Vaccine debate heats up in GOP
Potential 2016 candidates Chris Christie and Rand Paul stake claim on opposing sides
WASHINGTON— Whole Foods hippies. Anti-vaccination Americans, author Seth Mnookin said in 2011, tend to live in “those communities with the Prius-driving, composting, organic food-eating people.” Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, in a June segment titled “An Outbreak of Liberal Idiocy,” portrayed “anti-vaxxers” as the wealthy left’s answer to the climate change deniers of the ignorant right.
“It’s happening in my community? People who juice?” actor Samantha Bee asked in mock horror. “That’s exactly where it’s happening,” said vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit.
It’s now happening among Republicans who want to be president.
Top Democratic candidates quietly pandered in 2008 to voters fearful of the non-existent link between vaccines and autism. Few noticed. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, unlike potential 2016 candidates Chris Christie and Rand Paul this week, were not weighing in during a measles outbreak linked to Disneyland.
“I have never been contacted by so many media in a 14-day period in the entire 33 years that I’ve been here doing this work,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, president and co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center, which believes parents have a right to decide whether their children should be vaccinated.
Toronto Public Health says four measles cases were discovered in the city last week. Over 100 cases have been reported in the U.S. since the beginning of the year.
Christie, the New Jersey governor visiting England to burnish his foreign policy credentials, said Monday that he had his children vaccinated, but he called for “balance,” saying that “parents need to have some measure of choice in things.” Paul, Kentucky senator and an ophthalmologist, told CNBC the same day of “many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.” Their comments prompted an overdue examination of the demographics of vaccine refusal.
“I think it’s on both sides of the aisle. I think there are those who choose not to get it for the reasons that Chris Christie or Rand Paul talk about, which is ‘government off my back,’ ” Offit, professor of pediatrics in the department of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in an interview Tuesday.
“I don’t see this as a Democratic or Republican thing. I think everybody gets a chance to get science and medicine wrong.”
A 2014 study by Dan Kahan, a Yale Law School professor, found that people with negative views about vaccines do not belong to “any recognizable subgroup identified by demographic characteristics, religiosity, science comprehension, or political or cultural outlooks.” A Pew Research Center survey released last week, however, suggests Republi- cans have grown more opposed to government-mandated vaccination during an Obama era marked by the growth of anti-government views among the conservative grassroots.
In 2009, 26 per cent of Republicans and 27 per cent of Democrats said parents should get to choose. In 2014, 34 per cent of Republicans said so, versus only 22 per cent of Democrats.
Those figures might help explain the stance taken by the ever-cautious Clinton on Monday night.
“The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let’s protect all our kids. #GrandmothersKnowBest,” she wrote on Twitter.