Florida’s Measles Risk Is Already Past the School Mandate

A University of Maryland model published on September 28, 2026, finds Florida already below measles herd immunity, even with its school MMR rule still in force. The paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was built around a 2025 outbreak in Gaines County, Texas, then fitted to Florida’s age mix and measles, mumps and rubella coverage.

Lawmakers never took the measles shot off the school list. The live fight is a health-department rule that would drop four other vaccines, while kindergarten MMR coverage is already 88.9%.

Two MMR Doses Are Still Required for School

Florida’s health department still posts the same kindergarten-through-12th-grade list it has used for years, including two doses of MMR for kindergarten. Parents still document those shots on Form DH 680. Religious exemptions exist; they are issued at county health departments with no appointment and no questions.

State statute, not a department memo, is what locks in measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria, and tetanus for school. The department’s own rules add four more shots, and those four are the ones Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo can try to peel without a bill.

SHOTS STILL ON FLORIDA’S SCHOOL LIST

• By statute: DTaP, polio, and two doses of MMR remain school-entry requirements unless the legislature rewrites the law.
• By department rule: Hepatitis B, varicella (chickenpox), Hib, and pneumococcal conjugate are the four vaccines in the pending rollback.
• How parents opt out now: A religious exemption is available; Florida does not offer a personal-belief exemption.

That split is the part the podium speech does not mention. Repealing “all mandates” would take both a statute change and a rule change. Only the second track is moving.

Maryland’s Model Finds Florida Already Short

Alice Oveson, a University of Maryland doctoral student in applied mathematics, and Abba Gumel, a distinguished mathematics professor there, ran Florida-specific mixing patterns through a transmission model calibrated to Gaines County. Their paper estimates the state’s vaccine-induced herd line at 93% to 94% for measles. The CDC’s conventional national target is 95%.

The model’s own Florida baseline, a 2011-2025 CDC average, is 91.6% in children and 92.5% in adults, with 7.5% of adults unprotected. Both child and adult figures sit under the paper’s 93% to 94% line. The newer CDC kindergarten snapshot for 2025-26 is lower still: 88.9% MMR in Florida, 6.1 points under the 95% target.

If school-entry rules fell away, the team’s worst case sends child coverage to 82%. In that run, a large outbreak arrives within 3 to 5 years, peak child infection rates reach 260 to 315 per 100,000 (about half that in adults), and the paper projects hundreds of pediatric deaths within five years. Those peaks, the authors wrote, would exceed any U.S. year since 1977, when the country counted 57,345 measles cases. A milder post-repeal path holds coverage near 90%, which is still below both the paper’s Florida line and the CDC target.

THE MARYLAND MODEL’S FOUR COVERAGE PATHS

Gumel said adult catch-up shots, masks, and isolation can blunt an outbreak if childhood coverage holds, and that none of those tools can make up for a steep drop in child MMR. The paper’s funding came from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Why a Child’s Shot Counts Triple

Florida is an older state. About 80% of residents are older than 40, Oveson noted, which would seem to put adult immunity at the center of any measles plan. The model went the other way. Vaccinating one child cut transmission about three times as much as vaccinating one adult, because children spend more time face to face.

Small cuts in child coverage, Oveson said, produced outsize jumps in outbreak size, especially when children mixed mostly with other children. That is the age group the school-entry rule actually reaches, and the age group a statutory repeal would release.

It’s like having a very dry forest with a lot of kindling. Having a large unvaccinated population including children is the perfect set-up to spark a very big and potentially deadly outbreak.

Alice Oveson, Ph.D. student in applied mathematics, University of Maryland

Gumel put the same math in policy terms. School-entry rules have long been the tool that stops herd immunity from eroding, he said, and strengthening adult immunity cannot compensate for declines in childhood MMR coverage. One to three of every 1,000 children who catch measles die of respiratory or neurologic complications, a risk the Maryland team used to convert case counts into pediatric deaths.

A 5.9% Exemption Rate, and Rising

CDC school data for 2025-26 put national kindergarten MMR coverage of 92.4%, down from the year before, with about 280,000 kindergartners lacking documentation of a completed MMR series. Exemptions from one or more vaccines rose to 4.2% from 3.6%, covering about 155,000 children, and 24 states now sit above 5%.

Florida is one of them. Kindergarten MMR there is 88.9%, a tick above 88.8% the prior year after a longer slide from at least 93.5% in 2019-20 to 88.1% in 2023-24. Exemptions reached 5.9%, or 12,540 of 213,535 kindergartners, up from 5.1% the year before.

WHERE FLORIDA STANDS ON SHOTS

• Kindergarten MMR: 88.9% in 2025-26, against a 95% CDC target and the paper’s 93% to 94% Florida line.
• Exemptions: 5.9% of Florida kindergartners, versus 4.2% nationwide.
• The gap: 6.1 points between Florida’s kindergarten MMR rate and the 95% national target.
• National backdrop: Coverage fell in more than half of states; 24 states now post exemption rates above 5%.

