Coming for Vaccines: Anti-Vax Theocrats

Another "Trump Effect" We Can Do Without

His confirmation hearings haven't even started yet, and Donald Trump's careless nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to Health and Human Services has emboldened legislators in 15 states to introduce legislation challenging vaccination requirements, such as for attending government schools:

Religious exemptions for school vaccine requirements are among the most popular proposals so far. Lawmakers in New York, Virginia, Connecticut and Mississippi have introduced bills that would allow more people to waive routine shots. Indiana lawmakers will weigh religious exemptions for medical students.

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[Brian Festa, co-founder of an anti-vaccination law firm] credited West Virginia's new religious exemption to Trump's nomination of Kennedy, as well as a 2023 federal court ruling that required Mississippi to allow residents to cite religious beliefs when seeking exemptions from state-mandated vaccinations for children.

"I think the writing's on the wall and they did feel the pressure," Festa said of West Virginia.

After the heavy-handed policies of the left during the pandemic, and less-than-ideal explanations of the benefits of the Covid vaccines, Republican politicians seem rather to have doubled down on the kind of perspective I noticed during the pandemic:

...While I applaud DeSantis being wary of and opposing government-imposed vaccine mandates and "passports," he was wrong to prevent businesses who wanted them to require vaccinations of their employees or customers if that is what their (individual!) owners wanted to do. This is almost blatantly contradictory and indicates that, for his admiration of America's founding principles, he does not understand them appreciably better than most other politicians.

But Gus, the government runs the public schools! you might object.

This is true, but ideally, the educational sector would be privatized and each school free to set its own vaccination policy. Given the choice and accurate information about vaccines, most parents would send their children to schools that required vaccinations of pupils as a condition for enrollment.

Absent a private education sector, the government should have the most rational, scientific vaccination policies in place for schools. That is generally the status quo now, and changing that at the state level as these Republicans are proposing will endanger herd immunity, which will make attending school especially dangerous for any child who has to forgo vaccination for legitimate medical reasons, such as allergies -- and for anyone whose vaccination was ineffective for any reason.

RFK, Jr., ahead of his confirmation hearings has said We're not going to take vaccines away from anybody. No matter: Between the trial lawyers he will empower and politicians like these, he won't have to.

-- CAV