Anti-science Trump regime moves to ban vaccines
Bleak: Republican voters trust Trump and RFK as much as they trust doctors
In the fall of 2021, a Democratic state senator from Iowa tweeted a response to Republican leaders calling covid vaccine mandates authoritarian: “Do Iowa Republicans believe requiring the polio vaccine for school age children is authoritarian?”
It was a standard rhetorical technique: Undermine Republican attacks on vaccine mandates by reminding people of a vaccine mandate that has been uncontroversial and effective for decades. If America had a Republican Party that was capable of shame and prioritized public health over the accumulation of power, such a rhetorical device could have put an end to the GOP’s attacks on vaccines. Unfortunately — but clearly — America does not have such a Republican Party. Worse, America’s Republican Party has a solid base of supporters who will believe any bullshit the Party1 peddles, even if it contradicts their own lived experience.
So I tweeted a grim response: “I worry that if we keep asking questions like this we’re gonna end up with a bunch of school kids with polio.”
My point at the time was that we really need to stop thinking of Republican leaders as people we can win over with logic or shame, and we really need to stop thinking of Republican voters as people who will choose science, facts, their own lived experience, or even the safety of their children over their allegiance to a political party and communications apparatus that has curdled their brains.
I think about that exchange regularly. Last December, for example, when The New York Times ran this article:
Right around that time, I had a conversation with a health care provider in which I raised the question of which vaccines someone like me might benefit from,2 because I wanted to get those taken care of before the Trump regime took power. The provider was a bit incredulous: Why would you want to do that? I haven’t seen any indication they’re going to ban vaccines, just study them. So I said “I will leave health care to you but what Republicans might do is my lane.”
People really should stop expecting anything other than the worst from Trump & co.
Sure enough, the Trump regime now plans to prevent most Americans from getting a Covid vaccine:
Here’s today’s New York Times report on the Trump regime’s move to ban Covid vaccines for most Americans:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, is a prominent vaccine skeptic who spent years campaigning against the Covid shots.
Under his leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services has taken a more critical view of vaccines in general, raising questions about their safety and whether they should be so widely administered.
[…]
“This is overly restrictive and will deny many people who want to be vaccinated a vaccine,” Dr. Anna Durbin, director of the Center for Immunization Research at Johns Hopkins University, said in an email.
The changes do “not make sense from a public health perspective,” she said.
None of this is likely to get better any time soon. Years of Republican lies about vaccines haven’t eroded support among Republican voters for Republican politicians; instead, it has resulted in Republican voters trusting the likes of Donald Trump and RFK Jr. significantly more than they trust the scientists and health experts at the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, and their local health department — and even as much as they trust their own doctor.3
These trends have accelerated in recent years — the Covid crisis, social media, and disinformation campaigns have combined to completely break the brains of the American Right — but their origins go back much further. The Republican Party has long sought to undermine the concepts of science and objective truth as a central strategy in their effort to consolidate power.
Two decades ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Mooney wrote The Republican War on Science detailing the party’s assault on science across a range of issues, from climate change to health care to product safety. A Washington Post reviewer ridiculed the book, portraying Mooney as a conspiracy theorist and comparing him to Ann Coulter. Noting that Republican Senator Bill Frist supported federal funding for stem cell research, the reviewer concluded “If there really is a sustained Republican war on science, Frist’s announcement suggests that some of the rebel generals are starting to wave white flags.”
Twenty years later, it’s clear that Mooney’s argument has aged considerably better than the Post review’s dismissal of it.
It’s important to understand that the Republican war on science was never just about getting their way on specific policy debates. The goal is much deeper and more dangerous. They are anti-science in the way that Donald Trump is anti-constitution — not as disagreements with specifics, but as a rejection of any authority higher than their own word. That’s what they’ve sought to establish among their followers: The primacy of Republican edict, above and immune from the constraints of science, fact, law and constitution. If we have any hope of combatting that, it’s important to understand how successful they have been.
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If you’d like to comment on the Trump administration’s proposal to block Covid vaccine approval for most Americans, the Regulations.gov comment page is here and the comment window is open until May 23. Also consider contacting your member of congress.
And its allies in the news media, tech company algorithms, et cetera.
I wasn’t referring to flu or Covid vaccines, which I get routinely, but rather to other things I might not be aware or certain of.
Looking forward, as Trump and RFK remake the federal health agencies in their image, with grievance and grift replacing science and concern for public health, Republican confidence in the FDA, CDC, etc might well increase, and confidence among Democratic voters might erode. Things fall apart.
Ah yes, "anti-science" from the same liberals who think that a man can become a woman by taking hormones and getting radical cosmetic surgery. You are the very last people who should be delivering any lectures about "the science" of anything.
You just can't fix stupid.