Vaccines were becoming partisan before Covid-19

Vaccines were becoming partisan before Covid-19

By Matthew Yglesias

Today, overall partisanship and views on Covid-19 vaccines are strongly aligned. Democratic Party elected officials may possess a range of opinions about the merits of vaccine mandates, but sentiment generally favors some mandates, and enthusiasm for voluntary vaccination is practically universal.

But even a relatively pro-vaccination GOP figure like Mitch McConnell opposes mandates, and Republican views have only been growing more hostile. Earlier in the vaccine rollout, a number of GOP figures were fairly supportive of ideas like cash bonuses or lotteries for the vaccinated, an acknowledgment of the positive externalities associated with the shot. But these days even supportive politicians eschew any kind of pro-vaccination policy. Ron DeSantis once tried to position himself as pro-vaccine but now won’t tell anyone whether or not he got a booster shot — presumably embarrassed to admit to the base that he’s not a crazy person.

This development has been moderately surprising to many of us, I think.

(Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Donald Trump did not invent mRNA vaccines, but to the extent that his administration had any Covid-19 policy at all, it was to aggressively fund vaccine development. And his team was, wisely, less tight-fisted about advance purchases than the European Union, which got the U.S. more shots more quickly and could have resulted in a huge win for Americans had his party not subsequently turned against the whole idea. Certainly, nothing about the politics of September 2020 particularly indicated that views on this subject would become so closely aligned with views on the legality of abortion or taxing the rich.

That makes it easy to chalk up today’s vaccination debates purely to post-election developments. But I think if you look closely, you can see the pre-Covid emergence of a polarized vaccination debate that just didn’t happen to be especially salient or high-profile.

The coalition merchants

A lot of political pundits write books, but I can only think of one book that’s about political punditry — Hans Noel’s “Political Parties and Political Ideologies in America.” Perhaps because this is my line of work, I found it fascinating

Noel explores why certain ideas tend to go together. If I describe a politician who wants to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges and make same-sex marriage illegal, and then ask you to guess what that person thinks about taxes, you’d know that they almost certainly favor big tax cuts. Why is that? Well, you know that openly opposing marriage equality in 2022 is a pretty extreme right-wing stance and also that basically all Republicans favor tax cuts. So an Obergefell opponent is probably not just a right-wing elected official, but some kind of far-right crank who also favors something more extreme on taxes, like a flat tax.

At the same time, you’d probably struggle to explain, on a deeper level, the logical relationship between taxes and same-sex marriage. But somehow our political system has ways of putting issues together. At some point, it became clear that dismantling Jim Crow would require the regulation of private businesses, and people favoring strong civil rights measures came to be associated with people who favored higher taxes. The same coalition incorporated feminist causes by analogy to civil rights and later gay rights for the same reason.

This all makes sense as a story. But it’s also a little contingent and weird. We know that civil rights can be part of the pro-business party’s issue bundle because that’s how it worked in the 19th century. And at the time that Democrats were becoming the party of Black people, they were also the party of Jewish and Catholic voters — i.e., the party of minority groups. And as the abortion issue grew in salience, many pro-life voters were Catholic Democrats, while many pro-choicers were mainline Protestant Republicans.

Noel’s argument is that the works of political pundits anticipate these changes in partisan alignment.

The politics of civil rights was very disorganized in the 1950s. Both Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson tried to have it both ways and simultaneously courted Black votes in the north and white votes in the South. But the arguments among pundits were much better organized. Northern conservatives like William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell were constructing arguments in favor of Jim Crow, while the once-prominent progressive/eugenicist synthesis has vanished from magazines and op-ed pages. Activists then translated this abstract alignment into practical politics. Noel shows that if you go back decades before Roe v. Wade to a time when almost nobody was talking publicly about abortion, the writers who were in favor of liberalizing abortion laws were on the left.

In a nutshell, intellectuals and take-slingers serve as “coalition merchants” who propose ideas about which issues should go together, and issue alignment is determined by who successfully persuades highly engaged activists and members of the public.

Anti-vax politics on the left

Pre-Covid, I did not spend a lot of time thinking about vaccine politics, but I probably would have characterized anti-vax sentiment as primarily part of a left-wing “neopastoralist” school of thought — a bundle of ideas that includes strident opposition to nuclear power, enthusiasm for organic produce, and suspicion of GMOs.

This kind of crunchy left politics has minimal influence on the day-to-day conduct of Democratic Party elected officials but decent cultural clout, and you often see it bubbling up beneath the surface. When I was promoting “One Billion Americans,” any time I did an appearance on a local NPR station (especially ones west of the Mississippi), population control types would call in to complain. Anti-vax views, to me, were bundled with those kinds of unfashionable-among-elites (and rightly so!) environmental views.

A key figure in this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is a somewhat influential environmental activist and an anti-vax crank. In 2005, Rolling Stone and Salon co-published a piece by him titled “Deadly Immunity,” claiming to expose the fact that MMR vaccines were causing autism. That piece was widely criticized in the liberal media (I would know, I was there) and certainly didn’t represent any kind of consensus view, but it also definitely appeared in left-wing publications and was seen as part of a left political worldview. It was a discreditable part, like alleging that George W. Bush had orchestrated 9/11 in order to generate a pretext for invading Iraq, but definitely a left-wing idea.

