At least nine states have introduced legislation to eliminate or weaken school vaccine mandates for children, part of a coordinated campaign led by a coalition of nonprofit organizations that is gaining real traction in statehouses across the country. The effort runs parallel to a significant shift at the federal level, where the CDC has already reduced the number of routinely recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11.

The two tracks, state legislation and federal schedule changes, represent the most consequential rethinking of American vaccine policy in a generation. And the underlying question is straightforward: who decides what goes into your child's body?

The state-level push

The Medical Freedom Act Coalition, an umbrella group of at least 15 nonprofit organizations including Children's Health Defense, is driving the legislative effort. The campaign spans red states and purple ones alike, with bills advancing in Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, Arizona, West Virginia, and South Carolina.

The specifics vary by state, but the direction is consistent:

• Iowa's HF 2171 would eliminate all school vaccine requirements. It has cleared committee and awaits a full House vote.
• New Hampshire's HB 1811 has been amended to retain only the polio mandate and is headed for a full House vote. A companion bill, HB 1719, targets the hepatitis B requirement specifically.
• Florida's Senate Bill 1756 would expand exemptions for personal reasons. The state is also pursuing regulatory changes to drop requirements for hepatitis B and chickenpox.
• Idaho enacted its Medical Freedom Act in 2025, broadly prohibiting discrimination based on vaccination status, though it created legal contradictions with existing school mandates.
• West Virginia has introduced multiple bills to create religious exemptions and prohibit mandates.
• Arizona has a broad anti-mandate bill awaiting action, though it faces a likely veto from the state's Democratic governor.

According to the Daily Mail, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo went further, announcing the state would rescind all vaccine mandates outright, though that move would require legislative approval he does not currently have.

Idaho and Iowa appear closest to removing school vaccine mandates entirely.

The federal shift

The state campaign does not exist in a vacuum. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversees the CDC, which recently moved vaccines for rotavirus, COVID, influenza, hepatitis A and B, and meningitis from universal recommendations to either "shared clinical decision-making" or recommendations only for high-risk children. That brought the routine childhood schedule from 17 shots down to 11.

Kennedy co-founded Children's Health Defense, one of the organizations within the Medical Freedom Act Coalition, though he says he is no longer involved with it. He has not said outright that the federal government is modeling its approach after the state-level efforts. An HHS spokesperson acknowledged questions from the Daily Mail about potential nationwide changes to vaccine requirements but declined to answer them.

The combination matters. Federal schedule changes reshape what the medical establishment officially recommends. State legislation determines what's actually required for a child to walk through a school door. Together, they represent a two-pronged restructuring of the policy architecture that has governed childhood vaccination for decades.

The case for parental authority

For conservatives, this is fundamentally a question about who holds authority over medical decisions for children. The answer, for most of the right, is parents. Not state health bureaucracies, not the CDC's advisory committees, and certainly not school administrators enforcing compliance lists.

The mandates that exist today were built during an era of nearly universal public trust in health institutions. That trust has eroded, and not without reason. The COVID era shattered whatever deference remained. Americans watched public health officials shift recommendations repeatedly, dismiss natural immunity, push vaccines on populations with negligible risk, and use mandates as instruments of social control rather than public health. School closures, mask mandates for toddlers, and vaccine requirements for college students who faced virtually zero risk from COVID did more to undermine confidence in the public health establishment than any activist campaign ever could.

The institutions did that to themselves.

Now those same institutions ask parents to trust the full childhood vaccine schedule without question. Many parents are asking questions anyway. The response from the medical establishment has largely been to treat skepticism as ignorance rather than engage it seriously. That approach is not working, and the legislative momentum in nine states is the proof.

South Carolina and the measles question

The debate is not abstract. South Carolina is currently experiencing a measles outbreak that has infected nearly 1,000 people, most of them children. At least 19 have required hospitalization for severe complications including pneumonia and brain inflammation. Of those infected, 893 had not received both doses of the MMR vaccine. Vaccination rates at schools at the epicenter of the outbreak had fallen below 80 percent, well short of the 95 percent threshold the CDC identifies for herd immunity.

This is the part of the conversation that demands honesty from everyone involved. Measles is not a mild inconvenience. Children are being hospitalized. The MMR vaccine is described by experts as 97 percent effective at preventing illness. These are facts that opponents of mandates must reckon with, not dismiss.

But the existence of a serious disease does not automatically validate government compulsion as the only acceptable policy response. Plenty of things are good for children that the state does not mandate. The question is whether parents, armed with accurate information and access to vaccines, will make responsible choices without the force of law behind them. Advocates of mandate repeal are betting yes. South Carolina's outbreak is the most significant test of that theory currently underway.

What the polling actually shows

Kaiser Family Foundation polling found that 9 in 10 parents say it is important for children to be vaccinated against MMR and polio. Support among Republican parents sits at 88 percent for MMR and 86 percent for polio. Among parents identified as MAGA, the numbers are 85 percent and 82 percent respectively. Democratic parents register at 96 and 95 percent.

These numbers undercut the narrative that vaccine mandate repeal is driven by mass anti-vaccine sentiment. Overwhelming majorities across the political spectrum support these core vaccines. The legislative fight is not really about whether children should be vaccinated. It's about whether the government should be the one making that decision.

That distinction matters enormously and gets collapsed constantly in media coverage. Support for vaccines and opposition to vaccine mandates are not contradictory positions. They reflect a coherent philosophy: trust parents, provide information, preserve choice.

What comes next

The legislative calendar will determine the near-term trajectory. Iowa and Idaho are the states to watch for outright mandate elimination. New Hampshire's narrower approach, retaining only the polio requirement, may represent a middle path that gains traction in states where full repeal faces resistance. Florida's combination of legislative and regulatory strategies gives it multiple avenues to weaken or eliminate requirements even if one path stalls.

Arizona's Democratic governor stands as a reminder that these efforts will face executive resistance in states where the legislature and governor's mansion are split. But the broader trend line is clear. The coalition behind these bills is organized, operating in multiple states simultaneously, and building on a federal environment that is moving in the same direction.

The public health establishment can keep treating this as a problem of misinformation. Or it can recognize that millions of American parents have decided they want a say in what's injected into their children, and that the era of unquestioned compliance ended when the same officials who closed their kids' schools started lecturing them about trust.

The mandates may survive in blue states for years. In red ones, the walls are already coming down.