Republican Support for Childhood Vaccination Plummets, Putting Us All in Danger

A troubling Gallup poll suggests that Republican support for child vaccination has plummeted since 2019. The firm interviewed 1,010 American adults by telephone in July, finding that just 26 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe it is “extremely important” for parents to get their children vaccinated. Just five years prior, that number was 52 percent.

Democratic support for vaccinations was essentially unchanged from 2019, remaining high. Sixty-three percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents said it is “extremely important” for parents to get their children vaccinated. Another 30 percent said it was “very important.”

Delving further into the survey, the details don’t augur well for anyone uninterested in catching vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, polio, pertussis, and diphtheria. Roughly a quarter of Republican supporters said it is merely “somewhat important” for children to get vaccinated, while a further fifth replied it is “not very important” or “not important at all.”

Such elevated denialism of one of the greatest public health tools of all time endangers all Americans, not just Trump supporters. While staple vaccines for kids are highly effective at warding off the diseases they target, they aren’t perfect. Nor can every child get vaccinated, because of weakened immune systems or severe allergies. That’s why it’s important that the vast majority of kids get vaccinated – to develop a high group, or “herd” immunity so that dangerous viruses can’t circulate. For polio, 80 percent of us need to be immunized. With mumps, it’s 90 percent. Measles requires 94 percent of the population to get vaccinated against it.

Of course herd immunity, like politics, is local. Since Republicans and Democrats tend to self-sort into certain communities and regions, it’s possible that rural areas and deep red states will start to see resurgences in vaccine-preventable illnesses. However, since we live in a highly connected society, any isolated eruptions of infectious disease might not remain contained.

Gallup didn’t explore the roots of Republicans’ newfound dislike for childhood vaccines, but there is a pretty glaring culprit. When highly-effective vaccines became available during the COVID-19 pandemic, influencers and elected officials on the Right repeatedly sowed skepticism and distrust, even suggesting that they were more dangerous than COVID-19 itself. So it’s not surprising that 31 percent of Republican supporters in the present survey responded that childhood vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to prevent, compared with 5 percent of Democrat supporters.

All fifty states require children attending public schools to be vaccinated against a range of diseases. In the past few years, however, conservative lawmakers mainly in red states have passed policies making it easier for parents to opt-out for personal, religious, and moral reasons.

Earlier this year, a single death brought us to the precipice of an era’s end. Paul Alexander of Dallas, Texas died at the age of 78. He was the last man in the United States living in an iron lung. Only Martha Ann Lillard of Shawnee, Oklahoma now remains confined to such a device.

An iron lung is a respiration machine that encloses all but a patient’s head. It varies pressure within its cylindrical chamber to force air in and out of a person’s lungs, essentially breathing for them. 

Alexander needed an iron lung because as a young child his lungs were permanently paralyzed by polio. In 1952, twenty thousand Americans suffered the same, debilitating fate. Since 1990, there have been fewer than 150 such cases, and only four since 2000. We owe this astounding public health success to vaccination.

Terrifying vaccine-preventable illnesses remain mostly relegated to the past, and most people alive today probably have never seen nor heard of an iron lung; MAGA Republicans pine for some theoretical past point of perfection, and refusing vaccines and bringing back long-forgotten diseases lays bare the lie at its root. Let’s hope their surging anti-vaccine sentiments subside as pandemic resentments fade with time. Otherwise, innocent children may be forced to personally experience the vaccine-preventable illnesses their parents had the luxury to forget.