Anti-science extremism is now spreading like a virus on the political right. Legislation in some red states seeks to roll back vaccination requirements not just for the coronavirus but for any other disease — potentially even preventing schools from enforcing long-existing requirements that students be vaccinated against polio, measles and the like. It sounds extreme, but in fact it’s the logical outcome of the irrational conservative backlash against coronavirus vaccination mandates.
Vaccines have saved an incalculable number of lives in the past century. Smallpox, a deadly scourge throughout the history of civilization, has been eradicated globally for almost half a century now. Once-common and dangerous childhood diseases like polio, measles and whooping cough have been brought under control by school vaccination mandates in place for generations, without significant controversy.
It takes a special kind of historical ignorance to imagine that, on balance, the minimal risk inherent in vaccines is remotely commensurate with the massive harm these various diseases have inflicted on humanity down through the ages — and could again, if left unchallenged. That’s why, until recently, America’s anti-vaccination movement was a minor fringe.
But that has changed. For reasons that have more to do with political identification than medical facts, large swaths of the Republican Party have come to view the remarkably successful coronavirus vaccines developed during the Trump administration as a political enemy — something to be rejected and opposed. The most reasonable among them couch their opposition as being not against the vaccines themselves but against vaccine mandates for employment, travel or other forms of societal participation. Even that stance, though, ignores the fact that vaccine mandates have been around in various forms almost as long as vaccines have been around.
Critics of this latest anti-vaccination movement frequently ask why they oppose these mandates for the coronavirus but not, for example, vaccination mandates for measles and mumps in schools. Isn’t that inconsistent?
Now, some Republican state lawmakers around America are answering that question with a disturbing step toward consistency. Pending Republican legislation in Georgia would ban the state from requiring “proof of any vaccination of any person as a condition of providing any service or access to any facility.” Sponsors claim the measure isn’t aimed at school vaccine requirements but, as written, it certainly would seem to invalidate those requirements. Pending Wisconsin legislation is more explicit, specifically prohibiting schools from excluding students based on their vaccination status, The Washington Post reports.
Underlying these and other efforts around the country is a chilling premise: that one person’s right to enter a school, office or other crowded place without being vaccinated overrides everyone else’s right to be safe from potential exposure to a deadly disease. It doesn’t — and until recently, it’s not a premise that anyone outside society’s fringes would have accepted. That this is becoming what passes for mainstream thought in Republican circles is terrifying and dangerous.
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