Florida health officials on Tuesday updated the year's COVID-19 death toll, reporting 878 deaths — even as Gov. Ron DeSantis applauded a dramatic federal policy shift to no longer recommend the COVID vaccine for healthy children and pregnant women.
Palm Beach County leads the state in reported COVID-19 deaths in 2025 with 63, followed by Pinellas County with 57, Hillsborough with 52, Broward with 51 and Miami-Dade with 46, according to data this week from the Florida Department of Health.
While the number of deaths has gradually climbed in recent months, the toll remains far below previous years. COVID-19 fatalities in Florida peaked in 2021 with nearly 40,000 reported deaths.
The fatality update came the same day U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the mRNA shots are no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women.
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A year ago, the Biden administration urged healthy children “to get yet another COVID shot, despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children,” Kennedy said.
Those guidelines came out after Florida became the first state to advise against COVID vaccination for healthy children in 2022 and later expanded that guidance to all age groups in early 2024.
Then and now, most public health experts have criticized state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s recommendations as politically motivated and potentially harmful.
This week, Ladapo praised the federal move as vindication of the state’s early and controversial decisions to push back against mRNA vaccine use.
On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis agreed, saying it “was the correct move, but also it’s something that Joe Ladapo has been talking about for a couple of years.”
Ladapo has cited concerns over adverse events like myocarditis, as well as what he called insufficient data on the long-term safety and efficacy of the vaccines. The state has also emphasized the need to scrutinize pharmaceutical influence on federal health guidance.
“Just based on the data that we had, based on what we knew about COVID, what we knew about the mRNA shot, and how that got added was not evidence-based, it was more just basically following whatever the narrative was at the time,” DeSantis said at a news conference in Fort Myers.
“So, when [Ladapo] came out for that in Florida, there was ‘Oh, my gosh,’ the wailing and the carping and everything like that. But the reality was, his job or our job is not to just follow the crowd or follow the narrative, but to actually follow the evidence, and that’s what Joe did. I think that’s what they’re doing now," he added.
DeSantis alluded to this season's COVID vaccination numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: only 13% of children and 23% of adults have received the most recent COVID booster.
"I think a lot of parents got it because the uptake was incredibly low for this because they saw that there was not a proven benefit," the governor said.
Though federal and state officials now align on vaccine guidance for certain groups, many clinicians remain uneasy with the new direction. National medical organizations have warned that pulling back vaccine recommendations could lead to a resurgence in preventable illness, particularly among vulnerable populations.
That HHS announcement follows a Food and Drug Administration move to limit the shots among healthy people under age 65. Yet, CDC data shows that those 75 and older currently have the highest rate of COVID deaths at 4.66 per 100,000.
“Florida has continually demanded honest science and accountability in our public health decisions,” Ladapo said. “Thanks to the tireless efforts of Secretary Kennedy, this is an important advancement for parents, physicians and children across the country.”
