Republicans Are Now the Anti-Vax Party
In 2015, 1,027 Americans adults were asked: “Do you think parents should be required to have their children vaccinated against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella or polio if the children are healthy enough to be vaccinated?” There was solid support for mandatory vaccination of children throughout all demographics and subgroups.
72% of Republicans said vaccinations should be required. 27% said no.
86% of Democrats said yes. 14% said no.
Today, a poll was released in which respondents were asked: “Do you believe K-12 schools should be allowed to mandate vaccines for their students?”
14% of Republicans said yes. 74% said no.
64% of Democrats said yes. 20% said no.
dem split on this question is 64/20, gop split is 14/74 https://t.co/8RHtrEd0fd
— Allahpundit (@allahpundit) February 16, 2022
Congratulations, Republicans. You did it. You’re now the anti-vaxxers.
Lying Eyes: 1
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 2/16/2022 @ 9:16 amSkinsuit Karens: 0
The recent poll:
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/mfe5ie0pbd/econTabReport.pdf
Sandwiched between multiple questions about Covid masks and booster shots is the so called general question about mandating any old vaccine for k-12?
Of course the people thought this was a specific Covid question. They were never asked the same question as quoted from the 2015 poll.
More on those shots:
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/fda-executive-officer-on-hidden-camera-reveals-future-covid-policy-biden/
Maybe the question should be :
That would be an interesting poll.
BuDuh (4a7846) — 2/16/2022 @ 9:22 amIn my eyes, this poll only goes far enough to suggest that Republicans don’t trust government bureaucrats, don’t trust the public school cartel, and don’t like the fact that important vaccine mandates are being imposed without legislative assent. It wouldn’t surprise me if GOPers were now somewhat more anti-vax than Dems, but I don’t think the poll questions as posed and reported provides adequate proof of that.
A really interesting poll would be to just ask “Do you think the [COVID, measles, mumps, polio, etc.] vaccine is safe and effective?” Forget the whole part about “should they be mandated” and just get a real sense of which subgroups are more anti-vax and which are simply more anti-mandate. But I suppose those sort of polls are less likely to lend themselves to sexy partisan results for the Economist/YouGov folks to report, so no pollster is going to want to bother.
JVW (ee64e4) — 2/16/2022 @ 9:33 amGovernment + Media + Corporations all working together… what could go wrong?
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 2/16/2022 @ 9:45 amthe question today infers covid vaccine
obviously, the same question in 2015 does not
so, the news here is that there is across the board acceptance of non-covid vaccines
as for covid (an affliction that disproportionately doesn’t impact kids and pretty much only if they have comorbidities), not so much acceptance
ok, duh
JF (e1156d) — 2/16/2022 @ 9:49 amand full disclosure:
i have kids in elementary school
they’re both covid vaccinated with two jabs
do i think schools should be allowed to mandate it?
no
i guess i’m an anti-vaxxer according to the host
this is where we are with public discourse
JF (e1156d) — 2/16/2022 @ 9:55 amBy default and with a -14% from the D response in 2015, the R party might have been the antivax party pre-Covid anyway, especially on account of the outsize share of less than A list celebrities and RHO_ contestant types, just think of places like Orange County CA. It’s the lower income / less glitzy ZIP code areas since the pandemic that have really flipped that script.
urbanleftbehind (c073c9) — 2/16/2022 @ 10:04 amTo me it reads more that Republicans are anti-mandates. I’d say Democrats are 64% anti-freedom of choice.
rowbigred26 (f33047) — 2/16/2022 @ 10:05 amIn our “Man is the measure of all things” anthropocentric conceit, we think of our puny little bodies, the germs that threaten them, and the antibodies they create to fight them off. But have we considered that majestic Earth might have her own views about what two-legged germs threaten to overwhelm her and what her antibodies might be? Hmm?
And let’s carry it one step further. Okay? Okay. We might have noticed that as our bodies fight off the germs, some germs learn to defend themselves back. The ones that don’t, become ex-germs. Hors de combat. Might that not be the case with Earth’s germs too?
And, in regard to anti-vaxxers, well, there we are, aren’t we?
nk (1d9030) — 2/16/2022 @ 10:08 amthe question today infers covid vaccine
obviously, the same question in 2015 does not
so, the news here is that there is across the board acceptance of non-covid vaccines
Well again, I think it would be a worthwhile endeavor to poll Americans and ask them on a vaccine-by-vaccine basis how comfortable they are with each one, and then follow-up by asking the question about whether they should be mandated. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if part of the whole COVID mess is that Republicans are now far more against vaccine mandates than they were seven years ago, but I would be very interested in seeing if that has also led them to be less supportive of vaccinations in and of themselves.
