A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.
Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers. Even before COVID, they fought vaccine mandates and other public health measures.
[On] at least 17 occasions this year, Trump has promised to cut funding to schools that mandate vaccines. Campaign spokespeople have previously said that pledge would apply only to schools with covid mandates. But speeches reviewed by KFF Health News included no such distinction — raising the possibility Trump would also target vaccination rules for common, potentially lethal childhood diseases like polio and measles.Deidre McPhillips and Jacqueline Howard at CNN:
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment on this article.
Trump has presided over a landslide shift in his party’s views on vaccines, reflected this campaign season in false claims by Republican candidates during the primaries and puzzling conspiracies from prominent conservative voices. Republicans increasingly express worry about the risks of vaccines. A September 2023 poll from Politico and Morning Consult showed a narrow majority of those voters cared more about the risks than the benefits of getting inoculated
A surge in anti-vaccine policy in statehouses has followed the rhetoric. Boston University political scientist Matt Motta, who tracks public health policy, said preliminary data shows that states enacted at least 42 anti-vaccine bills in 2023 — nearly a ninefold surge since 2019.
In some states, it has the look of a crusade: The 2024 Texas GOP platform, for example, proposes a ban on mRNA technology, the innovation behind some covid-19 vaccines that scientists believe could have significant applications for cancer care.
A record share of US kindergartners had an exemption for required vaccinations last school year, leaving more than 125,000 new schoolchildren without coverage for at least one state-mandated vaccine, according to new data published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And another dip in measles vaccination rates among kindergartners means coverage has now been well below the federal target for four years in a row.
The US Department of Health and Human Services has set a goal that at least 95% of children in kindergarten will have gotten two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, a threshold necessary to help prevent outbreaks of the highly contagious disease.
After this rate was maintained for a decade, though, coverage dipped during the Covid-19 pandemic and has yet to recover. The measles vaccination rate fell again last year, to 92.7% coverage for kindergartners in the 2023-24 school year, according to the CDC data.
Rates for other state-mandated vaccinations – including diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis, known as DTaP, and polio – also declined.
