TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Senate on Wednesday confirmed Dr. Joseph Ladapo as the state's surgeon general.
"He is now officially official," tweeted Jeremy Redfern, press secretary for the Florida Department of Health.
The appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis was approved in a party-line vote. Not a single Democrat voted in favor of him.
Ladapo, like the governor, has resisted COVID-19 vaccine mandates. He has publicly indicated that he believes vaccinations do limit hospitalizations and deaths, while masks have been somewhat ineffective at preventing infections during the pandemic.
It's been a long road to get to Wednesday's confirmation. In January, elected Democrats accused Ladapo of evading questions on his coronavirus policies and stormed out before casting votes during a prior hearing. Then, at a confirmation hearing in February, he declined to say whether he'd been vaccinated when pressed by Democrats, drawing further criticism.
Ladapo, and his supporters, have maintained that his vaccination status is private medical information.
Last fall, Ladapo got backlash when he refused to wear a mask to meet with Democratic state Sen. Tina Polsky, who has cancer. Ladapo, who indicated he couldn't communicate clearly while wearing a mask, has said he offered to instead meet the lawmaker outside in a hallway.
Ladapo came to Florida from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he was an associate professor and cared for hospitalized patients. In 2020, he appeared in a since-deleted video that was labeled as misinformation; it was produced by a group called America's Frontline Doctors, promoting the debunked claims that the drug hydroxychloroquine could provide a cure for the virus, USA Today reports.
DeSantis announced Ladapo's appointment in September 2021, citing his "remarkable academic and medical career."
The Associated Press and 10 Tampa Bay's Andrew Krietz contributed to this report.