The Virginian-pilot on the risks of vaccine hesitancy:

The St. Louis Post-dispatch on how those who would overturn landmark press protection want to dodge accountability:

One of the lingering — and potentially disastrous — effects of the COVID pandemic is that more parents are reluctant to have their children vaccinated against what used to be common childhood diseases, as well as against flu and the mutating coronavirus strains.

These diseases are nothing to play around with, especially when it comes to young children. Government and public health officials should make it a priority to spread the word that vaccines save lives. Failing to have children vaccinated can have serious consequences for those children and for others around them.

Already, some states have serious outbreaks of measles and chickenpox among children. Thanks to the development and widespread use of vaccines, today’s parents may have had little experience with these diseases.

Before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles killed about 500 Americans each year, mostly children. Many others were left with lasting problems including blindness and neurological damage. Before the vaccine became available in 1995, chickenpox led to amputations and to deaths of infants, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems. Many older adults now are plagued with recurring bouts of painful shingles, a result of having chickenpox as a child.

Nor are these diseases totally eradicated. All it takes is a few unvaccinated people who interact closely, and these lurking pathogens can start to spread. Ninety percent of people who come into contact with someone who has measles will fall ill — if those people don’t have the immunity two doses of MMR vaccine provide.

Why would parents not take advantage of readily available vaccines to protect their children?

The pandemic’s disruption of our lives may be partly to blame. During the worst of the pandemic, many parents were unable to take their children to a doctor’s office. An increase in at-home schooling meant fewer families needed to show proof of vaccination or seek an exemption to school vaccination requirements. Those parents who fell behind on vaccinations should be encouraged to make up for lost time.

More troubling is what appears to be a growing resistance to vaccines. There’s been an anti-vaccine movement for years, fueled in part by misinformation from a false “study” claiming to have found a link between the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) and autism. The study was thoroughly discredited and the author disqualified as a physician, but the false information lingers.

Unfortunately, the toxic political atmosphere in the United States during the pandemic fueled the anti-vaccine movement. Protecting public health, especially that of children, should be a cause all Americans support, but many people felt that whether a person wore a mask or got a shot was a political statement.

Public school mandates requiring vaccinations against such diseases as measles, chicken pox and polio have been one of the most effective weapons against these diseases. Unfortunately, the recent political battles and misleading rhetoric over COVID have fueled mistrust of other vaccines. Polls show that although they are still a minority, increasing numbers of parents believe that they alone should decide whether their children get vaccinated. All states have exemptions to vaccination mandates for medical reasons, and most states grant exemptions for religious reasons.

A few states allow exemptions for “philosophical” reasons. Making it too easy for parents to opt out of vaccines for their children is dangerous, for their children and for those who aren’t vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons.

We need a robust campaign to help parents understand the importance of getting their children vaccinated against childhood diseases, and to get the word out that vaccines are safe. Leaders should work with state and local public health officials to spread the word that vaccines work. How tragic for a child to die or be permanently damaged by a disease that could so easily have been prevented.

It may sound like common sense to say all Americans should have to meet the same standard of proof to win a defamation suit against a media outlet, but that’s not how it works under U.S. law. And it shouldn’t. The landmark Supreme Court ruling in The New York Times v. Sullivan has long established that public figures who sue news media outlets must prove that the reporting was not just false, defamatory and negligent (the standard for private citizens), but also must prove “actual malice” — that is, that the outlet either knew it was false, or demonstrated “reckless disregard” for the truth.

Elected officials and others in the public eye should face a higher bar to win a defamation suit than a private citizen minding his or her own business. Journalistic fear of getting hammered in court for an honest mistake could lead to timid coverage of politicians. Which, make no mistake, is exactly what Florida Gov. Ron Desantis and others are seeking in their calls for the Supreme Court to overturn Sullivan.

The 1964 decision has given America arguably the most vibrant free press in the world. American politicians know that misbehavior risks exposure by aggressive journalists whose duty is to keep them honest. A return to the bad old days, in which media outlets could face bankruptcy for making mistakes that were neither intentional nor reckless when covering the powerful, would hobble the free press as surely as formal censorship.

Desantis, who has long bristled at unflattering but accurate media coverage of his dangerous pandemic policies and culturewar stunts, convened a roundtable this month where he and others called for scuttling Sullivan. “How did it get to be this doctrine that has had really profound effects on society?” Desantis said at the event, as if those effects were problems instead of a crucial undergirding of democracy.

Sullivan has protected journalists for almost 60 years now, but it’s not hard to imagine it coming under fire from a Supreme Court that has already shown its eagerness to trash longstanding precedent on abortion rights and gun safety laws. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have both indicated they think it should go.

Thomas’ view is rooted in his philosophy of constitutional originalism — the proposition that laws must be consistent with how the issues would have been understood at the time the Constitution was written. We have noted before the obvious problems with this approach, but in this case, the standards of Sullivan might adhere to it better than Thomas admits. The previous court predicated the Sullivan decision in part on a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” That commitment is made clear in the special stature the Framers gave to the free press and free speech. Today’s court must not undermine it.