The state isn’t restricting access to tests for anyone who wants one, Dr. Ladapo notes: “We’ve avoided that, because that’s been the spirit of the pandemic actually, which is to order people, to make people do things, to force people to do things, and to not respect people’s personal preferences. . . . I’m really stupefied by it—that so many of my colleagues would think that it’s OK to abdicate the rights of adults to make decisions about a vaccine, or about other public-health measures.”

A liberal writer recently tagged Dr. Ladapo “an anti-vaxx nut,” which means his views on the subject are nuanced and heterodox. He says he’s spoken favorably of vaccination throughout his career, and he acknowledges that Covid shots provide “reasonable protection . . . against hospitalization and serious illness” and that “infection case rates are higher in people who have not received the vaccines.”

But he strongly opposes mandates and thinks authorities are pushing vaccines too hard. For one thing, “there has been this irrational—it really has been irrational—campaign to promote the idea that we know all there is to know about safety.” Example: “One of the things that some women have been saying is that it’s altered their menstrual cycles.” Last week the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology published a study that found “vaccination is associated with a small change in cycle length.” NPR.org titled an article on the finding “COVID vaccines may briefly change your menstrual cycle, but you should still get one.”

“That’s perfectly fine to conclude,” Dr. Ladapo says, though one may question NPR’s authority to dispense medical advice. But “it’s wrong to suppress people’s concerns and complaints, what they report after something happening, and not investigate. . . . This study found that the effects were temporary, which is great. But we don’t understand the mechanism. Like why is that happening? And what else don’t we understand? Those are good scientific questions, and it’s antiscience to not let people explore those questions.”

He’s also uncomfortable with the call for ever more shots. “The CEO of Moderna is already talking about the next booster,” because the effect of the third shot begins waning within weeks. “I think that if someone wants to take the booster every few months,” Dr. Ladapo says, “that’s their decision.” But “the cycle of boosters that wear off after a few months . . . not even as a scientist but just as a human being, that doesn’t feel right to me.” This week an official of the European Medicines Agency confirmed Dr. Ladapo’s intuition by warning that repeated boosters could eventually weaken the immune system.

The justification for mandatory vaccination is that the unvaccinated put others at risk of infection. Dr. Ladapo maintains that rationale doesn’t apply to Covid, especially given Omicron’s infectiousness. So many people have been vaccinated that “if the vaccines stopped spread, this pandemic would be over,” he says. “The argument for the negative externalities does not hold water.”

His main objection, though, is to the infringement of civil liberties: “A lot of people have essentially suffered moral injury by coercion to undergo vaccinations that they felt they didn’t need, maybe because they had prior immunity, or they felt they didn’t want, because there are still uncertainties about the complete safety profile of the vaccines.”

Dr. Ladapo, a native of Nigeria, has an immigrant’s appreciation of American freedom. His parents brought him to the U.S. when he was 5, and he grew up in Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina while his father, a microbiologist, pursued an academic career. The son studied chemistry at Wake Forest, where he was captain of the track-and-field team, then went to Harvard and earned both a medical degree and a doctorate in health policy.

He followed his father’s path into academia. After a stint at New York University, he landed at UCLA, where he did both research and clinical work. Two years ago he found himself treating Covid patients at the university’s hospital early in the pandemic.

“There was a lot of uncertainty and there was a lot of panic,” he recalls. “We had protocols that were changing daily. . . . My residents were very scared.” He looked at data from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic originated: “It was very clear that risk was concentrated in people who were older, and the risk was very low among people who were younger.”

He also experienced the pandemic as a father of young children. “Los Angeles has been hard-core in terms of its lockdowns and restrictions,” he says. “The closing of the schools when the data was indicating that kids were at extremely low risk—that just completely looked like a bad decision. . . . We have boys, and they have to go outside. So L.A. shuts down; it becomes almost like a ghost town. We have three kids, and we didn’t stop going out. So we would take them to the park, and there’d almost be no one there.”

When schools prepared to open for the fall 2021 semester, the Ladapos decided their children wouldn’t go: “With masks and testing, my wife and I—it was just full stop. We would never do that to our kids. We think that—our personal beliefs are that children shouldn’t be forced to place something over their faces.” They started working with like-minded parents on joint home-schooling arrangements.

Then came the job offer from Tallahassee. “I didn’t think my wife would go for it,” he says. But “I told her, and she just lit up. She said that she had been waiting for something like that to happen.” He thought his academic work was going well, but she was worried about “the direction of UCLA and my career there.” They settled in the Tampa area.

For the benefit of readers who wonder how the other half lives, I ask him to compare California with Florida. “In Los Angeles during the pandemic, it felt like you lived under a blanket,” he says. “People who didn’t feel that they needed to take certain precautions, but there was—they would feel like they needed to be seen as taking certain precautions, because that was the atmosphere, the expectation. It was a very heavy air, sort of an oppressive atmosphere there. . . .

“Here, in contrast, the thing that you feel you’re under is the sun. . . . Do you have a mask on you, are you ready to put it on when you go outside or go to a store—that whole sort of ambiance is completely absent here.”

That resonates with my experience. At Christmas 2020 my wife and I decided to escape New York’s lockdown and wait out the pandemic near Miami, where we have a second home. We’re still waiting. We were most recently in the Big Apple a month ago, as the Omicron panic was getting under way. We had to show our papers—vaccine cards and photo ID—to eat in restaurants. Our last day there, a renewed state mask mandate took effect. It did all feel oppressive, and although I’ve been a New Yorker for more than 30 years, returning to Florida was like coming home to America.

Is it worth the risk? Miami-Dade County has had a higher per capita Covid case count than New York City for several weeks, but its hospitalization rate is somewhat lower. That sounds like a wash until you flip the question: Is the possible reduction in risk worth the price in freedom?

After the interview, an aide to Dr. Ladapo sends me a graph ranking all 50 states and the District of Columbia by age-adjusted Covid mortality rates throughout the pandemic. Florida comes in at No. 30. California does slightly better at 33rd, while New York ranks seventh.

Florida’s permissive policies didn’t stop Covid, but neither did other states’ restrictive ones. It’s an open question whether lockdowns, masking, forced vaccination and the rest have conferred any benefit at all. As the federal government and states like California and New York search for a “new normal,” they should consider following Florida’s example of simply being normal