Childhood immunisation is a modern scientific marvel. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Vaccination rates against childhood diseases have been on a downward slide for the past few years in the United States. Nationally, for example, the share of kindergarteners with completed records for the measles vaccine dropped to 93 percent last year, down from 95 percent in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Polio, whooping cough, and chickenpox vaccination rates have likewise slumped since the pandemic.
Vaccines are one of the marvels of modern science, allowing our species to overcome some of our oldest microscopic adversaries. The erosion of public support for childhood immunisation is thus lamentable, not to mention dangerous. Yet public-health and government authorities looking for someone to blame for growing vaccine scepticism might wish to look in the mirror: Their Covid and gender excesses have done a great deal to sow distrust among parents.
In a much-discussed report on Monday, The New York Times insisted on making this a partisan issue, noting that the number of kids receiving vaccine exemptions rose in states that Donald Trump won in November’s election. But exemptions are up in some Kamala Harris states, too. As The Times conceded, “the story with noncompliance is more complex” than the partisan headline figures might suggest. “It rose in both blue and red states, although more in red states”.
In short: The partisan angle tells only part of the story, as does the proliferation of crank ideas on the online right (a phenomenon that predates the pandemic, though it went on hyperdrive in the wake of it). Authorities in red states might be making it easier to obtain the exemptions. Or it could be that the great migration of the Covid era has reshuffled people into regions that more closely match their opinion on the issue of vaccinations. Or some combination of these factors may be at work. The bottom line, though, is that these and other factors wouldn’t be as significantly in play but for the breakdown in trust between many families and health agencies. That trust will take a long time to rebuild — that is, if it even can be rebuilt.
Start with the source of the decline data: The CDC is at the top of the list of agencies that destroyed trust. Rochelle Walensky took over as the agency’s director on the day President Biden was inaugurated. Biden had promised to reopen schools in the first 100 days of his presidency. As you might recall, this wasn’t seen as a particularly ambitious goal, since that timeline would put the reopening date in May, right around when schools would be closing for the summer anyway. Yet by February, even that meager plan was scrapped.
Text messages showed that Walensky cowered to Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, and changed school-opening guidelines based on the union boss’s demands. No science was involved in the decision: a special interest group was allowed to influence policy at the nation’s top health agency.
As if that alone weren’t egregious enough, Walensky’s also shotgunned her own credibility. There seemed to be a lot of simple guessing in her comments. In November 2021, Walensky said that masks are 80% effective in reducing Covid spread, a figure that appears to have been made up on the spot. If true, that would have meant masks were far more effective than vaccines in stopping infection, a claim the CDC would never have made.
It wasn’t just Walensky who bungled or politicised the Covid-19 response. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of America’s war on Covid, frequently and unaccountably reversed himself or simply lied to the American people. He admitted to misleading the public on the efficacy of masks because of mask shortages at the outset of the pandemic. But in a closed-door interview session in January 2024 before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci admitted that he had pushed regulations such as the six-feet rule and masking without having any clear evidence that these prescriptions would be effective.
Both Walensky and Fauci pushed the Covid vaccine on children, even after it was clear that the jabs didn’t stop the spread. In October 2022, a CDC advisory committee voted unanimously to add the Covid vaccine and the corresponding boosters to the recommended immunisation schedule for children as young as 6 months old. By then, it was clear that the shot didn’t prevent transmission, so the argument was it “reduces risk of serious outcome”. Of course, kids faced a minuscule risk of serious outcomes in the first place.
This was nearly a year after European countries had started limiting the Covid vaccine for kids as data about myocarditis revealed the risk presented to teenage boys. The CDC was aware, too, that boys were far more at risk than girls, which led to a curious choice in its presentation of data. As David Zweig reported for Wired: “In the advisory-committee meeting, a slide was presented that showed that within seven days following the second dose, males aged 12 to 17 had a rate of 62.75 myocarditis cases per million, whereas females had a rate of 8.68. Averaging the two rates yields 35.72 cases. Yet the rate for young males is more than seven times that of young females”. The CDC frequently lumped the two together.
