Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo is once again amplifying health misinformation — this time invoking a long-debunked anti-vaccine claim to explain a measles outbreak linked to a Catholic university in his state. His remarks, made at a press conference last Friday, illustrate a pattern of behavior that has made him one of the most scientifically unreliable public health officials in the country.
The immediate backdrop is a measles crisis that has been building for months. At least 2,318 cases have been reported across the United States in 2025 alone, already surpassing the total from the previous year. The outbreak is severe enough that the U.S. has almost certainly lost its measles-free status — meaning the virus is once again considered endemic on American soil, a public health milestone that took decades of sustained vaccination efforts to achieve and years of political erosion to undo.
Florida’s outbreak and the Ave Maria cluster
Florida has not been spared. The state has recorded at least 141 confirmed cases this year, ranking it fifth nationally. A significant share of those cases trace back to Ave Maria University, a private Catholic college in Collier County, where a cluster of unvaccinated students provided the conditions for the virus to spread. It was this outbreak that Ladapo was asked to address at Friday’s press conference.
His response was telling. Though he nominally reiterated support for measles vaccination, he quickly pivoted to suggest that students at Ave Maria may have declined the vaccine on religious grounds — specifically, because the measles-mumps-rubella shot is purportedly connected to abortion. “You know, for some people — people may or may not know that the measles vaccine is developed with the cells that are a progeny from…an aborted fetus,” Ladapo said, according to the Florida Phoenix. He added: “Whether there’s a connection between the fact that some of the students at this university chose not to receive that vaccine, and it happens to be a vaccine that is related to the practice of abortion, I’m not sure.”
That framing is misleading, and the science here is not ambiguous.
What the science actually says
The MMR vaccine does not contain fetal cells. The rubella component of the vaccine was developed using human cell cultures originally derived from two aborted fetuses in the 1960s — a historical fact, not an ongoing practice. No additional fetal tissue has been used in the decades since, and the purification process used in manufacturing removes any trace of those cell cultures from the final product. There is no “fetal debris” in the MMR vaccine.
Critically, the Catholic Church — the very institution whose values Ladapo appeared to invoke — does not endorse vaccine refusal on these grounds. In 2017, the Pontifical Academy for Life issued explicit guidance instructing Catholic families to vaccinate their children according to medical recommendations, stating they could do so with a “clear conscience.” While the Church encourages the development of future vaccines free from any connection to fetal cell lines, it has consistently affirmed that no such moral objection justifies refusing existing vaccines where no alternative exists. Ladapo’s framing, then, misrepresents not only the science but also the position of the institution he appeared to be defending.
A record of scientific unreliability
None of this is out of character for Ladapo. Since taking office as Florida’s surgeon general in September 2021, he has built a sustained record of promoting claims that contradict mainstream scientific consensus. He repeatedly misrepresented the safety data on COVID-19 vaccines, questioned the public health value of vaccine mandates, and at one point compared vaccine requirements to slavery — a remark as historically offensive as it was medically absurd.
By September 2025, Ladapo had announced his intention to eliminate all of Florida’s school vaccine mandates. The proposal was so extreme that even President Donald Trump publicly expressed disdain for it. The plan has not advanced. Earlier this year, in January, Ladapo also publicly endorsed “structured water” — a substance with no basis in chemistry or physics that has found a following in alternative medicine circles.
What makes Ladapo’s behavior consequential rather than merely eccentric is the office he holds. A surgeon general exists to protect public health, not to launder fringe theories with the credibility of a state title. When measles — a vaccine-preventable disease — is surging, and when a senior official uses a press conference to amplify the myths that drive vaccine hesitancy, the human cost is not hypothetical. It shows up in case counts, in hospitalizations, and in the erosion of the herd immunity that protects children too young to be vaccinated at all.
Florida’s outbreak did not have to reach 141 cases. That it has, and that the state’s top health official responded by lending oxygen to anti-vaccine mythology, is not a coincidence — it is a consequence.