Five Years After COVID’s Onset, the Republican Party Wages War Against Vaccines

Part of the Series

Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19

With vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now in control of the Department of Health and Human Services, state-level anti-vax politicians believe their moment has struck to fundamentally shift the country away from mass vaccination programs. As a result, the U.S. stands on the edge of a series of cascading public health crises.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and the rapid implementation of stay-at-home orders in an attempt to stem the tide of airborne sickness and death.

In the days leading up to this grave anniversary, last week Iowa Republicans moved a state bill out of subcommittee and into the full Iowa Senate Health and Human Services Committee that would make it a misdemeanor offense for Iowa doctors to give a patient an mRNA vaccine. The bill, Senate File 360, targeted what its supporters labeled “gene-based vaccines,” which it defined as those generated through using mRNA, and threatened health care providers with a $500 fine for vaccinating patients, and, even more insidiously, with a revocation of their state license to practice.

In the end, the bill didn’t make it out of the full committee and onto the Iowa Senate floor, thus killing it off for the current legislative year. But the fact that both of the Republicans on the three-person subcommittee voted to advance it, despite public comments being overwhelmingly against the measure, is indicative of how far anti-vaxxers have advanced in mainstreaming their ideas within the GOP. Legislators in Montana and Idaho have also introduced legislation this year aimed at banning mRNA vaccines.

Meanwhile, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has asked legislators to make permanent a ban on COVID vaccine mandates at both government offices and private businesses. And state public health officials in Louisiana have stopped all promotion of COVID vaccines and Mpox vaccines, and have even stopped promoting routine flu shots as well. This follows on from Texas’s decision last year to stop promoting COVID shots.

In recent years, a growing number of GOP voters have self-identified as vaccine skeptics. Polling last year suggested that only 26 percent of these voters believed it was “extremely important” for their children to stay up to date on their vaccines. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of Democratic voters felt this to be “extremely important.”

Many vaccine skeptics send their children to private schools so as to avoid having to comply with public school vaccine mandates, and in some school districts in places like West Texas, the epicenter of the latest measles outbreak, the numbers of unvaccinated children far exceeds the 5 percent safety threshold that allows for herd immunity to largely stymie the spread of measles.

It’s not a surprise, therefore, that five years after COVID began its rampage through the U.S. population, on the way to killing well over 1.2 million people, the U.S. is facing a series of growing public health risks.

In Texas and New Mexico, the most serious outbreak of measles in the U.S. in decades has sickened hundreds and killed at least two people, including an unvaccinated child and an unvaccinated adult.

In normal times, given the hyperinfectious nature of measles, the CDC, the NIH, and every other branch of the federal and state public health system would be firing on all cylinders to get as many unvaccinated children and adults as possible vaccinated.

But these aren’t normal times: Public health agencies are being decimated by huge personnel and spending cuts; the travel budgets of staffers are being all but frozen; vaccine advisory committees aren’t being allowed to meet, meaning that, if and when the vaccine committees resume meeting, it will still be a scramble to accurately choose which flu strains to vaccinate against for next year’s flu season in the northern hemisphere; and scientific grants are being stalled.

Public health officials in Louisiana have stopped all promotion of COVID vaccines and Mpox vaccines.

And while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has half-heartedly come out in support of the vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella, he has also preached a regimen of cod liver oil and vitamin A for at-risk kids, and continues to muse aloud about the dangers of vaccines, thus muddying the waters at a time when experts say a laser focus on vaccines ought to be the order of the day.

Making matters worse, with huge demand for measles, mumps and rubella vaccines in Texas and New Mexico at the moment, doctors’ offices and pharmacies are reportedly running out of stock of the vaccine; and with the federal government in turmoil, there does not appear to have been a coordinated effort to get extra doses into the states at the epicenter of this epidemic. In fact, while the U.S.’s worst measles outbreak in decades picks up pace, the CDC is busy setting up studies to revisit conspiracy theories about childhood vaccines causing autism — theories that have already been debunked.

Measles isn’t the only infectious disease to worry about. This season, bird flu experts worry that with hospitals seeing so many people suffering from regular flu, there’s a risk that the few patients with H5N1, or bird flu, might serve as incubators for a mutation of the bird flu that picks up genes from regular flu — hand-delivered by the large numbers of patients being admitted to hospitals — that would allow it to transmit within the human population more effectively. The World Health Organization, with which Trump recently severed U.S. ties — estimates a mortality rate as high as 50 percent for H5N1. Given the lethality of bird flu, vaccine research should be center stage. Instead, the “Department of Government Efficiency” accidentally fired many of the USDA’s bird flu experts; and while the department did try to rehire these workers once the mistake was identified, not all have returned. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, the CDC has put on hold vaccine committees that study the flu and recommend vaccines.

Meanwhile, advocates worry that distribution of the Mpox vaccine is at risk. The reason is that outreach for the vaccine has targeted the LGBTQ population, since the disease has spread furthest within that group in the U.S.; but in the new anti-DEI era, this targeted outreach may run afoul of new restrictions on what words can and can’t be used in government public health efforts.

And, with USAID programs around the world terminated, as well as contracts with UNICEF, major international efforts to eradicate polio through expanding vaccination efforts have also been thrown into reverse, leading to the very real possibility of burgeoning polio outbreaks. Given the infectiousness of the disease, it’s unlikely that large-scale outbreaks in multiple countries would be contained overseas, and it’s all too likely that wealthy countries such as the U.S. could also see polio outbreaks in consequence of these shortsighted spending cuts.

As more of Trump’s nominees get confirmed, the anti-vax leanings of the federal government will only become more pronounced. Dave Weldon, the physician nominated to head the CDC, has publicly embraced conspiracy theories about childhood vaccines and autism — despite such theories being thoroughly disproved. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee to head the NIH, is more measured in his conversation on vaccines — but he, too, appears open to funding studies to explore potential links with autism. And in his address to Congress last week, Trump himself appeared to lean into the notion that vaccines lead to autism, prompting at least one Democratic lawmaker to walk out of the speech.

The COVID pandemic, which began surging in the U.S. five years ago, should have led to more long-term investments in public health and in vaccination programs across the country. Instead, five years and well over a million deaths later, the pandemic has given way to political fissures and a federal government tilting the scales against vaccine research and distribution. It’s hard to see how this can lead to anything other than more preventable disease outbreaks and more deaths.