KFF Health News —
More than four years ago, former President Donald Trump’s administration accelerated the development and rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. The project, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, likely saved millions of lives. But recognizing that a significant number of Republican voters now identify as vaccine skeptics, President Trump has said little about what is considered one of the greatest public health achievements in recent memory.
“Republicans don’t want to claim that,” President Trump told an interviewer in late September.
Instead, President Trump has pledged at least 17 times this year to cut funding to schools that require vaccinations. A campaign spokesperson previously said the pledge only applied to schools with COVID-19 mandates. But the speech reviewed by KFF Health News contained no such distinction, and also included Trump’s vaccination rules for common, potentially deadly childhood diseases such as polio and measles. The possibility is increasing.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
President Trump has presided over a landslide shift in his party’s views on vaccines, reflected in false claims by Republican candidates during the primaries and mysterious conspiracies from prominent conservative voices this campaign. I am doing it. Republican lawmakers have increasingly expressed concerns about the risks of vaccines. A September 2023 poll by Politico and Morning Consult found that a narrow majority of voters were more concerned about the risks than the benefits of vaccination.
In response to this rhetoric, anti-vaccine policies have proliferated in state legislatures. Matt Motta, a political scientist at Boston University who tracks public health policy, said preliminary data shows states enacted at least 42 anti-vaccine bills in 2023, an increase of nearly nine since 2019. He said the number has doubled.
In some states, this has taken on the appearance of a holy war. For example, the 2024 Texas Republican Party Platform supports mRNA technology, an innovation behind some COVID-19 vaccines that scientists believe could have important uses in cancer treatment. We are proposing a ban.
Last month, President Trump appealed to anti-vaxxer voters by winning the support of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptics, and appointing him to his transition team. . On a recent tour with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, Kennedy said, “I’m going to be very involved in selecting the people who run the FDA, the NIH, and the CDC.”
President Trump’s activities may become more cautious. President Trump recently met at his New Jersey golf club with a delegation of vaccine-skeptical activists, including groups calling for mandates and the elimination of certain types of vaccines. The discussion was published on the conservative blog Gateway Pundit.
Trump has options to advance his anti-vaccine goals as president, including by sowing more suspicion and undermining the federal government’s ability to recommend vaccines. He promised that Kennedy’s nonprofit would appoint him, along with “leading experts,” to a committee investigating chronic diseases linked to vaccinations. At a rally accepting Kennedy’s endorsement, President Trump declared that “no one has done more” to defend “the health of our families and our children.”
Still, Judith Winston, who served as general counsel for the Education Department during the Obama administration, is looking to see how Trump’s most frequently proposed defunding of schools with mandatory vaccinations translates into action. He says it’s difficult.
Currently, she said, the Education Department does not have the authority to cut funding to public schools all at once, meaning the second Trump administration would have to take away funding program by program.
And the legal basis for such a move is not clear. “I’m not aware of any federal law that requires school districts to provide or not provide vaccines,” Winston said, adding that Congressional action would probably be needed.
All 50 states have vaccination requirements related to school attendance.
Trump’s outreach to anti-vaccine supporters comes at a time of growing vaccine hesitancy and a surge in preventable diseases. This summer, Oregon experienced its worst measles outbreak since 1991.
Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the situation could get even worse. In the 1990s, at a time when skepticism about vaccines was widespread, thousands of measles cases occurred in the United States. Although we are not yet back to the bad old days, the number of measles cases recorded this year has already quadrupled from last year, according to the CDC.
“It was very destructive,” he said. “Many children infected with measles have lifelong hearing and cognitive impairments. A small number of people in this country have died.”
According to the World Health Organization, the disease will kill more than 100,000 people worldwide in 2022, most of them children under the age of five.
Robert Brendon, a Harvard professor and expert on medical politics, said polls show that a sizable minority of Americans, concentrated among Republicans, are skeptical about vaccines.
And skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines has blossomed into doubts about vaccines among that group as a whole, he said. “This is the result of an uprising against the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.”
Opponents of vaccines are dividing the Republican Party. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made opposition to vaccines a central part of his ill-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. This year, states such as Wyoming and Missouri have run primary campaigns with anti-vaccination themes.
Bob Onder, a doctor and Republican candidate for the Missouri House of Representatives, was accused in a Facebook ad run by his biggest opponent of accepting millions of dollars from drug companies to test a vaccine. “He profited from our suffering,” one ad read. “You suffered the consequences.”
Onder has “never done any COVID-19 vaccine research” and opposes mandatory COVID-19 vaccines, his campaign manager Charlie Lovett told KFF Health News. (Lovett said Onder “conducted” a study sponsored by AstraZeneca that used monoclonal antibodies, rather than vaccines, to prevent COVID-19 in high-risk patients.)
Onder won the Republican primary, but his opponents, who downplayed vaccines, still received just over 37% of the vote.
Anti-vaccine candidates typically become anti-vaccine policy makers. The effects are also being felt in Texas, where vaccine policy was once a bipartisan issue. Researchers say that between 2009 and 2019, the country’s lawmakers passed 19 pro-vaccination bills, including one that would allow pharmacists to administer vaccinations.
However, that consensus began to change towards the end of the decade. In many cases, small groups fostered on Facebook have exerted their influence. One such group, Texans for Vaccine Choice, facilitated testimony before the statehouse in 2021, targeting pro-vaccination legislators, some of whom lost in Republican primaries.
Summer Wise, a former executive committee member of the state Republican Party, said that in addition to traditional conservative attitudes about personal autonomy, misinformation is fueling the anti-vaccination movement in Texas, especially He said this was due to misunderstandings about the use of fetal cells in vaccine development. False research on link between vaccines and autism. And there are conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist who supported vaccination.
“Politicians see vaccines as an easy foil to spread fear among voters, and they can use that to control voting blocs,” Wise said.
In addition to calling for a ban on mRNA technology, the Texas Republican Party’s 2024 platform calls for policies that could undermine vaccinations, such as allowing residents and doctors to opt out of vaccinations for religious reasons. It lists many. It also calls for enshrining a patient’s ability to opt out of vaccination requirements in the state’s bill of rights.
Under the second Trump administration, there is a possibility that anti-vaccination policies will take a more aggressive turn nationwide.
Roger Severino, former director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services and now at the Heritage Foundation, wrote the health agencies section of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation-led effort to plan for a Republican administration.
Among other ideas, the document proposes cutting the CDC’s authority to issue guidance on vaccines and quarantines of a “prescriptive” nature to schools and elsewhere.
A Heritage Foundation spokesperson noted that Severino said the Heritage Foundation’s credibility has been undermined and that it has the burden of explaining that “all vaccines on the schedule are being administered in combination.”
Lawrence Gostin, a public health law professor at Georgetown University, said the proposal misunderstands the CDC’s history and authority. He said the agency “very rarely” makes binding recommendations.
Get CNN Health’s weekly newsletter
“When the next pandemic hits, we will look to the CDC to provide guidance based on the best known evidence,” he said. “We don’t want government agencies to lose authority during a public health emergency.”
Some Republican intellectuals are spinning a dystopian vision of vaccines. Take, for example, the unpublished book “Dawn’s Early Light” by Heritage President Kevin Roberts. The book, which received a glowing foreword by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, has some particularly sharp words about vaccines.
In one section of the book, Roberts imagines that the federal government will somehow use the purported new features to “de-platform drivers” of cars that “fail to comply with the latest vaccine mandates.” are.
“Another powerful measure of social control has been introduced,” he wrote.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health issues and is one of KFF’s core operating programs and an independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. Information source.
