Republicans reject democratic attempts to tighten vaccine legislation

Most Republicans reject Democrats' bills to tighten child immunization laws during the worst measles outbreak in the last 20 years, alarming public health experts who fear that the country will divide as much into vaccines that are global warming.

Democrats from six states – Colorado, Arizona, New Jersey, Washington, New York, and Maine – have drafted or co-sponsored legislation to prevent parents from avoiding vaccinating their children. School age and have mainly faced the opposition of the GOP. At the same time, in West Virginia and Mississippi, countries with some of the country's most stringent immunization laws, Republican legislators have introduced measures to expand vaccine exemptions, although has not yet determined how popular they are.

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In Washington State, which has one of the largest measles epidemics, a state Senate bill to reduce vaccine exemptions through health committee without the support of a single Republican. The same thing happened in the legislative committees of Colorado and Maine last week.

All states have mandatory vaccination laws, but the way they provide exemptions for religious or philosophical reasons varies considerably. It gets more and more careful as measles spreads.

Democrats introduce bills that narrow the loopholes as a scientific foundation and necessary to fight the disease, while sometimes belittling their enemies as "misguided or selfish" anti-vaxxers. to reduce the right of parental control over the bodies of their children and to hand over this power to the government.

Of course, there are skeptics about vaccines left, Robert Kennedy Jr. being the most striking example. But to this day, their influence is not as strong in the state legislatures.

Fueled by major epidemics in Israel and Europe, measles has punctuated the US immunity barrier at several entry points in what promises to be the worst year since 1993, with 555 cases beginning in April. Epidemics in six states include hundreds of cases in ultra-Orthodox communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County, New York, and their numbers are increasing.

"What if God did not allow someone to die?", Said Bronx member Jeff Dinowitz, whose bill to limit religious exemptions to nine Democratic co-sponsors – but no Republican support – at the New York Assembly.

Andrew Raia, a senior Republican leader of the New York Assembly Health Committee, said he would not support the bill. Without being totally convinced by the voters who associate their children's autism with vaccines and unaware of the existence of a true religious injunction against vaccination, he said: " I am not a religious leader and I am not a scientist either. weigh both sides. "

The political struggle around vaccination is complicated by the fact that President Donald Trump and two of his main Republican enemies, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) an ophthalmologist, and Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who is now secretary of the HUD, both expressed support for refuted theories linking the vaccine to autism during a debate in 2016. Last month, Paul announced that he had vaccinated his own children, but that He had been violated by the mandates of the government.

Since he became president, Trump dropped the subject and abandoned the plan to create a commission led by Kennedy Jr. to investigate an alleged concealment of vaccines assumed by public health officials.

However, officials worry that they are "three Trump tweets" in an even more polarized situation, said MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky, who has studied communication around issues. politicized public health and science.

In Texas, the Tea Party and its related groups created an anti-vax PAC in 2015. The successful candidates have not been elected yet, but the very existence of a Vaccine Policy Committee shows that the political presence is growing. Right-wing influential voices, including Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, have all raised suspicions about vaccines.

"There is a credulity gap between the parties in science that did not exist 25 years ago," Berinsky said. And Trump could easily ignite skepticism about the vaccine if he put his hand on it. For much of the highly polarized population of the United States, "in the end, these are not the arguments people make, but who makes them," said Berinksy.

To be sure, Republicans have traditionally supported vaccines as parental responsibility. And although Senator Paul opposes mandatory vaccination, other members of the GOP Congress, including Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and representatives, Phil Roe (R-TN), Michael Burgess, (R-TX) and Representative, Brad Wenstrup R-OH), who are all physicians – strongly supported vaccination in statements to POLITICO, while avoiding supporting the removal of religious or philosophical exemptions. Cassidy is strongly in favor of mandatory vaccinations and has publicly sparred with Paul.

A century of immunization laws has shown that some of the strictest states carry a lower burden of vaccine-preventable diseases. Pests including smallpox, polio and diphtheria have been eliminated.

The rules generally become more stringent after major outbreaks, and groups like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have used the measles outbreak to stop the laws of the United States. State allowing people to refuse vaccination of their children for religious or philosophical reasons. .

In 1972, during a measles outbreak in Los Angeles, public health authorities prevented 50,000 children from going to school until their parents could prove it. that they had been vaccinated. The success of this effort has led to a national push for stricter laws and stricter enforcement.

After 89 people, mostly children, died in the 1990 measles outbreak, millions of dollars were spent to expand the availability of the vaccine for the poor and in 2000 the disease has ceased to circulate in the United States. Since then, each case has been linked to visitors from overseas – although the virus has subsequently spread here among the growing pockets of vaccine-shunners.

Yet even Walter Orenstein, a field marshal who had headed the CDC's immunization division from 1993 to 2004 during the crackdown, is not sure whether to legislate against all non-medical exemptions.

"In my heart and from a purely medical point of view, I agree with that," said Orenstein, who now teaches at Emory University. "I'm a little worried that he's going to turn against us."

Experts differ on the gravity of political polarization. Dan Salmon, a vaccineologist at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health, notes that the only vaccine bills passed by legislatures in recent years – including a 2015 law removing philosophical exemptions in California – have been tightened rather than lifted.

"I do not think it's partisan," Salmon insists.

Research conducted by Neal Goldstein of the Drexel School of Public Health suggests that the issue of immunization warrants has indeed entered a hyper-partisan landscape. As a result, he said, it may be wise to avoid legislation where possible to avoid opening more wounds.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, said: "My concern is that the tightening of requirements in the political process may politicize an issue that we can not politicize if we want to maintain public health. "

Dan Goldberg, Renuka Rayasam, Amanda Eisenberg and Sam Sutton contributed to this report.