There’s lots of reasons why the GOP and its right-wing allies (masters) have stirred up resistance to the Covid vaccine. Part of it has to do with Trump’s initial dismissal of Covid as “no worse than the flu” and his efforts to conceal his incompetence at handling the pandemic. It’s also another way to “own the libs” and push the anti-government narrative. It’s supremely hypocritical, of course; most of the loudest screamers warning of the “dangers” of the vaccine are themselves vaccinated. Still, from a purely pragmatic (and dogmatic) political perspective, the anti-covid-vaccine campaign makes a kind of perverse sense.
But it’s moving beyond that to something that makes no sense at all, from any political perspective:
GOP opposition to vaccine mandates extends far beyond Covid-19
(Stat published this story on the 17th; it just caught my attention now.)
Right-wing politicians’ resistance to vaccine mandates is extending far beyond Covid-19 immunizations, a startling new development that carries vast implications for the future of public health.
In Idaho, a lawmaker introduced a bill that would define vaccine mandates — of any kind — as a form of assault. In Florida, a prominent state senator has called for a review of all vaccine requirements, including those for immunizations that have enjoyed wide public acceptance for decades, like polio and the measles, mumps, and rubella shot. And in Montana, the Republican governor recently signed into law a new bill that forbids businesses, including hospitals, from enforcing any vaccination requirements as a condition of employment. [emphasis added]
Holy shades of Louis Pasteur! What next? Will they stop hospitals from making doctors wash their hands between patients?
Other states are taking similar steps:
A Tennessee proposal banning employer vaccine mandates, for one, doesn’t specify which immunizations it would apply to, meaning it effectively would apply to any requirement. Alabama’s GOP governor recently signed a new law banning any new vaccine mandates in schools, beyond those that already exist — a measure clearly aimed at Covid but with a potential impact on future immunization efforts. [emphasis added]
Some of this is political backlash manufactured to oppose anything Biden does, in this case a Covid vaccine mandate (which is really more “vaccine-or-test”). But this isn’t completely a product of Covid vaccine hysteria; anti-vaccination campaigns precede the pandemic, and already produced disastrous — predictably disastrous — results:
Even before Covid-19, some U.S. communities had begun to experience outbreaks of diseases that most of the country has largely eradicated. In two recent high-profile instances, a Somali-American community in Minnesota and a largely Orthodox Jewish town outside New York City experienced major measles clusters in 2017 and 2019, respectively. In both cases, the outbreaks were driven by lower-than-ideal vaccination rates, which in turn stemmed from active misinformation campaigns.
Public health officials, not at all surprisingly, are extremely alarmed:
“It’s the perfect storm, because there’s growing vaccine hesitancy, an anti-vax lobby growing more powerful, and this growing milieu of disinformation,” [Nahid] Bhadelia[, a physician-researcher who leads the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University] said. “There is a general societal movement here in the U.S. to undermine public health recommendations.”
It has already had an impact on this year’s flu vaccine program:
In 2020, one AP-NORC poll showed just a 4% gap between Democrats’ and Republicans’ desire to be immunized against the flu. Two surveys conducted in 2021, however, paint a grimmer picture: Now, Democrats are more enthusiastic than Republicans about flu vaccines by a 24% or 25% margin, according to Axios/Ipsos and Kaiser Family Foundation, respectively.
and that is also evidence of the politically-driven nature of the anti-vaccine program.
In a Biblicly just world, the Republicans would end up killing off their own base through diseases that had been a thing of the past. The problem is, diseases don’t make political distinctions. No vaccine is perfect (a point often misused by the anti-covid-vaccine mob), and our country’s health depends not just on vaccination but on widespread vaccination.
There may be some among the anti-vax crowd who think their genes (their tighty-whitey ones) are superior and will resist diseases without vaccines. Or that God will protect them, since in the Bible disease was a punishment for disobeying God. Or, even more cynically, they’ll get vaccinated on the sly (much as Trump did) while counting on the disinformation campaign to work on the poor, the minorities, the “undesirables” who shouldn’t be in the country in the first place. Call it internal emigration, if you will.
Whatever the calculation, public health doesn’t work that way. Democrats should be shouting this from the rooftops — the Republicans are seriously trying to get us all sick, or worse.