Florida Surgeon General Resurfaces Misleading Claims Connecting Measles Vaccines to Abortions

Call it common sense, call it media literacy—but anyone with eyes and ears can tell MAHA isn’t going so well. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won’t stop betraying public health whenever his (or Trump’s) interests stand at odds with ours; the nation is still being plagued by a diarrhea outbreak; and measles cases this year have officially surpassed 2025 numbers, which was already a record high since 1992.

The idiocy of RFK Jr.’s mandate is but a ripple of subsequent disasters, however, and nothing serves quite so good a reminder of this as Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who’s back on his anti-vaccine crusade to parrot claims from Kennedy that the measles vaccine contains “aborted fetuses.” 

“You know, for some people—people may or may not know that the measles vaccines is developed with the cells that are a progeny from…an aborted fetus,” Ladapo told reporters during a press conference in Orlando on Friday. He was specifically addressing the uptick of measles cases in the Sunshine State, which—per federal data as of Thursday—was recorded at 155. 93 of these cases stem from Ave Maria University, a private Catholic college. 

“You know whether there’s a connection between the fact that you know 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,” Ladapo explained.

Uh, we’re sure. And so would he—if he bothered to do some quick research.

floridaphoenix.com/2026/07/24/s…
Oh my effing god
Please deliver us from morons

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— johannamariew.bsky.social (@johannamariew.bsky.social) July 26, 2026 at 12:15 PM

For much of last year, Kennedy and the HHS regularly claimed the MMR (mumps and rubella) vaccine includes “aborted fetus debris,” which is incredibly misleading, and a position fact-checked by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which said—point blank—that vaccines do not actually contain fetal cells.

Instead, throughout the 1960s and 1980s, many vaccine developers used human fetal cell strains—or cells grown in a lab using human fetal tissue—for research. One of these was the rubella-targeting part of the MMR vaccine, which—like polio, Hepatitis A, and rabies—also used fetal cell lines that were decades-old, and provided through two elective abortions. Those same fetal cells are being used for vaccine development today. 

Speaking to the Guardian last year, Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said these claims came as part of Kennedy’s overall goal to “lessen trust in vaccine and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.” “It’s a fragile market,” he explained.

For his part, Ladapo has been targeting vaccines for months—at one point working hard to make Florida the first state to scrap its vaccine mandate. (The bill never even made it past the state House.) “People should always be able to make decisions about what they put in their body in the absence of coercion,” he told reporters Friday. Sure. But moreso… people should always be able to make decisions on accurate information.