One of the lazier rhetorical tropes to enter modern political discourse is of the “people will die!” variety. Remember when net neutrality was going to kill us all? And how about those fatal tax cuts? Then there’s of course climate change, which most people across the political spectrum understand will wreak havoc within the century if unchallenged, but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned us “like, the world is gonna end in 12 years.”
But there is one issue of state level politics that is actually on the cusp of leading to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths, and Republicans are about to unilaterally enable it.
Just three states, California, Mississippi, and West Virginia, have forbidden all vaccine exemptions except for those in the case of medical necessity. The tri-state area and most of New England, the South, and the Midwest only allow medical and religious exemptions from vaccination, but a staggering 17 states allow “philosophical” exemptions, otherwise known as the outright rejection of settled science. Six of the 19 states with measles outbreaks are those which permit philosophical exemptions, and the single state with an outbreak that bans all but medical exemptions, California, was directly caused by international travel.
POLITICO reports that Democrats in six states, four of which permit philosophical exemptions, have recently introduced bills to tighten vaccine laws, only to be opposed by Republicans. GOP lawmakers in West Virginia and Mississippi have gone as far as introducing measuring to permit more vaccine exemptions.
The actual anti-vaxxing population tends to skew either hippie-dippie left-wingers influenced by Hollywood hacks like Jenny McCarthy and Kat von D, or insular, religious fundamentalist communities. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers in political discourse. But Republicans in state governments have no excuse, morally or logically to aid and abet in the mass proliferation of fatal diseases.
Mandatory vaccination is both libertarian and conservative. As I explained last month:
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Non-medical exemptions from vaccinations are a clear and concerning violation of the non-aggression principle. Parents sending their students to public schools must not be forced to unknowingly send them to their deaths.
In 2000, public health officials declared that the United States had eradicated measles. In just this year, more than 500 Americans have come down with the disease, which has exploded by 300% globally from last year. As fewer and fewer Americans get vaccinated, we’re collectively killing our herd immunity and putting unvaccinated infants at the highest risk of death, blindness, and intellectual disability.
A Republican Party that voluntarily puts innocent infants at risk for no reason is not a pro-life party. It’s not a conservative one, and it’s not a libertarian one. If you live in Colorado, Arizona, New Jersey, Washington, New York, or Maine, call your state lawmakers to demand they support Democratic legislation to tighten vaccination requirements, and if you live in West Virginia or Mississippi, call them to ask why the hell they would loosen them.
