One-Third Of Republicans Prefer Deadly Childhood Diseases To The Vaccines That Prevent Them

There's no accounting for taste.

Conservatives are always obsessed with going back to the 1950s — minus the high union participation and taxes on the rich that allowed for more evenly distributed economic prosperity. They want to bring back “traditional gender roles,” as if anyone is stopping them from doing that in their own lives, and a shockingly high number of them want to bring back communicable diseases and viruses that we don’t really have to deal with anymore thanks to vaccines.

A recent Gallup poll found that 30 percent of Republicans actually (think they) prefer childhood diseases to the vaccines that prevent them.

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As you can see from this graph, that number has increased significantly since before COVID times!

According to that same poll, only 26 percent of Republicans think it is “extremely important” to get their kids vaccinated, and that same percentage said it was “very important.” The rest? Well, they could give or take.

It also found that only a slim majority — 51 percent — of Americans think that the government should require vaccinations, also a major decrease since before COVID. In 1992, 80 percent of Americans believed that, and the percentage has been steadily decreasing since then, but there was a sharp dip after COVID.

Personally, I think that big dip has far less to do with anything anyone knows about vaccines and more with a fierce desperation to “own the libs,” so far as scientific beliefs are concerned. They want to be right about climate change and trans people not being real, so they’re going to double down and pretend that vaccines are the real danger.

This “owning” has not been without consequences. Deaths from measles shot up 43 percent — to 136,000 worldwide, mostly children under the age of five — from 2021 to 2022.

It’s also extended beyond childhood vaccines. Bryan Caplan — the right-wing author of a book titled, I shit you not, The Case Against Education — was ratioed on social media the other day for smugly pooh-poohing tetanus shots.

“My doctor talked to me like a child when I refused a tetanus booster,” he wrote. “This disease kills about 2 Americans per YEAR!”

Users were happy to point out to him that the reason it kills so few people is explicitly because of the tetanus vaccine. Prior to the vaccine, tetanus killed about 1 million people globally each year. Neonatal tetanus is still an issue, with about 14,000 babies dying each year, largely in areas with low vaccination rates.

But that’s been a pattern, hasn’t it? Vaccines have reduced the numbers of people dying from these diseases and now people look at statistics and go “Why are we getting these vaccines when no one is dying from these diseases, huh?”

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It would be one thing if this weird anti-vax jag only affected adults capable of deciding they’d rather have the disease than the vaccine — but it doesn’t. It affects their children and it affects herd immunity for people other than themselves who may not have been able to get vaccinated for health reasons or for whom a vaccine didn’t work.

I’d say things will have to get worse before they understand, but if seeing the decrease in people dying from COVID after the vaccine didn’t convince them, it’s actually hard to imagine what will.