It wasn’t just Covid where public trust in health agencies and “expert” organisations was shattered. There was also the gender question. The CDC recommended the vaccine to “pregnant people” and removed all references to “women” from its vaccine website. Last year, the CDC presented guidance on “chest-feeding” — that is to say, pretend breastfeeding by biological males using “medication to induce lactation.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics is just as guilty of becoming a political operation with a health-care name. During the pandemic, the AAP reversed its previous guidance on the importance of babies being able to read faces to fit in with the leftist push for masking. The organisation also took advice from teachers’ unions and pushed for schools to remain closed. Today, the AAP is busying itself issuing political statements on the conflict in the Middle East.
Parents didn’t wake up one day and decide to stop vaccinating their children without reason. They no longer trust groups that have proved themselves untrustworthy. Parents are fed up with falsehoods that made them wonder what else they’ve been lied to about. Moms and dads have had a front row seat to the politicisation of health policy over the last few years and have decided to opt out of taking any further guidance from these people until that trust can be restored.
When I speak to parents who no longer vaccinate their children, a common thread is that they just don’t believe what they are told anymore. These were normal people, following the rules, until abnormal policies were pushed on their families. Low trust in institutions is detrimental to societies. Maybe those institutions should work on fixing themselves so people will once again listen to what they have to say.
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SubscribeWho is this head-scratching fool?
You?
Some of it is a loss of trust but a factor not discussed nearly as often is the sheer volume of jabs on the schedule. In my day, it was fewer than ten. We had the usuals: MMR, DPT, and polio. Today, it’s upward of 70 vaccinations and no one wants to ever discuss potential side effects of issues. Why not?
Everyone’s chemistry teacher in school said “don’t put A and B into the beaker together.” With vaccines today, we have the entire alphabet multiples over. I realize some of the count involves boosters for a previous vaccine but that’s not all of it. And finally – as with the Covid fallout on heart and other issues – if the vaccines are completely harmless, what is causing these issues?
This is what elitists on both the right and the left don’t get: People may not understand all the details of the science – or of monetary policy, for that matter – but they twig when they’re being bamboozled.
During “COVID”, an interesting study found that distrust in the governments’ narratives was greatest with the most educated (who knew enough to see through the lies) and the least educated (who didn’t need to know the details, they could tell from the techniques being applied that they were being lied to). It was in the middle that the highest trust resided.
The WHO long identified this as the key problem: People simply don’t believe the authorities anymore. Too many narratives have turned out to be pure fiction. Unfortunately, the distrust affects both the good and the bad. It’ll be a long road to re-establish trust.
NIce catch. I had forgotten about that study which flies in the face of the usual leftist response to vaccine skepticism, that it’s the hillbillies and uneducated fools who object. Turns out a lot of PhDs were suspect, too.
I would actually say a bigger dividing line is not education but faith. Specifically faith in experts.
Many educated people are trained to “trust the experts.” They are making a conscious choice to shut off their minds. The expert’s claims are accepted Apriori as Gospel. Due to faith these educated people don’t discern between reliable and unreliable experts.
This intentional ignorance means the category of “Expertise” can be wielded to assert control. Control is achieved through the politics of Interconnectivity (Holism). So experts in a Holistic environment are not simply subject matter experts, they are experts of everything. This is why the “Experts” were able to carve out a Covid quarantine exception for Racial Justice protests.
PHDs, especially in the hard sciences are expected to produce their own knowledge, their own conclusions, to contribute to the field. Even Master’s degrees require a deeper understanding of the underlying philosophies in a field and how the knowledge we have came to be. Because they understand the process, they know how to lie and how the system can be corrupted by power and influence. Thus they do not trust blindly. They also have enough confidence in their own judgement to contradict expert opinions because they are experts themselves.
