America’s vaccination campaign has made slow, steady progress since its summer lull—and is likely to accelerate as new public and private sector mandates take effect. At the same time, right-wing political and media figures, who have already held back the country’s pandemic response, are finding more moronic battles to fight in the COVID culture war. In recent weeks alone, MAGA conservatives have opted to take a horse dewormer over the safe vaccines; elected officials have likened Joe Biden to a violent dictator for instituting shot requirements a majority of Americans support; and Tucker Carlson has devoted time on his program to talk about what may or more likely may not have happened to Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s testicles after taking his jabs. As the ailing country struggles to get better, the anti-vax right seems even more determined to get worse.
Just how much worse could they get? Is it possible their attacks on common sense and the societal good get somehow more absurd? Will the rise of requirements give rise to a search for loopholes? Could their performative, but by now reflexive, opposition to COVID vaccine mandates extend to other vaccine requirements, including those already necessary for many kids to attend school?
So far, there hasn’t seemed to be a new popular movement against the polio or measles vaccines already mandated for many school children; Ron Johnson hasn’t been going on Fox News to promote a feline tick medication to treat tetanus or anything like that. But the sweeping manner in which prominent Republicans have denounced the new White House plan to combat the pandemic has led to concerns about opposition to other existing and future vaccine requirements. “The 20th century was a century of incredible progress against leading killers, and much of that progress was because of vaccinations,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told the Washington Post on Monday. “If we turn our back on vaccines at this moment where vaccines are really having a scientific heyday...I think that would be tragic, and it would cause a lot of unnecessary suffering and death, particularly among children.”
As the Post noted, while the right has been freaking out over Biden’s COVID-specific public health precautions for a while now, some prominent GOP figures, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and some of his top allies, have made statements recently that imply more general opposition to public health mandates.
While there has been no immediate indication that McCarthy and his ilk have plans to include the mumps vaccine in their pitched battle against Biden, their wildly irresponsible political rhetoric around inoculations has public health officials worried that it is only a matter of time before other vaccines are swept up in the culture wars, whether intentional or not. “My worry is that there will be a spillover effect from all of this anti-vaccine aggression,” Peter Hotez,a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, told the Post.
Even if these weird, anti-vaccine politics stay contained to the COVID shots, there is still, of course, plenty of damage to be done. While the United States has had access to COVID vaccines that most of the world remains in desperate need of, it is beginning to lag behind other similar nations, as former Biden adviser Andy Slavitt noted Monday. New mandates could help turn that around. (Dr. Anthony Fauci in a recent podcast interview said he would be in favor of a vaccine mandate for airline travel, which White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients on Monday suggested could be a possibility.) But there are concerns that anti-vaxxers are already seeking out ways to get around the requirements, including through religious exemptions. “The consequences of these forced edicts are enormous,” Mat Staver, founder of the conservative Christian Liberty Council, told the New York Times, describing a surge in interest in religious exemptions to the COVID shots.
If there’s a bright side to all this, it’s that public opinion appears to be on the side of vaccines rather than on the unmitigated spread of the deadly virus: A spate of recent polls by CNN, Axios, and Morning Consult found a majority support mandates and Biden’s COVID plan—and while the surveys reveal deep partisan divides on vaccines, they also suggest that the percentage of Americans who are steadfast in their refusal of the shots has dwindled and that support for health precautions has grown. The rise of the Delta variant, which has overwhelmed hospitals and threatened the country’s long-awaited return to post-pandemic life, may be convincing more and more Americans that their freedom to walk through life without this level of threat from the virus might outweigh the freedom of the unvaccinated to spread a deadly virus in schools, offices, and other public spaces.
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September 14, 2021 at 10:39PM
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The Right’s War on COVID Vaccine Mandates Is About to Get Scary - Vanity Fair
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