A top Florida health official on Wednesday vowed to end all vaccine mandates, including school immunization requirements, likening the measures to prevent childhood diseases to slavery.

The announcement thrusts the conservative-leaning US state into the center of a growing political battle, as vaccine-skeptic federal Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seeks to steer the nation away from the life-saving medical intervention.

“The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida — all of them of them, all of them, every last one of them,” Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo told a cheering audience at the Grace Christian School in Valrico.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,

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