A wave of lawmakers who oppose vaccine requirements are winning elections for state legislatures amid a national drop in childhood vaccination rates and a resurfacing of preventable deadly diseases.
The victories come as part of a political backlash to pandemic restrictions and the proliferation of misinformation about the safety of vaccines introduced to fight the coronavirus.
In Louisiana, 29 candidates endorsed by Stand for Health Freedom, a national group that works to defeat mandatory vaccinations, won in the state’s off-year elections this fall.
Fred Mills, the retiring Republican chairman of the Louisiana Senate’s health and welfare committee, said he fears that once-fringe anti-vaccine policies that endanger people’s lives will have a greater chance of passing come January when newly-elected lawmakers are sworn in and more than a dozen Republican moderates like himself leave office.
Republican moderates
my nomination for 2023 oxymoron of the year
Dear elderly Republicans who are refusing flu shots and COVID boosters right now: Thank you for helping re-elect Joe Biden and putting Democrats back in charge of congress and possibly even your statehouse.
The irony of one of the richest countries in the world facing a future of child mortality and preventable diseases.
Don’t forget about child labor coming back.
When you’re anti-Big Pharma for all the wrong reasons, stuff like this happens.
Yes, they are soulless corporate for-profit husks that have silently squashed potential cures for debilitating diseases and prolonged the suffering of countless by diluting medicine into lifelong treatments at thousand times the cost, but the research is mostly sound. Ignoring the cut corners for rapid deployment, the actual scientists that work on these treatments do their best to make sure it does work.
Giving up on vaccines isn’t the right way to protest, pressuring the government and these corporations into ensuring the highest level of scrutiny is.
If there is a profit motive in it for them, bad companies can do good things. In this case, coming up with a COVID vaccine that worked and worked well was a big profit motive. And something anti-vaxxers don’t seem to realize: Moderna et al make a lot more money from a working COVID vaccine than a non-working COVID vaccine. People will eventually figure out the latter doesn’t work and stop using it.
Or even one that works, but not as well.
The J&J COVID vaccine was quietly discontinued a long time ago.
I used to be pro vax. But the way humanity is going maybe it’s best if we let the viruses win.
Because it’s never the perpetrators that suffer. No child is born blind or brain damaged by rubella by a choice they made. They are born that way because of a choice that was made for them.
And those that perpetuate this unto children, when they suffer the consequences for their choices they fail to attribute it to their own misgivings. Instead they absolve their misgivings as the function of some deity who wishes to test their resolve. That this affliction is not of their own making but of some twisted logic test of faith.
No, this does not rid the world of those who would harm but it with absolute certainty harms those who were never given a choice otherwise.
I’m quite the opposite. Until there are no people out there who can’t be vaccinated due to immune system issues or being too young, vaccination should be mandatory with tax penalties levied on anyone that refuses.
And don’t give me your “freedom” bullshit. You don’t have the freedom to kill babies and organ transplant recipients.
It’s OK I assure you this is a sarcastic comment. I myself have a kidney transplant (11yrs and going!) and am very pro vax.
Congratulations! I hope you live many more years on that kidney! And understood on the sarcasm. My vitriol wasn’t really directed at you, just at the “my freedom!” people.
Try reading the comment you replied to again.
What exactly do you think I misunderstood?
It’s not anti-vax, it’s anti-people.
Yes, I realize ‘it’s best if we let the viruses win’ is anti-people. And I explained that I am not anti-people and what should be done to protect people. I’m still not seeing what the problem is here.
Vax yourself and your loved ones, let the dumb die by their own dumbness…
The problem is, the dumb then go on to infect people who medically cannot be vaccinated.
Idiocracy, not just a movie, but a promise for the future.
The possiby worst part of this is that most -if not all- of these lawmakers probably don’t have a problem with vaccines and understand their importance. However, they just don’t give a shit about the human lives that stand between them and power and money.
They see gullible citizens that want to vote for stupid measures, so they offer to give them just that.