JVW (ee64e4) — 2/16/2022 @ 10:12 amThere is a big difference between vaccine mandates for adults, who are by far the most likely to die, and children who are not. Children also have less opportunity to spread the disease if infected since their world is more limited.
This also impacts parental control, which is a long-held GOP plank, versus state control, which isn’t.
Spinning this to being “anti-vaxx” leaps over two rather important differences: children and state mandates. One can be quite pro-vaxx yet not approve of the state forcing its will on children.
There are, indeed, mandates for a number of vaccinations, but these are primarily “childhood diseases.” Pneumonia can be fatal, but the pneumonia vaccine isn’t mandated. Neither is shingles.
Kevin M (38e250) — 2/16/2022 @ 10:13 amOne can also spin this as “Republicans overcome their fear reaction, recant of forcing unnecessary vaccinations on children.”
Kevin M (38e250) — 2/16/2022 @ 10:14 amAnd the juxtaposition of two polls, one general about childhood diseases, one specific to Covid (not a childhood disease) is not entirely ingenuous.
I think that the Hillary-spied people have better evidence that this conflation.
Kevin M (38e250) — 2/16/2022 @ 10:17 am@11: I mean Covid, not preventable illnesses in general.
Kevin M (38e250) — 2/16/2022 @ 10:19 amI am not a Republican and I am not an anti-vaxxer. I understand the need for vaccines and we get them in my family as appropriate. But government should not be making my health care decisions so I oppose vaccine mandates.
DRJ (03cb91) — 2/16/2022 @ 10:32 amRepublicans Aren’t New To The Anti-Vaxx Movement
………
Take a series of polls from Gallup, conducted in 2001, 2015 and 2019. Each time, Gallup asked respondents the same questions about vaccines, and while there was always anti-vaccine representation across the political spectrum, the most recent poll showed a spike in the adoption of anti-vaccine views among Republicans and independents.
When asked how important it is that parents vaccinate their children, very few or no respondents said it was “not very” or “not at all” important in earlier surveys. But in 2019, 8 percent of Republicans, 8 percent of independents and 2 percent of Democrats said it was “not very” or “not at all” important that parents vaccinate their kids.
Which side of the political aisle was more anti-vaccine really depends on the question and the poll. In a 2013 YouGov poll, 11 percent of Democrats, 14 percent of independents and 9 percent of Republicans said they believe vaccines cause autism. But in a 2017 YouGov poll, 19 percent of Democrats, 31 percent of independents and 39 percent of Republicans said it was “definitely” or “probably” true that vaccines cause autism. A 2015 Pew Research Center poll found 9 percent of Democrats, 10 percent of independents and 5 percent of Republicans thought the MMR vaccine was unsafe. And in a 2015 CBS poll, when asked whether parents should be required to vaccinate their kids or should be able to decide for themselves, 38 percent of Republicans, 34 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats said parents should be able to make their own choice.
When asked about vaccine safety, Republicans and Democrats express vaccine-hesitant beliefs at roughly the same rate. But when asked about government mandates, Republicans are much more likely to take the vaccine-hesitant stance, according to Allan McCoy, a sociology professor at State University of New York. In a 2018 study published in Critical Public Health, McCoy compared two Pew Center surveys on vaccine beliefs. He found that the more ideologically extreme a respondent was — regardless of whether they’re on the left or right — the more likely they were to think that vaccines are unsafe. But when asked if vaccines should be compulsory or left up to parents, respondents who identified as “very conservative” were 136 percent more likely than “moderates” to think it should be a parent’s choice, while those who were “liberal” and “very liberal” were 44 percent and 13 percent less likely to think so, respectively. Democrats and Republicans are almost equally likely to hold anti-vaccine beliefs, but Republicans in particular also tend to be against vaccine mandates.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 2/16/2022 @ 11:07 am……..
The hypothetical I wonder about is, what if the next pandemic is 5x more communicable and deadly across most age groups, at what point…if any…. does it not become an individual choice (for those that believe it is) any longer? Is it 10x, 20x, at what point does a mandate become viewed more as a quasi citizen duty?
