Vaccine Mandates - About Time

 Just finished slides for our Current Events session on Tuesday, topic Antivaccination and Covid. The opposition to vaccination is longstanding, beginning even before vaccines when there was opposition to the practice of inoculation for smallpox. After Jenner described protection from smallpox by introducing cowpox to an 8-year old boy named James Phipps and then exposing him to smallpox two months later (no Institutional Review Boards then), humankind had its first real vaccine. The opposition to vaccination came quickly. 

George Gibbs, an opponent of smallpox vaccination in Great Britain in the mid-19th century, wrote a book that sounds like it could have been written by the anti-vaxxers of today. Gibbs opposed mandatory vaccination for smallpox. He felt the law was an intrusion of personal rights; it was written to benefit the medical trade; the law treated people as too stupid to make their own health decisions; it mandated a practice that was not universally accepted by physicians; and it required a procedure that had failed in some cases. Those ideas from 1854 pretty much fit the narrative of the antivaxxer movement of 2021 to a T.

The anti-vaccination movement in the 20th and early 21st centuries has been mostly centered around vaccines for children. Pushed by a coterie of people who, on careful examination, have made a lot of money and garnered a ton of media attention from their nonsensical ideas (Andrew Wakefield as a prime example), the Covid pandemic represented a perfect storm wherein the forces of the anti-vaccination movement joined hands with right-wing politicians to protest vaccines for Covid-19 and any mandatory use of same. Michael Gerson, a conservative and former speechwriter for George W. Bush has correctly labeled the Republican opposition to mandatory covid vaccination as “performative libertarianism.” 

Aaron Blake in an analysis article in today’s Washington Post notes that President Biden is taking a correct path with his use of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) implementing workplace regulations on covid testing and vaccination as well as his executive orders testing and vaccination for federal workers in the Executive Branch and federal contractors. Blake makes the case these mandates are really for periodic testing with a vaccination opt-out.

The United States has coddled too many whiners and people out to score political points in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Providing facts, providing incentives (beer, donuts, lottery tickets) has not gotten us to the vaccination threshold necessary to begin to control this pandemic. As of today slightly more than 53% of Americans have received a full vaccination for covid. We continue to have a surge in covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, worst in states with Republicans in charge. This is insanity. We have lost 6 months this year because a cult that used to be a political party believes it makes better sense to prattle lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories rather than getting to work to deal with this public health disaster. As Peter Hotez predicted earlier this year, our flirtation with antiscience and the idea that individual medical freedom trumps responsibility to society as a whole has led to this calamity. 

We have truly reaped the whirlwind of Trumpism, with covid and its attendant miseries as well as an ongoing attempt by the Republicans to simply sidestep their sedition and treason on 6 January. I applaud bold public health action to end this pandemic. I also support efforts to find out all that happened prior to and after 6 January. These are truly two efforts that must succeed. Failure is not an option.