When you have no core values, no principles, flip-flopping is easy.
Yesterday’s decision hinges on a new and alarming embrace of the right-wing crusade against vaccination.
www.theatlantic.com
Conservatives were often vocally pro-vaccination in the past, when anti-vaccine sentiment was vaguely associated with people the comedian Jon Stewart once mocked as “science-denying affluent California liberals.” With “affluent California liberals” as a symbol of the anti-vaccination movement, conservative culture-war instincts trended in a more constructive direction. Indeed, a 2015 measles outbreak at Disneyland illustrated the importance of mass vaccination to obtain herd immunity and suppress disease.
Many conservatives at the time made precisely that point. “If you think about the childhood illnesses that once permanently debilitated people like my grandfather, who contracted childhood polio—and you think today that measles, rubella, polio have been eradicated from the U.S. and much of the world—why would we go backwards?” Senator Ted Cruz asked in 2015. “In a feat that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, the anti-vaccine movement has managed to breathe life into nearly vanquished childhood diseases,” the conservative pundit Rich Lowry had lamented presciently a year earlier. “Nothing good can come from undoing one of the miracles of medical progress.”
The logic of vaccine mandates, too, was well accepted on the right. “Some say the decision to vaccinate or not should be the parents’ choice,” the conservative writer Thomas Sowell argued in 2015. “That would be fine if their child would live isolated from other children. But that is impossible.” Many articles from 2015 were bitterly angry at the suggestion that conservatives were anti-vaccine, and blamed media bias for it. There were certainly disagreements over federal authority to mandate vaccines, but those differences of opinion were less significant, because immunization remained a thoroughly bipartisan cause, and Republicans had not embraced anti-vaxxers as a constituency. Today, Republican elected officials have begun opposing such mandates even on the state level.
Wendy E. Parmet: Americans are suing to protect their freedom from infection
Now Cruz complains about Big Bird encouraging children to get vaccinated while Lowry writes rageful op-eds attacking “the idiocy of covid-vaccine mandates for kids.”
In 2015, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky tweeted a photo of himself getting a booster shot to rebut liberal media bias; in 2021, the career ophthalmologist announced that he was refusing to get the COVID vaccine. As Lowry observed in 2015, anti-vaxxers tend to be “doggedly impervious to evidence.”
