An outbreak of measles has revived a latent but potent political debate over whether the government should mandate vaccinations and to what extent.
President Obama, in an interview over the weekend with NBC News, encouraged parents to vaccinate their children — but stopped short of saying such a vaccination should be compulsory.
“I understand that there are families that in some cases are concerned about the effect of vaccinations. The science is, you know, pretty indisputable,” Obama said. “We’ve looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren’t reasons to not.”
But New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie seemed to separate himself from the president’s stance in an interview during a trip to the United Kingdom, where he was asked whether he thinks the measles vaccine is safe and whether children should be vaccinated.
“All I can say is that we vaccinated ours. That’s the best expression I can give you of my opinion,” Christie said. “It’s much more important, I think, what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official. And that’s what we do. But I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.”
The “balance” to strike, Christie elaborated, would be how many vaccines to mandate.
“Not every vaccine is created equal, and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others,” Christie said.
Kevin Roberts, a spokesman for Christie, clarified the governor’s remarks further in a statement later Monday.
“To be clear: The governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection, and with a disease like measles, there is no question kids should be vaccinated,” Roberts said. “At the same time, different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate.”
In spite of the clarification, Christie’s remarks ignited a political firestorm and laid bare the intensity the issue of vaccinations still engenders, as well as the potential pitfalls for candidates.
Mo Elleithee, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said Christie “ought to take his own advice — sit down and shut up, before people actually get hurt.”
But Sen. Rand Paul, another likely Republican contender, went even further than Christie during an interview Monday on CNBC, not only opposing mandatory vaccinations but questioning the underlying safety of the vaccines themselves.
“I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines,” Paul said. “I’m not arguing vaccines are a bad idea. I think they are a good thing, but I think the parent should have some input.”
“The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children,” Paul added. “It is an issue of freedom and public health.”
If Paul’s phrasing sounded familiar, it might be because Rep. Michele Bachmann made a similar assertion, specifically about the vaccine for human papillomavirus, at a debate during the 2012 Republican presidential primary contest.
“There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate,” Bachmann told Fox News afterward. “She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine. There are very dangerous consequences.”
Indeed, vaccinations as a political issue is hardly a new phenomenon. On both sides of the aisle, the debate cuts to the core of disagreements among Americans about the role of states versus that of the federal government, and over whether to trust lawmakers with issues pertaining to health, as with the Ebola outbreak last year.
As a candidate for president in 2008, Obama struck a very different tone on the issue than he now does.
“We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate,” Obama said. “Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. … The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.”
During the 2012 presidential election cycle, Gov. Rick Perry was criticized by many of his Republican presidential primary opponents, including Bachmann, for having tried to make the HPV vaccine compulsory in Texas in 2007, with an option to opt out. HPV is a primary cause of cervical cancer.
At a press conference in May of that year with women who had contracted HPV, Perry staunchly defended the move with an emotional appeal.
“I challenge legislators to look these women in the eyes and tell them, ‘We could have prevented this disease for your daughters and granddaughters, but we just didn’t have the gumption to address all the misguided and misleading political rhetoric,’ ” Perry said.
But under the glare of a presidential campaign, the Texas governor quickly apologized for ordering the mandate, which was never implemented after being reversed by the Texas legislature.
“The fact of the matter is that I didn’t do my research well enough to understand that we needed to have a substantial conversation with our citizenry,” Perry said in August 2011.
Although the issue had long been moot in Texas, its revival in 2011 speaks to the political stickiness of the vaccination issue among conservative and Libertarian-minded Republicans.
“It was an easy attack from someone like Michele Bachmann, who was trying to question Gov. Perry’s conservative record and conservative credentials,” said Ray Sullivan, who at that time worked as Perry’s communications director. “It played well with a certain subset of the conservative base who are troubled either by vaccines generally or by the public health mandate approaches specifically.”
But the discussion might cut differently in this presidential election cycle, with the measles outbreak now widespread, affecting 14 states.
“Folks are now able to see the ramifications of some of this vaccine misinformation,” Sullivan said.
