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If you had asked me six months ago what I thought the first big issue dividing the 2016 Republican presidential candidates would be, I would have said, "Vaccines for childhood diseases, of course."
Yesterday I went off on Chris Christie for his remarks on the topic, and particularly for noting that he vaccinated his own kids and said, "It's more important what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official." This struck me as a particularly pernicious example of the propensity so many politicians have for saying, "My most important title is 'Dad,'" when actually they have a much more important title that gives them responsibility for the health and welfare of thousands or millions of people. But it turns out that Christie's equivocation was nothing compared to what Rand Paul said yesterday.
If you watch the whole CNBC interview in question, you'll see that Paul did say that vaccines are a great public health advancement. But then he said, "I've heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines." To which the only appropriate response is, are you frigging kidding me?
The fact that Paul has a medical degree makes this statement even more appalling than it would be if it was uttered by some ordinary idiot. That's like saying, "I've heard of many tragic cases of kids who got vaccines and then died in car accidents, so it's no wonder parents are worried about whether vaccines cause car crashes." This is no different from when Michele Bachmann said in 2011 that she spoke to a woman whose daughter got the HPV vaccine, and "[s]he told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences." Bachmann was roundly ridiculed at the time, and properly so.
Rand Paul is a quasi-libertarian, and so it isn't surprising that he argues that it's a problematic restriction on individual freedom for the government to mandate that people get their children vaccinated. If he were being honest, he'd say that the decision comes with tradeoffs. If we let people choose not to vaccinate, some number will make that choice, and the result will be occasional outbreaks of disease like what we're seeing with measles now. There will be increased suffering and even some deaths. But Paul's belief is that those numbers are small enough to make it an acceptable price to pay if we can preserve people's freedom not to immunize their kids.
I don't agree with that argument, but it's at least one that is based on facts and a coherent philosophical position. But when Paul decides to throw in the completely discredited idea that vaccines cause "mental disorders," he's trying to go beyond the philosophical argument to a practical one, implying that vaccines are causing substantial harm in addition to the good they do. And that's just factually wrong.
You might think that other Republicans would be rushing to get on this bandwagon, telling people that the big bad government is trying to tell them how to raise their kids. But that actually doesn't appear to be true. Here's a heartening excerpt from an article in today's New York Times:
Asked about the measles vaccine controversy on Monday, a spokesman for [Rick] Perry affirmed his commitment to "protecting life" and pointed to efforts by his administration to increase immunization rates.
But as Mr. Perry's experience shows, the debate is not one-sided for Republicans. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, also a possible 2016 candidate, was asked on Sunday about vaccinations on the ABC News program "This Week," and insisted that the science was clear and convincing. "Study after study has shown that there are no negative long-term consequences," he said. "And the more kids who are not vaccinated, the more they're at risk and the more they put their neighbors' kids at risk as well."
Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who is considering a run for president, has noted that the link between autism and vaccines was discredited. As governor, he received his flu shot at the State Capitol and encouraged all Arkansans to get vaccinated.
So what we have here seems to be a division between people like Huckabee and Perry whose conservatism is more of the religious variety - and who therefore may be more open to restrictions on individual freedom in the service of the well-being of the community-and Paul, whose conservatism is more of the libertarian variety. But those lines are anything but clear, whether you're talking about the Republican party as a whole or about individuals. The Tea Party, for instance, was often portrayed as a largely libertarian enterprise, concerned only with limiting government and reducing deficits. But the truth is that those who associated themselves with the tea party were mostly the same socially conservative, evangelical Protestants who make up the GOP's base. That overlap ends up producing political figures like Ted Cruz, who are deeply religious, highly conservative on every social issue, and spend a lot of time talking about the heavy hand of government.
After his initial round of comments, Christie clarified that he thinks everyone should be vaccinated. Ben Carson who, unlike Paul, appears to have paid attention in med school, said that he supports mandatory vaccinations. But there are a whole bunch of candidates whom we haven't heard from yet. Republicans are already slightly more likely than Democrats to oppose mandatory vaccination, though they're no more likely to believe that vaccines cause autism or any other disorder. It'll be interesting to see if that changes as this debate becomes more political.
UPDATE: The quote above from Scott Walker turns out to have been not Walker but a CDC doctor who appeared on the same program; the Times has corrected their error.
