Imagine how much anti-vaxxers would cost us --- now that these clowns are pushing for no vaccines whatsoever being required rather than limiting their efforts to Covid vaccines. These GOP anti-vaxxers are idiots who are dangerous to public health.
Not inflicting death and misery across society is not a "personal choice".
Anti-Vaxxers Could Fuel Spike in Childhood Diseases: 'It Will Be Horrific'
https://www.newsweek.com/2021/10/15...ldhood-diseases-it-will-horrific-1635853.html
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.
"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.
"Those vaccines have had a long history of use, so there's certainly data that suggests that they're relatively safe," the group's president, Jake Duesenberg, tells Newsweek. "But it always has to be a choice of individuals. You can't have government forcing that on us."
In all, some 22 percent of Americans now identify as "anti-vaxxers," defined as people who support vaccine refusal and "embrace the label as a form of social identity," according to a report by researchers at Oklahoma State University, Texas A&M University and others, published in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities. Underscoring concerns of public health experts, the study also found identifying as an anti-vaxxer to be predictive of increased opposition to childhood vaccine requirements.
Meanwhile, signs are also mounting about the partisan nature of growing opposition to vaccines and vaccine mandates, and the shift from medical to libertarian reasoning. Asked in a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation whether getting the COVID vaccine is a matter of "personal choice" or "part of everyone's responsibility to protect the health of others," more than 70 percent of
Republicans saw it as a personal choice vs. just 27 percent of
Democrats. And according to a
Twitter analysis by Renee DiResta, research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, reported in The
New York Times, even anti-vaxxers whose opposition in the pre-COVID era was focused on concerns about autism and toxins are now evolving their messaging to talk about freedom and "vaccine choice."
"The coalescing of previously distinct groups that are now more aligned on this issue of opposing vaccines is new," says Douglas Opel, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital and author of numerous papers on vaccine hesitancy among parents. "The politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine development and authorization process has been a concern of all of us on what that might mean for vaccine confidence and the sustainability of immunization programs generally."
The Road to Here
Until recently, mandates for vaccinations—which mostly surface when parents try to enroll their children in daycare facilities or schools—were a relatively uncontroversial, routine part of preventing the spread of mostly vanquished infectious diseases. Every state has such mandates, and all but six allow exemptions for reasons of either religious or "personal belief." In California, Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi, New York and West Virginia, only exemptions for medical reasons are acceptable.
Opposition to such mandates in the decades before COVID included the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the actress Jenny McCarthy, both liberal skeptics of vaccine science who promoted theories about widespread vaccine side effects that have been aggressively debunked and dismissed by the medical community. When the country experienced outbreaks of diseases such as measles—an illness that in 2000 was declared eradicated in the U.S. by the World Health Organization—the overall numbers were in the dozens or hundreds, which is relatively small. In California, where a 2014 outbreak was traced to Disneyland, and New York, where surges in 2019 were connected to insular Orthodox Jewish communities, lawmakers quickly voted to eliminate the ability of parents to opt out of vaccinations for religious or personal reasons.
Yet what scares epidemiologists now is that many conservatives who denounce vaccine mandates are eliding the medical questions of whether they are safe. Instead, says David Rosner, a Columbia University historian who specializes in the intersection of politics and public health, they're focusing on a political view that requiring them is wrong.
"We are at the beginning of a much more profound change that may lead to resistance to other vaccines but also may lead to disintegration of any sense of social obligation, social cohesion and social purpose," he warns. "It's part of the questioning of what the country is and what it represents. When you see this kind of breakdown and unwillingness to work together, even under the most obvious circumstances where we've had more than 650,000 people die, it feels like the beginning of a major dividing point."
Many opponents—like Elder and Ohio
Senate candidate Josh Mandel, who likened vaccine mandates to the Gestapo—are themselves vaccinated for COVID-19 and aren't voicing criticism of the safety or efficacy of the shots themselves. They merely insist that it's not the government's role to force the shots on people, many of whom question the record speed of the vaccines' development, prefer to rely on natural immunity the body may develop after being exposed to COVID or believe a wide range of misinformation, from the myth that the shots contain microchips capable of tracking movement to concerns of potential harm to the reproductive systems of women of child-bearing age.
"I am not against anyone getting the COVID vaccine, it's their choice," says Duesenberg, who declined to say if he is vaccinated against COVID. "From someone that's not in the medical profession, there are risky classes of individuals who, if they were to contract the COVID-19 disease, it could be very bad for them. There's a big argument for them to get the COVID vaccine. But for young, healthy individuals, that risk-reward is way different. I've heard even doctors ask why a young healthy person would get the vaccine when you don't know the long-term effects of it. Either way, it can't be the government's choice."
That notion, though, threatens to upend more than a century of bipartisan acceptance and judicial support for the government's ability to impose vaccine requirements. As recently as mid-August, in fact,
Supreme Court Justice
Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, declined to block a requirement from Indiana University that all students and faculty be vaccinated for COVID. In doing so, Barrett upheld a ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, featuring all Republican appointees, that said vaccine requirements "have been common in this nation" and citing a 1905 Supreme Court decision upholding a smallpox vaccine mandate.
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