My sense is THIS pandemic did not impress a healthy minority of the population that it was especially deadly (rightly or wrongly)…or that masks and vaccines were the answer. That people believe that they were not equally in jeopardy. That being forced to lose you job if you did not vaccinate was proportionate. I understand the objections, though I still believe at some point a public health crisis makes mandates the right choice. Democracies are messy and sometimes collective action is necessary. This time the cost was high but did not touch every family. I think this is a first peak at how we’ve corroded public sector trust…and replaced it by a lot of hot air.
AJ_Liberty (ec7f74) — 2/16/2022 @ 11:13 amWhile there may be some carryover to older vaccines, there is a clear attempt to spin things with that poll.
Sammy Finkelman (46ec7d) — 2/16/2022 @ 11:35 amThe poll seems poorly designed for quantifying the extent to which Republicans have gone anti-vax.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 2/16/2022 @ 11:39 amBig Pharma doesn’t fund the party as well as Big Oil. 😉
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 2/16/2022 @ 11:41 am19. Time123 (9f42ee) — 2/16/2022 @ 11:39 am
On purpose. It asks a question about vaccines in general, in the context of Covid questions, and then is interpreted as applying to all vaccines. It’s intended as political ammunition.
Sammy Finkelman (46ec7d) — 2/16/2022 @ 11:50 amI’m almost as down on anti-vaxx nonsense as it’s possible for a bloke to be, *and* i think this is an unfair reading of the poll.
The issue is that this question was embedded in a series of questions about vaxx mandates in other contexts — in the workplace, for example — in a way that means it’s almost certain that when people heard the question, they thought about it *in the context of covid-19 vaccines specifically* rather than thinking about other childhood vaccines.
So I think it’s unreasonable to assert that this represents views of, say, the measles vaccine. It might, it might not — the data are too contaminated to tell.
aphrael (4c4719) — 2/16/2022 @ 12:48 pm“Do you believe K-12 schools should be allowed to mandate vaccines for their students?”
As several have noticed, the phrasing of the question has shifted. (Shifted nearly as fast as the goalposts for percentage of a group vaccinated to accomplish “herd immunity”…)
Does a school superintendent/principal/administrator have the power to make that requirement? (Hell, no!) Does the locally elected board? (Maybe, temporarily.) The state level education agency or department? (No.) The Federal Department of Education? (*sings*: ‘You say you want an insurrection…’ ) In any case, how would the authorities imposing such requirements be held accountable?
Does a parochial or for-profit charter school where students enroll voluntarily and can leave at any time have the authority to make vaccination a requirement for attendance? (Yeah, seems so.)
pouncer (6c33cf) — 2/16/2022 @ 12:49 pmThis Arstechnica article seems relevant:
The authors of the study “noted that omicron produced severe disease in some children and has the potential to cause long-term symptoms”.
(Two days ago, a neighbor who has had COVID told me she was having significant long COVID health problems, enough so that she was headed for a doctor’s appointment with checks on her lungs. We can’t know, now, how bad those problems will be, over the next ten years or more.)
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 2/16/2022 @ 1:08 pmSo I think it’s unreasonable to assert that this represents views of, say, the measles vaccine
Well, it might. After all, no one gets the measles anymore. Am I right?
Kevin M (38e250) — 2/16/2022 @ 1:44 pmWell, the vaccine is of limited effect with Omicron, so the argument has flaws.
I don’t disagree, and I do not oppose mandates for some public-facing employees, particularly those who have contact with the elderly, sick or otherwise immunocomprimised. And I have friends who died OF Covid, so it was very long-term with them.
Kevin M (38e250) — 2/16/2022 @ 1:49 pm> Well, it might.
Sure. it *might*. we don’t have enough data to know — the data presented are insufficient to establish it.
aphrael (4c4719) — 2/16/2022 @ 2:08 pm> Does the locally elected board? (Maybe, temporarily.) The state level education agency or department? (No.)
Is this specific to covid, or to vaccines in general? Can a school board create a permanent rule requiring vaccination for chicken pox? How about the state board of education? The state legislature?
aphrael (4c4719) — 2/16/2022 @ 2:10 pm@24
“During the omicron wave, weekly pediatric hospitalizations peaked at 7.1 per 100,000 children, which is about four times higher than delta’s peak rate of 1.8 per 100,000.”
meaning, it went from 0.000018 to 0.000071
but it’s much more alarming to say it “was four times higher”
book recommendation for taking in Jim Miller’s comment
(note, this rate for omicron is about 100 times less than the average pediatric hospitalizations due to influenza)
JF (e1156d) — 2/16/2022 @ 2:57 pmIn fairness the earlier poll was before we knew vaccines are Satan’s plan to kill us and teach our children cannibalism. (Also to make kids turn in their parents, but if they’re already dead and eaten I’m not sure that’s a problem.)
lurker (59504c) — 2/16/2022 @ 4:33 pmI as an ESRF patient, have availed myself of all the vaccines and booster. Being in the hospital 2 years ago with double pneumonia, fighting to breath for weeks, I can only imagine the horror of dying of covid.
