80 Anti-Vaccine Bills Have Been Introduced In State Legislatures

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, does not mince words when describing the scientific legacy of the Covid-19 vaccines: The mRNA shots, he said, are “the greatest scientific achievement in my lifetime.”

Yet as the weather starts to turn cold and as officials push for more people to get their new booster shot before an expected winter coronavirus surge, public health leaders are battling skepticism and apathy toward the vaccines. Worse, experts fear the politicized backlash to the Covid-19 vaccines is already fostering skepticism about routine vaccinations generally, from childhood immunizations to flu shots.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers have drafted a pile of anti-vaccine mandate bills this year, chipping away at a foundational health practice for the last half-century. More than 80 anti-vaccine bills have been introduced in state legislatures, according to academics tracking the phenomenon, dwarfing the number of countervailing pro-vaccine bills. Public health experts are preparing for an all-out war on school mandates and other vaccine measures in states like Texas.

Childhood vaccination rates fell during the 2020-21 school year, the equivalent of 35,000 kids not being up to date on their shots. Although that might be an effect of missed checkups during the worst of the pandemic, there are other signs that faith in vaccines might be falling: Fewer Americans said this year and last year that they will get the flu shot compared to the few years before, according to a new poll from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. The fear among experts is that these drops are not a pandemic-driven blip but an accelerating trend, following a decades-long drift in trust in childhood vaccines; we should get updated numbers early next year.

This Covid-19 booster is likely the last time the government will offer a free shot to all Americans. We are moving away from a pandemic footing and into an age when reformulated Covid boosters are part of the routine vaccination schedule. That should be a cause for celebration: They are miracles of scientific ingenuity, delivered faster and proving more effective than most experts believed possible at the start of the pandemic. They have helped avert tens of millions of deaths worldwide, by some estimates.

And yet many Americans don’t trust them. If anything, the controversies around the vaccines — driven by a mix of political opportunism, polarization, and misinformation — may ultimately undermine faith in vaccines broadly among certain pockets of the population for years to come.

Why Covid-19 denialism could spread to other vaccines

Vaccine skepticism remains a minority position in the US. Nearly 70 percent of eligible Americans have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. More than 8 in 10 continue to say that getting childhood vaccinations is important. But that consensus is not quite as strong as it once was.

In 2001, according to Gallup’s polling, 94 percent of Americans said it was “extremely” or “very” important for parents to get their children vaccinated. In 2019, that figure had dropped to 84 percent. Gallup hasn’t asked that survey question again in a while, but the Kaiser Family Foundation asked something similar in July. They found 89 percent of parents or guardians said they kept their children up to date on vaccines. But 1 in 10 said they had skipped some or all of the scheduled vaccines for their kids.

People with doubts are often finding support from their political representatives. Both Hotez and Offit said that anti-vaccine sentiments have gained more of a foothold on the right in recent years. Once upon a time, vaccine hesitancy did not have a clear political bent: Some people on the left were doubtful of vaccines for what Offit called “purity” reasons (they don’t want to put “unnatural” products in their body) and some people on the right were making arguments based on liberty and freedom.

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