For vaccine opponents, Covid may have been just the start

As Covid vaccines became widely available in early 2021, opponents of Covid vaccine requirements faced an awkward question for which there was no obvious answer: If vaccine mandates are so outrageous, why have they been common in the United States for generations?

Indeed, The New York Times explained a couple of years ago that vaccination mandates “are an American tradition,” with roots that predate the United States itself. These policies have been especially common in schools nationwide, where children are routinely required to receive all kinds of vaccinations before they can attend classes.

It opened the door to an unsettling possibility: As Covid vaccine foes took aim at requirements, would they also start balking at related policies for other vaccines? With this question in mind, The Associated Press reported:

To be sure, when it comes to protections against meningitis, GOP state legislators aren’t undoing an existing policy: There is no current meningitis vaccination requirement in Wisconsin schools.

But as the AP’s report noted, the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices — experts who advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — has recommended that students get vaccinated against meningitis, and Wisconsin’s Democratic governor is eager to implement just such a policy.

The gerrymandered Republican majority in Madison apparently disagrees.

What’s more, while Wisconsin schools do have a chicken pox vaccine requirement for all students in kindergarten through sixth grade, those same state lawmakers have also made it easier to get an exemption from the requirement.

For good measure, the AP article added: “Vaccines for both meningitis and chicken pox are widely used and have been proven to be safe and effective.” It’s a point that apparently needs re-emphasizing from time to time.

But it’s not just Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin who need the reminder. I’m reminded of a Washington Post analysis published last year. “Somehow, this keeps happening,” it read. “For months, we’ve written in this space about how the Republicans’ pushback against coronavirus vaccine mandates could foment — and apparently has been fomenting — opposition to mandates of other vaccines, including for schoolchildren.”

That problem clearly has not gone away.

In 2021, Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin noted that it seems likely that the United States will “end up with fewer vaccine requirements in some places than we started with before the pandemic” that has killed more than 1.1 million Americans.

That might’ve sounded ridiculous, but nearly two years later, it’s an unsettling assessment that’s holding up well.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.