Get vaccinated, spare yourself death. I care about you all, please protect yourself
EPWJ (0fbe92) — 2/16/2022 @ 4:45 pmThis was probably too much of a push-poll to be able to draw real meaning from the data.
Nic (896fdf) — 2/16/2022 @ 5:03 pmEPWJ Thanks for sharing your experience, for your advice, and for your caring.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 2/16/2022 @ 7:03 pmHow can you compare the results of today’s poll to the 2015 poll? They are not asking the same question. I find the 2015 question far more carefully worded compared to Today’s poll question. Today’s poll question doesn’t even properly reflect who makes vaccination requirements. With Today’s poll question, it’s likely that the mentioning of schools could be biasing the results. There’s been alot of negative feeling with school policies regarding Covid that may be upsetting to Republicans. Even the Democrats that answered, their “Yes” answers declined and their “No” answers increased compared to 2015. I find that to be unexpected.
John Sellman (cfa6f2) — 2/16/2022 @ 9:04 pmAs others have noted, this poll was poorly worded and included a non COVID-related question amid a bunch of COVID-related questions.
I would think you would get closer to normal numbers if you asked people whether vaccines that have gone through clinical trials and have been deemed safe over the years and prevent illnesses should be mandated by state schools, a majority of people would say yes.
But that wasn’t the case with COVID. The vaccines were pushed through with EUA, not properly tested, and we can’t trust all the different surveys and studies about the efficacy of COVID masks and vaccines due to replication issues. And nor should we. Science takes time. But when it comes to COVID masks and vaccines, liberals have it all figured out.
Hoi Polloi (093fb9) — 2/17/2022 @ 5:44 amCovid has introduced us to many new experiences and decisions. Years ago, mandating vaccinations for children did not seem like government overreach to most Republicans.
But now we see government mandating vaccinations, masks, and even closing businesses, stores and restaurants in the name of protecting health. I can see why the polls might have shifted.
DRJ (03cb91) — 2/17/2022 @ 7:23 amA vaccine so great they asked for a liability waiver, changed the definition of vaccine twice and begged for 52 years to release the testing data.
What happened to this blog and why are you not talking about seizing wealth illegally in Canada for opposing insane govt. overreach?
Obudman (44ba8e) — 2/17/2022 @ 7:54 amwhy are you not talking about seizing wealth illegally in Canada for opposing insane govt. overreach?
Because it is in Canada?
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 2/17/2022 @ 9:08 amSatan’s plan to kill us and teach our children cannibalism.
It’s the “Coven schools.”
Kevin M (38e250) — 2/17/2022 @ 9:48 amBut that wasn’t the case with COVID. The vaccines were pushed through with EUA, not properly tested
They have now had the mother of all field tests. But still people deny.
Kevin M (38e250) — 2/17/2022 @ 9:50 amWhat happened to this blog and why are you not talking about seizing wealth illegally in Canada for opposing insane govt. overreach?
Because.
We are also not talking about the rampant crime in South Africa, or the inability of Germans to understand that mining and burning coal is worse than nuclear power.
Kevin M (38e250) — 2/17/2022 @ 9:52 amA vaccine so great they asked for a liability waiver……..
All vaccines have liability protection under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program:
COVID -19 vaccines were designated under a separate law, the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act which allows individuals to use the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program to receive compensation.
Next question.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 2/17/2022 @ 10:04 amWhich side are you on?
https://twitter.com/tedbbaxter/status/1494483353289953284?s=21
Obudman (44ba8e) — 2/17/2022 @ 6:02 pmAll the Westside LA wine moms and RFK jr. beg to differ… except for the Covid 19 VAX, where they are all in.
The VAX for what amounts to a very bad flu for sick and old people? YES! Polio? Never!
Florida has a wealth of data (1 years worth) on unvaxxed kids in school with unvaxxed teachers.
steveg (e81d76) — 2/17/2022 @ 6:18 pmThey also have 2021 data on unvaxxed students with vaxxed teachers