Vaccination is Not a Partisan Issue...Yet

During the last U.S. presidential election cycle, Michelle Bachmann was briefly seen as the Republican primary front-runner. Her downfall from that position was catalyzed when she claimed during a debate that the HPV vaccine could cause "mental retardation." Earlier this year a measles outbreak at Disneyland brought the issue of childhood vaccination to the public attention, resulting in California passing one of the strictest school vaccination laws in the country. Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the measles outbreak, a variety of politicians, including some (then) potential Republican candidates, expressed less than solid support for vaccination.

Donald Trump has believed, since at least 2007, that childhood vaccinations cause autism. The issue was raised in the second Republican primary debate earlier this week.



Ben Carson gently and correctly noted that studies have not found any connection between autism and vaccines. Unfortunately, he and Rand Paul, the other physician in the debate, ultimately indulged Trump's idea of spreading vaccinations out. This led the New Yorker's Jon Chait to complain,

It is depressing that a presidential field with two doctors cannot even produce sensible views on medicine, let alone anything else. The party’s decades-long flight from empiricism and reason shows no sign of abating.

But in the Washington Post two graduate students of political science write that CNN should not have raised the question at all.

We fear that if party elites continue to polarize, the cues present in the press could begin to undermine the societal consensus on childhood vaccinations. Why are we reasonably sure this is the case? Because we have seen this movie before, with global warming....

We fear we may begin to witness a similar dynamic on vaccines. Republican elites are increasingly voicing skepticism of the medical science consensus. The media sees this as fitting a pre-established narrative that Republicans are hostile to science, and thus CNN asked the GOP field a question about vaccines in front of a record breaking national audience of 23 million people.

It would not be surprising if Democratic elites leap at this opportunity to solidify their own science-based credentials and make it a campaign issue, particularly if someone like Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination. These cues are then communicated to the public through the press, and we may be off to the polarization races.

I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, the public ought to be informed that a leading contender for the U.S. presidency has crackpot views about vaccination. In normal times such views would bring a chorus of condemnation that would endanger presidential ambitions, as seen with Bachmann in the previous cycle. However, Donald Trump has shown himself to be impervious to shame. Apparently he cannot say anything ridiculous enough that would cause his supporters to abandon him, and attempts of the media--even Fox News(!)--to hold him accountable for his antics are, in the minds of supporters, more evidence that elitists are trying to manipulate the masses and keep a bold truth-teller from succeeding. Thus, whether they wanted to or not, Carson and Paul soft-peddled their criticism of Trump and ended up legitimizing his views.

I have a hard time seeing why CNN is responsible for that...other than the way the debate questions were constantly framed around Trump's views. If the media avoided this and other topics for fear of politicization, well wouldn't that just be interpreted as another manifestation of media elitism (i.e. that the simpletons of America are too dumb to risk discussing an issue in a political context)?

I do not think that vaccination will ever be as polarizing as climate change. Whereas addressing climate change is perceived by many as a threat to prosperity, vaccination is generally viewed as an enabler of prosperity. And whereas the consequences of error in judgment for climate change are delayed or almost imperceptibly gradual, the consequences for error in vaccination are more immediate and severe. However, vaccination is more sensitive to dissent; successful vaccination policies require a high degree of compliance.

Ultimately, if vaccination becomes a politicized issue Republicans will have nobody else to truly blame but themselves. If they and their outlets will give full support to vaccination, then by definition it won't be a political issue--at least between Republicans and Democrats. But if they voice skepticism, I don't think you can blame CNN for reporting it.

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