For the New York Times, opposition to vaccines is unique to conservative voters, a suggestion that doesn’t appear to be bolstered by any data or real life trend.
“The politics of medicine, morality and free will have collided in an emotional debate over vaccines and the government’s place in requiring them, posing a challenge for Republicans who find themselves in the familiar but uncomfortable position of reconciling modern science with the skepticism of their core conservative voters,” the Times’ Jeremy W. Peters, Richard Pérez-Peña, Nick Corasaniti and Kitty Bennett reported in an article titled “Measles Outbreak Proves Delicate Issue to G.O.P. Field.”
“The vaccination controversy is a twist on an old problem for the Republican Party: how to approach matters that have largely been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by conservatives,” the report added later.
To support the notion that conservatives supposedly oppose the science behind vaccines, the Times points to Republican opposition to government action on so-called “climate change” and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s enforcement of strict Ebola quarantines.
Further, the story notes recent vaccine-related comments by Republican lawmakers, including Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul, who asked Monday during a radio interview: “What happens if you have somebody not wanting to take the smallpox vaccine and it ruins it for everybody else?
“I think there are times in which there can be some rules, but for the first part it ought to be voluntary,” he added.
The Kentucky senator said later on CNBC: “I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”
Separately, Christie said Monday that parents “need to have some measure of choice in things,” adding that his children have been vaccinated.
Christie said there’s a “balance that the government has to decide.”
But as to the specific issue of whether the “core” of conservative voters oppose vaccines, this characterization appears to be deeply inaccurate.
First, as noted by the Washington Post, the recent measles outbreak that has rocked the nation has hit California particularly hard.
“The communities where anti-vaxxers cluster [in California] are also among the most liberal. Marin County, San Francisco County and Alameda County all voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008,” the Post reported.
“In Marin, 78 percent of the vote went to Obama. In San Francisco, it was 84 percent. And in Alameda, it was 79 percent. That’s all higher than what Obama got in his own home county of Cook County, Illinois. Here, too, Sacramento is an exception. Only 58 percent of the county went for Obama in 2008,” the report added.
California, which is regarded by many to be one of the most liberal states in the union, has not supported a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.
“Researchers analyzing records for about 55,000 children born in 13 northern California counties between 2010 and 2012 found five geographic clusters of 3-year-olds with significantly higher rates of vaccine refusal,” the Post reported.
“These included East Bay (10.2 percent refusal rate); Marin and southwest Sonoma counties (6.6 percent refusal); northeastern San Francisco (7.4 percent); northeastern Sacramento County and Roseville (5.5 percent); and south of Sacramento (13.5 percent). By comparison, the vaccine refusal rate outside these clusters is 2.6 percent,” the report added.
Again, these are areas that overwhelmingly vote Democratic — deep blue areas as identified by political analysts.
Elsewhere, BuzzFeed stated flat-out that opposition to vaccinations is primarily a “liberal fringe issue.”
Anti-vaccination strongholds “are in places like Newport Beach, Santa Monica, and Marin County, California,” BuzzFeed’s political editor Katherine Miller wrote. “The affluent, the educated, the enlightened, the ones who believe in purity and science — people in liberal enclaves are the ones rejecting one of the 20th century’s major scientific achievements.”
She added that Democratic lawmakers have in the past been more than willing to pander to their voters on this issue.
“In fact, in 2008, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gestured in the direction of the discredited link between autism and vaccines (though whether Obama actually pandered is in dispute),” she noted.
And then there’s the issue of celebrity support for the anti-vaccination movement. This campaign has, in part, gained strength through the efforts of celebrities, including former model Jenny McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and actress Mayim Bialik, none of whom are considered “conservative.”
Further, the phenomenon of popular support for the anti-vaccination movement has long been associated with wealthy, coast-dwelling, left-leaning persons, as documented in 2013 by the far-left website Salon.
“The anti-vaccination movement, which posits — in the face of overwhelming empirical research — that vaccines cause autism and other diseases, seems to be picking up steam in many of the country’s wealthier, educated enclaves where parents are interested in living ‘natural’ lifestyles,” then-Salon reporter Alex Seitz-Wald wrote.
The states that have people “choosing not to get vaccines at the greater than 5 percent level” include California, Michigan, Vermont, Idaho and Oregon, he reported.
“The national median is 1.8 percent, with many states below 1 percent, making Vermont (5.7 percent) and Oregon (6.4 percent) more than three times above the national average,” he added.
In contrast, the states that have the best vaccination rates include Mississippi, North Carolina, Hawaii, Utah and Maryland, according to the Post.
Taken together, the historical support for the anti-vaccination movement, where those who oppose vaccines happen to live and which states are better at encouraging parents to vaccinate their children, the Times’ characterization that conservative voters are particularly skeptical of vaccinations is dubious at best.
The Times article has been updated to correct several glaring errors:
The New York Times did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