Oprah Winfrey platformed a bunch of anti-vaccine content, as did Robert DeNiro. Neither are particularly political figures, but to the extent that they are, they’re on the left. A 2014 measles outbreak in California was closely linked to crunchy anti-vax sentiment.

The association between anti-vax politics and the left was so firmly entrenched in the world of stereotypes that in 2015, science journalist Chris Mooney wrote a piece for the Washington Post debunking the myth “that refusing vaccinations is a special phenomenon driven by the ideology of the political left.” And Mooney was correct that anti-vax sentiment wasn’t exclusive to the left. In 2006, when the HPV vaccine first became available, the CDC recommended routinely giving it 11 and 12 years old before they are exposed to the virus. That’s perfectly reasonable public health advice, but it landed squarely in the middle of a bunch of longstanding and politically polarized controversies about adolescent sexual behavior and sex ed.

This was a clear example of right-wing vaccine skepticism, but the mainstream narrative was largely focused on the MMR vaccine.

The rise of the conspiratorial right

In June of 2020, with Trump in office and leading the charge to develop mRNA technology, Kiera Butler at Mother Jones wrote a piece headlined “The Anti-Vax Movement’s Radical Shift From Crunchy Granola Purists to Far-Right Crusaders.”

But I think the key to understanding this is to see that shifts were in the works even before Covid-19.

In 2013, a PLOS One paper from Stephan Lewandowsky, Gilles E. Gignac, and Klaus Oberauer looked at the relationships between different ideologies and feelings toward vaccines. They found:

Conservative ideology tended to make people more pro-vaccine.

Free market ideology tended to make people more vaccine-skeptical.

Conspiratorialism tended to make people more vaccine-skeptical.

Since conservatism and free marketism tend to co-occur, they concluded that vaccine skepticism had nothing to do with U.S. partisan politics. As Chris Mooney put it, “the study found that the really big contributor to distrusting or disliking vaccines was not political ideology at all, but rather, having a conspiratorial mindset, which can occur on both the left and the right.”

But during this time, conspiratorialism was itself becoming a component of Republican Party ideology. One of the coalition merchants here was Donald Trump, who was not deeply versed in most of the traditional cornerstones of Republican Party policy but did like to talk about how Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya. Then in 2014 Trump tweeted, “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes – AUTISM. Many such cases!” That wasn’t the political leader of the conservative movement endorsing the anti-vax view. At that point, Trump was still a media figure with a growing, but still somewhat tenuous, relationship to Republican Party politics.

Alex Jones, a much more consistent anti-vax messenger than Trump, originally rose to fame as a Bush-era 9/11 truther. His general worldview has only coalesced as part of right-wing politics over the past ten years. A 2014 paper by Dan Kahan found that vaccine rejection was already correlated with conservative political views, but only weakly so. That made the GOP coalition friendlier to people like Trump and Jones who then made the coalition friendlier to conspiracists.

After Trump won the election, one of the people to snag an early Trump Tower meeting with the president-elect was none other than RFK Jr. himself — the alignment of anti-vax politics with the political right was in place, and even the particular politics of Trump’s personal involvement in the Covid-19 vaccines couldn’t stop it.

Politics with a screw loose

The fact that conspiratorial beliefs have now become polarized and aligned with partisanship seems like a bad trend to me.

When I listened to the JFK episode of “The Rewatchables” before Christmas, the hosts sporadically remarked that Oliver Stone’s approach felt kind of Trumpy or Alex Jones-like. This is true in a sense, but of course at the time, Stone was engaging in a paranoid, conspiratorial brand of left-wing politics. This isn’t because conspiratorial thinking was exclusively or peculiarly left-wing (see the long history of the John Birch Society on the right), but because it used to exist largely independent of partisanship or ideology. Mainstream conservatives would accuse mainstream liberals of being too indulgent of their side’s embarrassing cranks, and mainstream liberals would defend themselves as actually not that indulgent and say it’s really conservatives who were indulging cranks.

That argument, regardless of who was correct, was a socially healthy process. But now the cranks are definitely running the show on the right, which is good for liberals who want to win the argument but troubling for society.

Here’s Ted Cruz trying to perform conservative Covid-19 politics and sort of accidentally coming out against all kinds of longstanding policies mandating that school kids take vaccines.

Twitter avatar for @SenTedCruz

State Rep. Manny Diaz in Florida made this explicit, saying the state should review all its childhood vaccine mandates. The governor of Montana signed a bill saying no employer can make any vaccination a mandatory condition of employment.

The upshot is that while we should be redoubling our efforts on pandemic prevention, a much more likely scenario is that we’re going to see backsliding on the use of longstanding MMR and TDAP vaccines and reduced uptake of flu shots. So over and above whatever burden endemic SARS-Cov-2 places on the healthcare system, I would expect to see more severe flu cases in the future and more measles outbreaks. One particularly scary scenario is that falling measles vaccination rates could lead to epidemics large enough to cause breakthrough infections among the vaccinated, which as we’ve seen with the Covid-19 vaccines, will tend to discredit vaccination among some people and lead to even lower vaccination levels.

I do not have a lot to contribute to the solution here, except the observation that if Noel is right and people in my line of work actually play a crucial role in organizing political debate, then I think that underscores our obligation to be contentious and argue with each other in an omnidirectional way. Slotting everything along a single dimension of political conflict is bad for society, and the pressure on pundits to always be good coalition partners makes it worse.