Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP
Readers might be surprised to learn that Mississippi has the highest child vaccination rate of any state in the country. The main reason is that it is one of a handful of states with a school vaccination requirement that has no exceptions of any kind. It formerly had a religious exception, but the state supreme court ruled that it violated the state constitution in 1979.
This is why Mississippi has not had a measles outbreak since 1992.
Alas, that vaccination crown is likely to be lost soon. Federal District Court Judge Halil Ozerden, a George W. Bush appointee, recently ruled that Mississippi must reintroduce a religious exemption.
That ruling is part and parcel of the Republican turn against their own health. Many tens of thousands of loyal conservative voters have died unnecessarily of COVID-19 because they refused to get the vaccine—a refusal championed by anti-vaccine messaging from political leaders and media figures (many of whom died of COVID themselves). Now that has made them more skeptical of vaccines of any kind, which might just bring back measles, mumps, rubella, polio, and more. The GOP is so politically diseased that it can’t take elementary steps to protect its own members from actual disease.
As an initial matter, the religious argument for school vaccination exemptions is ludicrous. In the first place, as Dorit Rubinstein Reiss points out in a Hastings Law Journal article, every major religious sect supports most vaccination, from Judaism to Islam to all the large Christian denominations. Even smaller sects skeptical of modern medicine like Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses support it. In reality, as Reiss documents in detail, probably the majority of people claiming religious exemptions are dedicated anti-vaccine cranks lying about what they believe.
Even if some religion were to forbid vaccination, children would still have a right to health no matter what their parents might believe, and more importantly, other children in school have a right not to be exposed to preventable deadly diseases. While the COVID vaccines don’t stop transmission entirely, they do reduce it (contrary to a right-wing myth). Other vaccines like those against polio, measles, mumps, chicken pox, or rubella can stop transmission entirely—but only if a high enough fraction of the population is vaccinated. Reaching that “herd immunity” mark protects the whole community, especially those who can’t get vaccinated due to allergies, or whose vaccinations don’t take because of a compromised immune system. We’ve seen in many states that letting vaccination rates fall sufficiently leads to chronic disease outbreaks.
So far, ordinary child vaccination rates have fallen only modestly. But Republicans are enormously less likely to have gotten vaccinated against COVID: Their rate is 62 percent against the Democrats’ 86 percent. As soon as the shots became available, we saw a large and growing political discrepancy in COVID deaths. According to a Brown University study, about 320,000 American deaths could have been prevented with vaccines—heavily concentrated in red states like West Virginia, Tennessee, and Wyoming, which had about four to six times Massachusetts’s rate of preventable death. Another study found that as of September last year, roughly twice as many Republicans as Democrats have died of COVID. The death toll was likely enough to swing the Arizona attorney general race in 2022.
The GOP is so politically diseased that it can’t take elementary steps to protect its own members from actual disease.
Conservative resistance to vaccines comes from three interrelated factors. First is the sheer self-indulgent lunacy of the right-wing base. For years, this group has been marinating in a propaganda stew of inflammatory anti-immigrant racism, unhinged accusations about Democrats (they’re not citizens, they’re pedophiles, they’re in league with Satan), hysterical lies about crime in big cities, and sundry other conspiratorial nonsense that has given them leave to be mean to anyone they don’t like. Buttoned-down, sensible analysis about how vaccines work just doesn’t hit the rage buttons in the same way.
The second is that the economic engine of the same conservative media is scams. Every major right-wing media property is stuffed with ads for bottom-feeding swindlers hawking gold coins, brain pills, and dubious conservative-branded consumer products. Often those media outlets sell those products themselves. It follows that this media ecosystem basically can’t recommend treatment that works, because it can’t be characterized as a secret remedy liberal elites don’t want you to hear about. That’s why many conservatives first convinced themselves that hydroxychloroquine, and then ivermectin, were magic cures for COVID. Many conservatives are still giving the latter drug to their own kids despite a pro-ivermectin influencer recently dying of a common side effect of the drug.
The third is that the conservative base, its brains melted into a Velveeta-like consistency by the above-listed processes, has produced a leadership class that is in equal parts grotesquely irresponsible and plain crazy. Some are smart enough to get vaccinated themselves while still pandering to deadly anti-vaccine paranoia: Just about everyone at Fox News, for instance, has gotten their shots, but one still hears constant misinformation about the vaccine on the network. Other conservative leaders, like a half dozen different regional radio hosts, believed their own propaganda and paid for it with their lives.
Some seem to be somewhere in the middle. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, also got vaccinated. But as the base turned against it, he sought out an out-of-state crackpot, Joseph Ladapo, to serve as the state’s surgeon general. Last October, Ladapo recommended that young men should not get the COVID vaccine, supposedly based on his analysis of the risk of heart swelling. But as the Tampa Bay Times recently reported, the state’s own data, as well as early drafts of the policy conclusion, indicated the exact opposite conclusion. He lied about a lifesaving vaccine during the worst pandemic in a century.
Contrast with Mormonism, where (despite its manifold issues) behaving responsibly rather than gleefully indulging every lizard-brain impulse is still a powerful norm. The Mormon leadership repeatedly urged its members to get vaccinated, which indeed caused many church members to get their shots, undoubtedly saving many lives.
One can never know what is in DeSantis’s head. But his cynical and/or deranged vaccine misinformation is a big reason why over 29,000 Floridians died preventable deaths from COVID. It’s one of the most awful things that has ever happened in American politics—and with DeSantis’s poll numbers plummeting against Trump, it’s not even going to help him win the presidency.
Years ago, when anti-vaccine lunacy was more of a bipartisan phenomenon, I thought that vaccine skepticism was a privilege of growing up in an era largely without endemic diseases. But watching Republicans eagerly embrace anti-vaccine lies during COVID has convinced me otherwise. If Mississippi and other conservative states keep dismantling the vaccine firewall in Republican communities, I don’t think they’ll be deterred even by large outbreaks of measles and polio. The new conservative private schools where students learn to read from gun catalogs and the Left Behind series will just have to be equipped with plenty of iron lungs.
