Florida’s surgeon general said Sunday that he had not weighed the cost – in terms of infections, hospitalizations or deaths – of ending vaccine mandates in his state. But scientists who have done those calculations say those costs may be high. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether he had done any data analysis or projections of how many new cases of vaccine-preventable disease there would be if the mandates were lifted for everyone in Florida, including schoolchildren, as he proposed last week, Dr. Joseph Ladapo answered, “Absolutely not.” “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 an analysis on that,” he said. Scientists have crunched the numbers, however. Infectious disease forecasters at Stanford University who recently looked at the effects of falling vaccination rates across the country found that in Florida alone, a 15% decline in vaccinations against measles over 25 years would lead to 1 million measles cases. The state is particularly vulnerable because of its large population and brisk tourism industry, according to lead study author Dr. Mathew Kiang. Disney World in Orlando has often been the site of measles cases imported from other countries, for example. “Unvaccinated groups in the United States are sort of like tinder, and vaccines are sort of fire protection, and so every imported case is like throwing a match into the fire,” said Kiang, an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health. “For most of them, nothing is going to happen, but what you don’t want is a situation where one happens and then it comes roaring back like a wildfire.”For every 1,000 measles cases, there are between 1 and 3 deaths from breathing complications or brain swelling. If there are a million cases, that’s about 1,000 deaths that doctors consider preventable with the use of vaccines.