Analysis: the anti-vaccine movement is gaining power in U.S. state governments

How the anti-vaccine movement is gaining power in statehouses Louisiana is a harbinger of the growing power of the anti-vaccine movement in the nation’s statehouses, as more candidates supporting once-fringe policies win and sign onto laws gutting vaccine requirements. Lauren Weber The Washington Post

BATON ROUGE — 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.

Louisiana’s shift is a sign of the growing clout of the anti-vaccine movement in the nation’s statehouses as bills that once died in committee make it onto the legislative floor for a vote.

Since spring, Tennessee lawmakers dropped all vaccine requirements for home-schooled children. Iowa Republicans passed a bill eliminating the requirement that schools educate students about the HPV vaccine.

And the Florida legislature passed a law preemptively barring school districts from requiring coronavirus vaccines, a move health advocates fear opens the door to further vaccine limitations.

“Politics is going to win over medicine,” said Mills, a pharmacist who has weakened or defeated bills that would have limited vaccine access and promoted vaccine exemptions in schools and workplaces. But after 13 years in the Senate, Mills has hit the state’s three-term limit.

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