A KFF survey of more than 2,700 parents, fielded July 18 to August 4, 2025, found 84% confident the MMR shot is safe for children and 90% saying it matters for kids in their community. About eight in ten, 81%, want public schools to require measles and polio shots with some exceptions. Eighteen percent said schools should not require those vaccines for any student. Sixteen percent had skipped or delayed at least one childhood shot other than flu or COVID-19, and 9% had skipped MMR.

House Leadership Blocked a Full Repeal

In September 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ladapo called for ending every vaccine mandate in Florida law. Ladapo said the rules “drip with disdain and slavery” and that he has no right to tell a parent what to put in a child’s body. Clips of that speech still move as if the repeal already happened. It did not.

On April 28, 2026, Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez refused to bring the issue to the floor. “There is some concern here, on my behalf, about children being in school without measles, mumps, polio, and chickenpox vaccines that have been working for decades,” Perez told reporters. No lawmaker filed a bill to strip the statutory MMR, polio, or DTaP rules in the 2026 sessions. Medical-freedom bills that would have widened exemptions passed the Senate and died in the House.

Statewide polling in that fight found 79% of likely voters, including 71% of registered Republicans, wanted the current school shot rules kept. Separate figures put 70% against ending school vaccine mandates altogether and 57% against lowering the number of required shots.

HOW THE REPEAL STALLED, THEN SHIFTED

1. September 2025: DeSantis and Ladapo call for ending all vaccine mandates in Florida law.
2. April 28, 2026: House Speaker Daniel Perez keeps a full repeal off the floor; no statutory MMR bill is filed.
3. August 24, 2026: The Department of Health publishes proposed changes to the school immunization rule, aimed at four shots the department controls.
4. September 28, 2026: Oveson and Gumel publish the Florida measles model in PNAS.
5. October 4, 2026: The department drops a bid to add moral or ethical exemptions and keeps the four-vaccine rollback on the calendar.
6. October 8, 2026: A public hearing on the rule is set for 9 a.m. to noon ET in Lake Mary.

A year-old clip of the “every last one” line still circulates as breaking news. People who live in Florida have spent that year filling out the same DH 680 form. The bill did not pass. Pediatric offices can still set their own policies. The school list still starts with two measles shots.

What the October 8 Hearing Can Change

The Department of Health’s proposed revisions to Rule 64D-3.046 would take hepatitis B, varicella, Hib, and pneumococcal conjugate off the school-entry list. Those four were added by department rule, so Ladapo’s agency can try to repeal them without the House or Senate. The hearing runs October 8, 2026, from 9 a.m. to noon ET at the Orlando Marriott Lake Mary, 1501 International Parkway. On October 4 the department dropped a related plan to let parents claim moral or ethical exemptions, after lawmakers had already refused to write that language into statute.

Ladapo has said the four shots will remain available and that the fight is the mandate, not the product. “This business of forcing free people to put medicine in their bodies is anachronistic,” he said when the department opened the rule file in August. The measles model does not run on those four vaccines. It runs on MMR, which stays in statute unless lawmakers reverse Perez and pass a bill they would not even file in 2026.

Oveson warned that dropping the school measles rule would signal that vaccination is unnecessary, which she called inaccurate and dangerous, and that the change could make measles endemic in Florida and seed spread elsewhere. Gumel said public-health officials have to reach parents who do not trust the shot, because the disease is circulating, coverage is down, and children are back in classrooms.

3,887 Cases, Two Deaths, and a 35-Year Mark

The CDC has counted 3,887 confirmed measles cases as of October 1, 2026, across 47 jurisdictions, with 18 more in international visitors. That is already the most in a calendar year since 1991, when the country logged 9,643 cases, and it has three months left to run. Two deaths are confirmed in 2026; three were confirmed in 2025.

Ninety-five percent of this year’s cases, 3,700 of 3,887, are tied to outbreaks, 42 of them new in 2026. Age splits show 683 patients under 5 (18%), 1,652 ages 5 to 19 (43%), and 1,533 ages 20 and older (39%). Ninety-five percent were unvaccinated or had unknown status. Nine percent, 352 people, were hospitalized, including 14% of children under 5.

U.S. AND FLORIDA MEASLES COUNTS

Florida’s 148 cases in 2026, with no death in the CDC tally, already dwarf the 8 cases logged in 2025 and the 11 in 2024. The 1989-91 resurgence, the last U.S. wave of this size before elimination, produced more than 55,000 cases and 123 deaths, most of them in unvaccinated preschoolers. Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. The 2024 count was 285 cases; 2025 closed at 2,289.

The October 8 hearing can take four other shots off a department list. It cannot rewrite the statute that still asks every Florida kindergartner for two measles doses, and it cannot lift kindergarten coverage from 88.9% to the line the Maryland model says the state has already missed.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a published mathematical model, CDC case and coverage figures, and Florida immunization rules. It is for information only and is not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a recommendation about whether any child or adult should receive the MMR vaccine or any other shot. Readers should talk with a licensed physician or pediatrician about measles risk, vaccination, and school-entry forms before making a health decision. Case counts, coverage rates, exemption rules, and the status of Rule 64D-3.046 can change as the CDC, the Florida Department of Health, and lawmakers update their data and filings.