CNN thought it had another “gotcha” moment when Jake Tapper tried to corner Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo on *State of the Union*. Instead, Tapper got a lesson in common sense and parental rights. The clash highlighted the growing divide between freedom-minded states like Florida and media elites who believe government — not parents — should make health decisions for children.

The segment turned heated when Tapper launched into an aggressive line of questioning, accusing Ladapo of ignoring public health “data” while pursuing Governor Ron DeSantis’s initiative to roll back vaccine mandates in Florida schools. Tapper waved around a state report noting increased requests for religious vaccine exemptions and recent cases of illnesses like chickenpox and whooping cough, before demanding to know why Ladapo hadn’t run projections on how ending mandates might affect hospitals.

But Ladapo wasn’t having it. Calm, direct, and unflinching, he reminded Tapper that the issue wasn’t about hypothetical charts or bureaucratic projections. It was about liberty.

“Ultimately, this is an issue, very clearly, of parents’ rights,” Ladapo explained. “Do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what goes into their children’s bodies? I don’t need to do an analysis on that.”

That response sent Tapper into a frenzy. He scolded Ladapo for supposedly failing to prepare Florida hospitals for “outbreaks” of diseases like measles and polio. Tapper even accused the surgeon general of abandoning his responsibility by refusing to predict “how many kids might now get these preventable diseases.”

But Ladapo shut down the scaremongering. “Jake, just really briefly. This whole, ‘Oh, Florida hasn’t done any analysis’—that’s nonsense. We handle outbreaks all the time. So there’s nothing special that we would need to do,” he shot back.

Ladapo then delivered the knockout punch: “There are countries that don’t have vaccine mandates, and the sky isn’t falling over there. The right position is that parents should control—absolutely. They should be the final say on what happens in terms of any vaccines that they choose to take or not take. It’s very simple.”

That’s what CNN doesn’t get. This isn’t about denying science — it’s about affirming freedom. Florida has thrived by putting parents first, while blue states continue to push top-down mandates and heavy-handed restrictions. Tapper, like so many in the corporate press, pretends that liberty is dangerous while ignoring how government overreach has eroded trust in public health.

Predictably, conservatives on X cheered Ladapo’s refusal to bow to Tapper’s framing. The account “Vigilant Fox” summed it up: *“HOLY SMOKES: Florida’s Surgeon General just called out Jake Tapper for spewing ‘nonsense.’”*

At the end of the day, Ladapo reminded Americans that freedom doesn’t require permission slips from bureaucrats — and that the job of government is not to parent our children. CNN may call that controversial. Florida calls it common sense.