ladapo’s announcement yesterday occurred during a presser unveiling Florida’s new MAHA Commission, which Governor DeSantis said would “recommend state-level integration of MAHA principles and expanded protections for parental choice regarding childhood vaccines:”
As far as I can tell, it’s like an executive-branch lobbying arm aimed at assimilating MAHA into state law. Governor DeSantis is swinging for the political fences, having created a Florida DOGE, announced an initiative to outlaw homestead property taxes, surged Republican registrations, consigned Florida’s Democrats into generational Hades, and has now fully embraced the MAHA medical freedom agenda.
Lawyers like me who lived in courtrooms through the pandemic well remember the constant drumbeat of Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), wherein the Supreme Court upheld the state’s smallpox vaccine mandate (with only a $5 fine for noncompliance). But that annoying case is about to boomerang on them, because in it SCOTUS held that states can set whatever vaccine policy they want, under their inherent police powers.
It’s funny how things work out sometimes. The precedent they leaned on so hard now gives Florida a rock-solid shield to do exactly what it’s doing.
Assisted by the pandemic, Governor DeSantis will be remembered as the most significant and influential governors the state has ever had. We should name buildings, highways, and airports after him. Suggestions welcome in the comments.
Have a terrific Thursday! We’ll be back tomorrow, with a regular style C&C roundup of essential news and commentary.
Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠
Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
