Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced Wednesday that all of the state's vaccine mandates for schools will end soon, the first state to take such action.

The state requires vaccinations for school-aged children, including those that protect against chickenpox, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, and hepatitis B.

Ladapo compared vaccine mandates to “slavery” and said they will end as he announced the pending change during a news conference at Grace Christian School in Valrico, NBC News reported.

He added that the state has mandates for about a half-dozen vaccines, which will be repealed.

“All of them. Every last one of them,” Ladapo said. “Who am I, as a man, to tell you what to put in your body?”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis backed the measure, saying his administration can remove some of the mandates, but the Florida Legislature would have to remove others, according to The Washington Post.

The proposed change has drawn criticism from public health experts. “We can expect a resurgence of measles,” pediatrician Paul Offit told The Washington Post.

“Other infectious diseases will continue to pop up,” Offit continued. “This is an unprecedented measure that will only put our children at unnecessary risk.”

Over the past 50 years, vaccines have saved an estimated 154 million lives, most of them infants, according to the World Health Organization.

Vaccines generate herd immunity against specific diseases, which requires a vaccination rate of at least 94% in a defined population to achieve, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Ladapo is a known skeptic of vaccine mandates, as is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.