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Staunch defender of medical freedom, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s latest move supercharges safeguards for informed consent.

DeSantis shot to fame in 2020 when he resisted the temptation to turn two weeks to flatten the curve into totalitarianism.

Now he is championing the creation of a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission, grounded in his government’s consistent resistance to COVID-19 overreach.

In 2020, DeSantis stood alone as he refused to implement mask mandates and vaccine passports.

Speaking at a news conference earlier this month, the Republican Governor said,

“People tried to say we were fascists for doing that.”

“Think about it for a minute: I’m liberating people from restrictions, and they’re trying to say that that’s authoritarian?”

DeSantis defended his decisions, saying the COVID-19 response “spun out of control and impacted people’s basic civil rights.”

Florida decided not to mandate vaccines, he added, because “nobody in the state of Florida should ever have to choose between a job they need and a shot they don’t want.”

Protecting Freedoms

DeSantis then called out the World Health Organisation (WHO), slamming the organisation for being “one of the engines for bad policy.”

At the time, he recounted, “Biden was president, and they were working on this lockdown treaty.”

They called it a pandemic treaty, “but basically it would have handed sovereignty from the US and other countries invested in it to an unelected organisation mainly funded by the Chinese Communist Party.”

“So, we passed legislation in Florida saying Florida does not recognise WHO dictates, whether it’s the lockdown treaty or anything else.”

“Some of these policies that have been put in place in some of these medical institutions [were] insane.”

“The elites lost their way,” and lost all credibility.

Noting this, DeSantis said, “We’ve done a lot over the years to really be on the right side of fighting against the hysteria.”

Not giving up on that momentum, he asserted,

“There are a lot of issues that we have to deal with regarding medicine and medical freedom.”

“We’ve got to be very conscientious about protecting those freedoms,” especially given how the elites responded.

Consequently, DeSantis remarked, we were making America healthy again (MAHA) before MAHA was trendy.

Hence, the creation of the Florida MAHA Commission.

Under my administration, Florida has become the leading state in the nation for medical freedom. Our health policies are guided by evidence, common sense, and respect for individual rights—not ideological agendas or special interests.

With the establishment of the Florida MAHA… pic.twitter.com/yWxaMj7c1m

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) September 3, 2025

“Some of the commission’s guiding principles,” DeSantis explained, “are empowering informed decisions.”

He described these as the bedrock for medicine and medical freedom.

“Informed consent is the touchstone for everything that goes on in this area of American life,” DeSantis added.

Born from this is the “primacy of parents who should be free to direct health decisions for their minor children.”

“We ought to be empowering parents rather than trying to take away the rights of parents,” he continued.

Doctors who won’t “see kids unless they take a bunch of vaccines first, are very destructive. It’s not right.”

“Does a baby really need a hepatitis shot, given that we know how the disease is contracted?”

Transparency and Accountability

Making the case for transparency, DeSantis said, “We need the ability to challenge the medical orthodoxy when it’s not supported by the data.”

This isn’t about being anti-science, he clarified, where medical intervention works, “that’s great.”

However, “you have a lot of stuff that gets put out there that when you peel back the onion, it’s worth asking, what’s the basis for that?”

DeSantis then explained that Florida would be doubling down on his government’s Make America Healthy Again roots.

Florida’s MAHA commission will “recommend state-level integration of  at least four Make America Healthy principles.”

These are: “individual medical freedom, informed consent, parent rights and market innovation.”

The commission “will also prioritise reforms that empower Floridians.”

Such as “reducing regulatory burdens and holding actors accountable for their conduct, while fostering incentives for healthy living and innovation.”

Backlash

Florida’s Democrats are in an unsurprising fit of rage over DeSantis choosing freedom over Faucism.

Their current problem is with DeSantis’s MAHA decision to end school vaccine mandates.

Appealing to safetyism in a letter sent to the Governor on 8 September, Democrats protested the medical freedom initiative.

They effectively took issue with parents deciding what’s best for their kids, then “urged DeStantis to reverse the directive, by keeping school vaccine requirements.”

Responding, DeSantis fired back, saying he was “opposed to vaccine mandates, not vaccines.”

Notably, Florida ending school vaccine mandates coincides with Pete Hegseth — the MAGA White House’s secretary of war — ending COVID-19 vaccine mandates and rolling back some influenza (flu) shots.

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Image courtesy of Adobe.