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Graph courtesy of Gallup, from its article titled: “Far Fewer in U.S. Regard Childhood Vaccinations as Important: Decline occurs among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents”, August 7, 2024.
‘Tis the season! It’s both vaccination time and our once in four years’ opportunity to vote for our next president, a new Congress and many other elected officials down ballot. What’s the connection? It turns out that even before the pandemic, overall vaccine skepticism had increased and broken more sharply along partisan lines.
According to data gathered by Gallup: today, 31 percent of Republicans think “vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to prevent”, while less than 5 percent of Democrats agree with that statement. But until just about 2016, there was little to no difference between the political parties on the issue of vaccine efficacy, and less than five percent of people from either party believed that statement.
I chose that graph from several in the Gallup article because I think the question is strange at best. Really, who would think that vaccines developed by scientists over decades or longer, using scientific protocols with rigorous oversight and approval processes would be more dangerous than the deadly disease itself? A quick review of the history of vaccine development and use plus a simple Internet search for vaccine efficacy, would show that vaccines have proven astoundingly effective for at least the last century and a half. Vaccines have drastically reduced or eliminated diseases, that before widespread vaccination, killed millions of people, often before the age of five.
The partisan divide on vaccines (not just Covid-19, but the full range of available vaccines) isn’t only at the individual level, but extends to the states — generally, blue states with an elected Democratic governor have much higher vaccination rates than red states with an elected Republican governor. Unfortunately for the higher concentrations of unvaccinated populations in red states, their elected officials also don’t believe in extending Medicaid health care coverage for those in poverty.
A map from the Kaiser Family Foundation published in May of 2024 highlights the ten states which, to date, have not accepted Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Eight of ten of those states have Republican governors and nine of ten reliably vote Republican in presidential elections. Check out what’s going on in Wisconsin, the lone democratic state still not accepting Medicaid expansion. The expansion is favored by Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor but opposed by much of the state’s Republican legislature. According to reporting by the Wisconsin Examiner, that partisan refusal has cost the state $1.6 billion in lost federal health care funds and payments for the medical treatment of the uninsured.
Apparently, it’s not enough that many more Republicans have died of Covid than Democrats, greater numbers of vaccine skeptics of even the most routine vaccinations like measles, polio and whooping cough live in red states, or that several million people have died and/or have no health care because they choose to believe conspiracy theories or simply reside in red states… because there are more deadly games brewing in the race for president..
A CNN article published September 30, 2024, details former President Trump’s continued war on vaccines:
…on at least 17 occasions this year, Trump has promised to cut funding to schools that mandate vaccines. Campaign spokespeople have previously said that pledge would apply only to schools with covid mandates. But speeches reviewed by KFF Health News included no such distinction — raising the possibility Trump would also target vaccination rules for common, potentially lethal childhood diseases like polio and measles.
And a few state legislatures are pushing the boundaries of public health and sanity even further:
Boston University political scientist Matt Motta, who tracks public health policy, said preliminary data shows that states enacted at least 42 anti-vaccine bills in 2023 — nearly a ninefold surge since 2019…The 2024 Texas GOP platform…proposes a ban on mRNA technology, the innovation behind some covid-19 vaccines that scientists believe could have significant applications for cancer care. [And] Last month, Trump made an appeal to anti-vaccine voters by landing the endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptics — and appointing him to his transition team.
Meanwhile, back at the World Health Organization…it, along with other humanitarian organizations, just completed a successful campaign to administer oral Polio vaccinations to about 560, 000 children in the Gaza Strip, after discovering one case of Polio in a child this July. That is how dangerous and contagious Polio is and how effective the Polio vaccine, created and tested in the mid-1950’s by American physician, virologist and medical researcher, Dr. Jonas Salk, has proven over the last 70 years.
Former President Trump and many in the Republican party who support him, continue to spout lies about vaccines and science, and just about everything else, and call the press '“fake news” if it reports the truth about him. It turn, his supporters stop believing facts and stop trusting scientists, journalists and other reputable sources.
There has been a “doctored” quote by the German-American historian and political theorist, Hannah Arendt, who covered the Adolf Eichmann, trial, in 1961, recently circulating on social media.The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College felt compelled to correct it. The following is part of the corrected version:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
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What do you make of the partisan divide on vaccination policies in particular, and science in general? Will “uninformed” opinions influence this election? Let’s talk this out in the Comment Section, below.
As always, thank you for reading and listening to The Poverty Trap !
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