A wave of lawmakers who oppose vaccine requirements are winning elections for state legislatures amid a national drop in childhood vaccination rates and a resurfacing of preventable deadly diseases.
The victories come as part of a political backlash to pandemic restrictions and the proliferation of misinformation about the safety of vaccines introduced to fight the coronavirus.
In Louisiana, 29 candidates endorsed by Stand for Health Freedom, a national group that works to defeat mandatory vaccinations, won in the state’s off-year elections this fall.
Fred Mills, the retiring Republican chairman of the Louisiana Senate’s health and welfare committee, said he fears that once-fringe anti-vaccine policies that endanger people’s lives will have a greater chance of passing come January when newly-elected lawmakers are sworn in and more than a dozen Republican moderates like himself leave office.
When you’re anti-Big Pharma for all the wrong reasons, stuff like this happens.
Yes, they are soulless corporate for-profit husks that have silently squashed potential cures for debilitating diseases and prolonged the suffering of countless by diluting medicine into lifelong treatments at thousand times the cost, but the research is mostly sound. Ignoring the cut corners for rapid deployment, the actual scientists that work on these treatments do their best to make sure it does work.
Giving up on vaccines isn’t the right way to protest, pressuring the government and these corporations into ensuring the highest level of scrutiny is.
If there is a profit motive in it for them, bad companies can do good things. In this case, coming up with a COVID vaccine that worked and worked well was a big profit motive. And something anti-vaxxers don’t seem to realize: Moderna et al make a lot more money from a working COVID vaccine than a non-working COVID vaccine. People will eventually figure out the latter doesn’t work and stop using it.
Or even one that works, but not as well.
The J&J COVID vaccine was quietly discontinued a long time ago.