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Will Ron DeSantis use the anti-vaxx movement to defeat Donald Trump in 2024? Signs point to yes [1]
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Date: 2023-03-23
TPM:
As all of this preventable carnage began, DeSantis shrugged it off with a series of orders that, epidemiologists say, poured gasoline on the already more contagious Delta variant. He has made national news this year by banning two mandates that public health officials have said are needed to keep hospitalizations down: vaccine and indoor mask requirements. The Florida government has prohibited businesses and government agencies from requiring vaccines, and has forbid schools from instituting mask requirements.
As reported by Katherine Eban, writing this week for Vanity Fair, DeSantis—ever the cynical opportunist—believes that he can “outflank” Trump by promoting an extreme brand of vaccine denialism.
Even a former senior Trump official who worked on Operation Warp Speed, the program that successfully accelerated vaccine development, acknowledges that DeSantis’s anti-vax 180 is “good politics.” Trump himself has drawn boos at his rallies when he mentions the vaccines. “There is a whole contingent of the GOP that don’t like vaccines,” the former official says. Those familiar with DeSantis’s inner circle say his vaccine stance is indeed driven by politics, not science. “There’s no medical people involved in this,” someone with knowledge of DeSantis’s advisers says. “It’s all political people. Now a couple of those TV doctors, those people are in his orbit, but this is not engineered by the scientific side of the house.” His goal, insiders say, is to tack to Trump’s right and peel off anti-vaxxers whose votes could prove decisive in the Republican presidential primaries next year.
As Eban reports, last December, DeSantis successfully petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to allow him to empanel a grand jury dedicated to investigating allegedly nefarious motivations and intentions by vaccine manufacturers such as Pfizer and Moderna in their development of the COVID-19 vaccines. That jury’s findings are scheduled to be released in January 2024, as Eban observes, “just in time to potentially influence the outcome of the Republican presidential primaries ...”
Medical and public health experts quoted in Eban’s report suggest that DeSantis’ efforts may result in vaccine denialism becoming an essential “litmus test” for the GOP in 2024, even to the point where anti-vax sentiments become an “official plank” of the Republican Party.
Eban predicts the public health consequences of DeSantis’ political ambitions could likely be dire for the general population of this country.
While DeSantis’s strategy may be rooted in politics, it is likely to have far-reaching public health repercussions, says Dr. Jonathan Howard, an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU Langone Health. “You’re going to continue to see Republicans dying [from COVID-19] at a higher rate, and a return of measles and whooping cough and God knows what else,” says Howard, who has studied the anti-vax movement for a decade.
DeSantis originally came out in favor of the COVID-19 vaccines, going so far as to tout his state’s efforts to vaccinate its older residents. But with the social media fueled an explosion in anti-vaccination sentiments as the pandemic inexplicably began to outlast and confound most Americans’ short-term attention spans, the political right saw an irresistible opportunity to castigate the Biden administration along with the medical community that staunchly supported the vaccines. By 2022 this opportunity had grown into a national movement, with Republicans now nearly two-and-a-half times “more likely than Democrats or independents to believe that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe.”
They were aided by libertarian-leaning organizations that advocated—most notably in a public letter that became known as the “Great Barrington Declaration”—simply allowing younger people to become infected while still immunizing a narrow segment of the most vulnerable. As Eban observes, these politically motivated, medically contrarian sentiments were largely adopted by the Trump administration, providing legitimacy to a “herd immunity” philosophy that guided their official policy.
This philosophy quickly became an article of faith on the far right, even as CDC data continued to show drastically higher rates of hospitalization to unvaccinated young people as compared to their vaccinated peers. Eban’s article notes that Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the “Barrington Declaration,” became one of DeSantis’ go-to, so-called medical experts—who ultimately informed his policy in Florida.
Along with DeSantis’ vaccine-skeptical surgeon general, Joseph A. Ladopo, Bhattacharya’s views have provided justification for Florida being the only state not to recommend the COVID-19 vaccine for children under five years old, or even for otherwise “healthy” children of any age. As a consequence, Eban notes, “In Florida, only 11.8% of people five and up are fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19—lower even than the nationwide average of 17.4%, according to CDC data.”
More to the point is the impact that DeSantis’ anti-vaccine ethic has already had on Florida’s heavily senior-skewed population, as editorialized last November by the Palm Beach Post:
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30,060 seniors in Florida, 65 and older, have died due to COVID. That's a whopping 36 percent of the 82,065 COVID deaths recorded in the Sunshine State, a higher death rate than any other state. The figures are worse for seniors 85 and older. Florida leads the nation with 9,828 COVID-related deaths in that age group. These grim statistics leave the far-more populous states of California and Texas eating our dust.
While it may be tempting to conclude that Floridians own whatever consequences have occurred from electing someone as callously unconcerned about their health as DeSantis clearly is, the fact is that by cynically elevating anti-vax sentiments into a national political issue (or “litmus test”) for the sole purpose of inflaming the GOP base, millions of unsophisticated and medically illiterate Americans—along with their children—are going to be put at risk.
In November 2022, Michael Hiltzik, business columnist for the Los Angeles Times, pointed out that COVID-19 vaccine denialism has prompted many parents to reconsider getting other protective vaccines for their children, for diseases such as measles, rubella and chicken pox. Hiltzik quotes Rekha Lakshmanan, strategy director for Houston’s Immunization Partnership, who sees her state of Texas “on the brink of a collapse in public health because we’re seeing intentional efforts to play politics with people’s health.”
“COVID served as an accelerant for anti-vaccine activists,” Lakshmanan says. She cites “a significant increase in the kinds of anti-immunization legislation filed” in state capitols, especially in red states. In 2021 and 2022 most were aimed at blocking COVID vaccine mandates. “The alarming thing is that those kinds of bills served as a Trojan horse for what the opposition is really trying to do, which is undermine the public health infrastructure and push vaccines and vaccination into the shadows,” she says. “The ultimate goal is to go after all childhood wellness vaccines.”
By making the very idea of vaccination a test of GOP loyalties, DeSantis hopes to ride the anti-vax issue into national office, just as he capitalized on it with such enthusiasm in his own state of Florida. DeSantis’ strategy appears to assume that Trump will be unable to counterattack him on the vaccine issue in light of the fact that the Trump administration was in power when the COVID-19 vaccines were developed and first released. And Republican voters may oblige him, even while the rest of the nation recoils in horror.
Either way, the damage will have been done. What was once a fringe movement of crackpots railing against vaccines will have been transformed into a national “debate,” with all of the residual and deadly fallout that occurs when noxious ideas like this are given some semblance of validation in a nation of 330 million people, most of whom now receive nearly all their information curated to their political preferences.
You could rightfully call DeSantis’ plan “cynical.” But “malevolent” might be a better word for it.
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