A recent gathering in a Quality Inn ballroom in rural Bradley, Illinois, offered a glimpse—terrifying to most epidemiologists, thrilling to longtime vaccine “safety” activists—of America’s growing political divide over vaccinations and its implications for the nation’s health. Ostensibly, the meeting was a community forum about employer mandates for COVID vaccines that the organizer expected to draw 80 people in this overwhelmingly Republican exurb of Chicago. Instead, more than 300 people piled in, mostly to complain about the notion that anyone—a boss, a school, a government—could force them to take any vaccines at all. As one Libertarian county commissioner told the crowd: “I will fight for your right to believe in whatever god, medicine or way of life you choose.”
The event is being replicated in some form or another in cities and towns across America, emblematic of a growing grassroots movement of people who believe that vaccine mandates—for COVID, yes, but increasingly for other diseases as well—are an affront to their personal freedom. That represents a marked shift from pre-pandemic times, when vaccine opponents typically based their reasoning on medical concerns and were largely comprised of a few religious sects and a small number of left-leaning activists seeking explanations for rising rates of autism. As the anti-vaxx mandate movement gains political traction, particularly on the right, medical experts fear it could not only cripple efforts to eradicate COVID but could also lead to a surge in long-conquered diseases, from mumps to whooping cough to smallpox.
“Those [more established] vaccines have had a long history of use, so there’s certainly data that suggests that they’re relatively safe. But it always has to be a choice of individuals. You can’t have government forcing that on us” – Conservative group Action 4 Liberty president Jake Duesenberg
“There are some more conservative states where we are likely to see other non-COVID vaccine mandates under attack, and it is very worrisome,” says Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “If we have some of these pediatric infectious diseases come back, it will be horrific.”
Even before President Joe Biden’s September 9 announcement of a litany of aggressive COVID vaccine mandates—covering an estimated 100 million Americans, including federal health workers and companies with more than 100 employees—evidence of changes in policy and sentiment toward such rules was cropping up, led by the right. This summer the Tennessee Department of Health, reportedly pushed by GOP lawmakers, directed its staffers to stop conducting “proactive outreach regarding routine vaccinations,” including those for childhood diseases, HPV and influenza. Larry Elder, the top Republican vote-getter in the failed recall effort against California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, told the Los Angeles Times editorial board in August, “I don’t believe that the state should tell a parent whether or not a child should be vaccinated. That’s an intrusion of state power.” In Minnesota this month, the conservative group Action 4 Liberty, which boasts an email list of more than 100,000 recipients, began hammering a leading Republican candidate for governor for refusing to sign the group’s “Stop Vaccine Mandates” pledge.
As the article says, there have been anti-vaxxers from all over the map for a while, including a contingent on the left which is just as anti-science as the right wing. But that is a vanishingly small faction compared to this new group of “freedom fighters” who have no reason to not vaccinate their children except to make a political point. It’s child abuse.