The least intelligent have no idea about any of this, but most of them have learned the hard way, through experience, to know when they’re being lied to. They’re probably used to it. Further, we live in an age when the wealthy and powerful have pushed the globalist agenda that has left the least educated objectively poorer, sicker, and less politically powerful than their parents and grandparents. They were told by ‘experts’ how globalism would benefit everyone and how the old jobs would get replaced by new ones. What they weren’t told is that the newer jobs were in entirely different fields that they might or might not be trained or suited for and that they would pay relatively less because of the lack of unionization in service industries. Thus, they have good reason to disbelieve ‘experts.
The middle layers naturally have the highest compliance and allegiance to the ‘experts’ because they’ve been rewarded for it. Most wouldn’t have enough intelligence to create their own knowledge or make their own discoveries to contribute to their discipline, but they are smart enough to learn the knowledge and techniques discovered and pioneered by those who came before them. Then they got jobs where they use that knowledge to make a decent living. They didn’t question the knowledge that came from their professors, their textbooks, their bosses, and so on, and they were rewarded for it. They owe their middle class existence to trusting the various ‘experts’ who have basically directed their entire lives already. Of course they trust the experts now. College education simply no longer signifies any great intellectual achievement. It is more or less a hoop to be jumped through for whoever is willing. Like so many other things, education has been industrialized to mass produce a uniform, quality controlled product, that is skilled workers who know enough to do the work but not enough to truly understand the world and ask questions of those who hold power and influence.
Historically, this is what the public education system basically always was. During the industrial revolution, employers needed factory workers who could at least read, write, and do basic mathematics, so they lobbied the government and helped fund public education systems that taught those skills. When reading, writing, and arithmetic were no longer enough, they started requiring high school by raising the legal drop out age and passing various laws to keep children in schools, sometimes against the wishes of parents who used them as labor in family farms or other businesses and passed down skills in a more traditional manner. When high school wasn’t enough, they pushed more and more college education. State governments provided funding for their own universities that competed with traditional learning institutions. Experts began pushing college as a preferred path for all high schoolers. Now they’re forgiving student loans, which is essentially the government funding another level of education. How long until this too becomes a legal requirement?
Be aware, I am not arguing for or against the idea that educating all citizens is a worthy goal in and of itself. That was the excuse, not the reason for our modern education system. If the goal really were to ‘educate’ rather than ‘indoctrinate’, I think our education system would look very different from our current, standardized, industrial mass education system. I question whether the current system is accomplishing the goal and I question whether uniform class instruction is even the best way to pass knowledge to the next generation. I’m reasonably sure we wouldn’t be having debates about educators pushing political ideologies and elite viewpoints if schools hadn’t always been designed in part for that very purpose. We might also find that there were a lot more people who don’t place such blind faith in ‘expert’ opinions.
How to be intelligent, but jump to so many erroneous, prejudiced conclusions. Life’s to short to challenge them all, but I do.
But the anti-vaccination started decades ago. In Britain, it was born of the hippyish drive towards natural alternatives to medicine, popular everywhere nowadays. This was very much a leftist group, already suspicious of big pharma (and any big company).
In contrast, Right leaning people, being generally older in the UK, cleaved more to authority. Many had lived through the breakthroughs on polio, TB, and childhood diseases, so had seen the effectiveness of vaccination. That is why there was no problem of Covid vax uptake on the Right.
The other anti-vax groups were health and social care workers coerced to vaccinate in order to work, and ethnic groups culturally suspicious of vaccination.
That people like Trump and RFK have been muddying the waters with conspiracy theories is an American thing. It seems to gain support from a lack of critical thinking rather than a political ideology. The make up of Britain’s Right isn’t the same as the USA’s. We don’t have large ultra religious Christian groups, geographically isolated communities or large numbers wedded to gun ownership. Only the question of mass immigration leading to Brexit has brought some of Britain’s less affluent voters to Right leaning parties.
Anti vax started in the 19th century.
You’re making a fallacious argument that rural, American Christians who believe guns are a necessary form of self defense of their family and personal property lack common sense because they’re skeptical of centralized government. Your error lies in assuming this group is “less affluent.”
America is not informed by Class Conflict. In isolated areas you have wealthy and less wealthy people that coexist with little difficulty because they share common values.
