The anti-vaccination movement has only gained strength in recent years, and the controversy over vaccines that played role in the 2016 election is set to figure even more prominently in politics going forward.
“The anti-vaccine lobby has grown from a fringe movement in the late ’90s, early 2000s to this massive media empire that has now hundreds of websites, amplified on social media. They have political action committees now, it’s become politicized,” said Peter Jay Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and the director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development. “This was never a problem up until a few years ago, but now it’s become this huge issue.”
There are numerous signs that the anti-vaccine movement has grown since the 2016 elections. The rate of children entering schools without vaccinations has climbed. The movement made the list of the World Health Organization’s top threats to global health in 2019. The U.S. has suffered an uptick in measles outbreaks, prompting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to warn that the progress in eradicating many infectious diseases achieved over the course of decades is at risk.
There are currently over 65 confirmed cases of measles in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, and 90 confirmed cases in Brooklyn, New York.
In recent months, social media platforms have been forced to grapple with the growing phenomenon, as passionate and bitter arguments about vaccines have spread like wildfire. Last month, Pinterest banned certain vaccine-related terms in an effort to quell vitriol. Also last month, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., sent letters to CEOs Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google urging them to crack down on anti-vaccine content.
Schiff wrote in the letter that he “is deeply concerned about declining vaccination rates” and encouraged the companies to follow YouTube, which is owned by the same parent company as Google, in ensuring that they do not promote “conspiracy theories or medically inaccurate videos.”
Pressure is growing for more politicians to weigh in.
“This debate is evidence of our polarized politics. If one side is against, the other says, ‘I’m going to be for,'” said Charles McCoy, assistant professor of sociology at State University of New York at Plattsburgh. “These new trends show that politics are becoming more polarized, so this issue will become more polarized.”
President Trump led Republican presidential primary candidates into a debate over vaccines in 2015 by suggesting on the debate stage that vaccines are linked to autism.
That claim has long been debunked. Nevertheless, other GOP candidates were forced to respond to Trump, and several fell short of the full-throated support for vaccination that doctors had hoped for. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for instance, an ophthalmologist, said that vaccination should be voluntary.
In the heat of the controversy, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie provoked controversy by calling for parents to have a “measure of choice” in whether their children are vaccinated.
Democrats sought to capitalize on the intra-GOP debate by portraying Republicans as anti-science and conspiracy-minded.
“The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork,” Hillary Clinton tweeted in February 2015 as Republicans tussled over vaccines.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., too, sided against the anti-vaccination movement — and paid a price for it. “I am sensitive to the fact that there are some families who disagree but the difficulty is if I have a kid who is suffering from an illness who is subjected to a kid who walks into a room without vaccines, that could kill that child and that’s wrong,” he told The Daily Beast in 2015. The comment provoked ire from skeptics of vaccines and drew scathing reviews from anti-vaccine blogs.
Today, 17 states allow philosophical exemptions for parents who object to immunizations on personal or moral grounds. The CDC reports the median percentage of kindergartners with an exemption from one or more required vaccines in school year 2017-18 was 2.2 percent, compared with 2 percent during the 2016-17 school year.
A substantial minority of the public believes that children should not be required to be vaccinated. A 2015 Pew Research Poll concluded that 68 percent of U.S. adults say childhood vaccinations should be required, but 30 percent say parents should be able to decide.
Former President Barack Obama addressed the conflict on CNN in 2015. “I understand that there are families that are in some cases concerned about the effects of vaccinations,” he said. “The science is pretty indisputable. There is every reason to get vaccinated. There aren’t reasons to not.”
“I think things will continue to get worse, and unfortunately, because there’s not a lot of political will to stop it, I think measles outbreaks are going to become the new normal in the United States,” said Hotez. “The majority of parents are not deeply dug in, they’ve just heard something unsavory about vaccines on the Internet or from a friend or a relative.”
