BuzzFeed News attempted to survey every candidate running for president in 2020 on their stances on vaccination and, more critically, their opinion on religious, personal, and medical exemptions. While plenty of candidates such as President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden did not respond with comment, a handful of candidates who responded simply equivocated on a matter that’s literally one of life and death.
Most astoundingly tone-deaf was South Bend, Ind., mayor and rising star in the 2020 field, Pete Buttigieg. While every candidate who responded offered the same, stale, and obvious assertion that vaccines are good, none demonstrated their ignorance of vaccination’s reliance on herd immunity than Buttigieg.
“Pete does support some exceptions, except during a public health emergency to prevent an outbreak,” a Buttigieg spokesman told BuzzFeed, which noted that “Buttigieg believes exemptions are appropriate for people who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons. Personal belief and religious exemptions should only be allowed in states that aren’t facing a public health crisis and where herd immunity rates of vaccination are maintained.”
As I have explained at length here before, refusing to vaccinate is as much of an externality as drunk driving. It’s the biological equivalent of meandering in public and playing Russian Roulette with people who didn’t agree to having a revolver shot in their faces. Because vaccination requires herd immunity, not vaccinating puts people who did get vaccinated at risk of coming down with fatal illnesses such as measles.
Personal belief and religious exemptions to vaccination are tantamount to acts of biological warfare. There’s not one word in the sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Jainism which posits theological objections to vaccination, and personal belief exemptions simply grant self-aggrandizing conspiracy theorists the opportunity to put dozens of Americans at risk of contracting fatal diseases.
For Buttigieg to allow either of these is unconscionable enough, but even worse is his aside that they would only be allowed before murderous public health crises break out. Diseases prevented by vaccination such as measles and varicella are effectively untreatable. Measles patients often take vitamin A supplements to mitigate the risk of death, there’s no actual cure. Nearly half of all measles patients experience complications such as blindness and deafness, and young children have the highest risk of death.
After backlash, Buttigieg’s campaign issued a “clarifying statement”:
This would be a weak initial statement, let alone one to clarify such a glaring error. For one thing, existing laws in most states are awful. Just three states have outlawed religious and personal exemptions, and state Republicans have actively attempted to loosen exemption laws.
Then there’s the issue of corrupt physicians in states like California, which only permits medical exemptions, issuing fraudulent medical exemptions to anti-vaccine parents.
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is a cop who was happy to lock up nonviolent drug offenders and mothers of truant children en masse, yet the most forceful statement she could issue to BuzzFeed News was that “she thinks people should get vaccines.” Now would be the time for a former prosecutor and state attorney general to call for every state in the union to not just outlaw nonmedical exemptions but also pass bills like those proposed in her home state of California, which would crack down on monitoring physicians who do issue medical exemptions.
Gillibrand issued the same equivocation, conceding that vaccines “save lives,” but refusing to explicate her position on exemptions.
Of the candidates who did respond to BuzzFeed, only Andrew Yang; Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass; Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio; and Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif.; explicitly called for ending all but medical exemptions for medically necessary vaccines. Only Moulton addressed how the federal government can encourage states to enact more stringent vaccine laws, calling for tying federal education funding to tightening vaccine laws.
Tightening vaccine laws is an obvious, life-saving, and politically expedient cause that every 2020 candidate ought to eagerly encourage. We’re not yet halfway through the year, and 2019 has seen more measles cases in the country than it has in 25 years. This is an emergency, and one that Republicans and Democrats alike can admit requires more government intervention.
