Florida Department of Health considers dropping 4 school vaccine requirements – here’s what that could mean for kids
The Florida Department of Health held a hearing in October 2026 on a proposal to remove four vaccine requirements for entry into school and childcare: Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, chickenpox, pneumococcal and hepatitis B.
These vaccines entered use in the U.S. at different times from the early 1980s through 2000. Prior to that, there were millions of chickenpox cases and thousands of serious bacterial infections and preventable deaths among American children each year. Vaccination has dramatically reduced the toll of these diseases.
Many parents today grew up during the transition to widespread vaccination for these diseases and may never have witnessed the severe complications these vaccines help prevent. I’m an epidemiologist who studies vaccine-preventable illnesses and health communication, and I worry that perhaps the luxury of forgetting about these diseases could end up giving rise to a generation of children who aren’t vaccinated against them.
What Florida would be choosing
School vaccination requirements help communities establish herd immunity, which is when enough people are vaccinated to prevent a disease from easily spreading. When vaccination rates fall, infections can spread among susceptible children throughout the community, placing those who are too young to be fully vaccinated, as well as those who cannot develop adequate protection due to medical conditions, at greater risk.
Florida’s proposal would not eliminate these four vaccines, nor would ending a mandate mean that every family would stop using them. However, it would weaken one of the policies designed to maintain high vaccination coverage. If fewer children are vaccinated as a result, the risks will extend beyond the families making that choice.
The consequences could be devastating.
Hib: The bacterium that can cause meningitis
Before Hib vaccines became widely used in the late 1980s, pediatricians sometimes faced a terrifying emergency: an infant with fever, lethargy and a stiff neck. Testing of cerebrospinal fluid would reveal bacterial meningitis caused by Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, an infection that could kill a child or leave lasting neurological damage.
Today, many doctors have never even seen a single case. The bacterium has not disappeared, but widespread vaccination has made serious Hib disease in young children far less common.
Before the vaccine, Hib was the leading cause of bacterial meningitis. In the early 1980s, there were 20,000 invasive Hib infections among American children under 5 years old, 12,000 of which were meningitis. Between 3% and 6% of those children died, and between 15% and 30% of the survivors were left deaf or with brain damage.
Hib infection did not manifest in dramatic outbreaks. Healthy young children carried it silently, and some, unpredictably, became seriously ill.
After the introduction of conjugate vaccines for Hib in the late 1980s, cases among young children declined by 99%. In 2023, the United States reported only 13 cases in children under 5. In 2026, that number is up to 28.
Chickenpox: The ‘harmless’ rite of passage
By the early 1990s, there were more than 4 million cases of chickenpox annually in the United States. Of those infected, 10,500 to 13,500 were hospitalized, and 100 to 150 died. More than 90% of cases and about 70% of hospitalizations occurred in children, as did roughly half of the deaths.
But even those who had manageable cases of childhood chickenpox are at risk for shingles later in life, which can lead to painful and sometimes permanent health complications.
Children are contagious before the rash appears, and each case has an incubation period of up to three weeks. A single infection could spread through a school or daycare in waves for a month or more. Since vaccination began in 1995, deaths from chickenpox in people under 20 years old have been virtually eliminated.