I canmot believe someone would dare question the legitimacy of Fauci (mask be upon him). He is The Science and the Science is him, when he speaks he speaks as The Science. Fauci (mask be upon him) is the one who will deliver us from the great evil pandemic.
Truly only a prophet of The Science such as Fauci (mask be upon him) would’ve been wise or enlightened enough to know that only protests against vaccine mandates by horrid worshipers of the orange devil would spread COVID, whereas protests for racial justice would not. Only the holy Facui (mask be upon him) knew that Churchs would be super spread events whereas bars were critical to the continued health of the nation. Who else but the wise Fauci (mask be upon him) would have realized that putting a mask on when you entered the restaurant wearing it until you got to your table, taking it off when you sat down and ate your meal, and then putting it back on as you left the restaurant, would prevent the spread of the disease.
Truly only those who trust in the great Fauci (mask be upon him) who is the Science will be delivered to the land flowing with vaccines and lockdowns, whereas the bigoted disciples of the Orange Satan will be cast down to the land of the eternal ventilator to be tormented by their “freedumbs” for all of eternity.
In the name of Moderna and Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, Awomen.
Interesting article. Just one problem, vaccines aren’t a modern miracle which reduced disease. Clean water, good housing, good diets got rid of most of the childhood illnesses and rendered those remaining into mild childhood infections which primed a child’s immune system for lifetime protection. For healthy children, measles, chicken pox and whooping cough might not be nice, but certainly weren’t killers. Vaccines aren’t risk free and whilst the association with autism is contested, the work of Aaby showed that vaccinating children with DTP (diphtheria, typhoid and pertussis) led to up to 6x the number of deaths compared with unvaccinated children. Childhood vaccines need proper research into safety and effectiveness. None have been compared with proper placebos such as saline so safety and effectiveness aren’t known. And combining vaccines will inevitably put a lot of pressure on a child’s immune system, so why ‘triple’ and ‘quadruple’ vaccines. Why vaccinate against illnesses that no child or adult is likely to come into contact with, let alone contract. Apart from the huge profits for the pharmaceutical industry, it doesn’t make sense.
Parental concern, far from simply being a lack of trust, is mainly based on a good understanding the associated science and the data. Perhaps the views of parents should be respected rather than forcing them to accept medical interventions on their children.
The T in DTP is for tetanus, not typhoid. Pertussis (whooping cough) is becoming a problem in Australia with babies dying due to falling vaccination rates.
I’ve just tried to find the number of Australian children who have died of whooping cough and since 2015 it appears to be about three, which is not the impression your comment gives. I think we need real facts and comprehensive studies to determine the safety and efficacy of the current childhood vaccine schedules.
The risk of autism is not contested. It has been very widely disproved.
Vaccines are not a panacea but they are another highly effective tool in helping us to control disease and viruses (along with other things that you likely mention, like improved diet, hygiene, etc.).
Thank you for this genuinely unheard point of view.
Too many organisations and so-called ‘experts’ have become politicized.
Good piece.
Add to the reasons for distrust of science the multifaceted crisis in published research. In addition to the “replication crisis”–in some fields as many as half of all published studies cannot be reproduced–science is increasingly fraught with hype, negligence, and outright fraudulent research. A fascinating book on the subject, Science Fictions, by Stuart Ritchie is well worth the time of anyone interested.
“Vaccines are one of the marvels of modern science, allowing our species to overcome some of our oldest microscopic adversaries.”
Really? Is it not improved hygiene, nutrion and of course antibiotics that have achieved this? Where good hygiene and nutrition are lacking childhood diseases long forgotten elsewhere are still common as is TB, although as populations shift this is beginning to change for the worse. Moreover, a concentration on pharmaceutical intervention takes attention away from more fundamental issues such as clean water, good food and general cleanliness.
Where is the study, or studies, that show the combined impact upon a body of many vaccines?
Experts killed the trust in ‘experts’.
“The vaccine will stop COVID in its tracks” is going down the memory hole.
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“Ruth Sharratt
3 days ago
Interesting article. Just one problem, vaccines aren’t a modern miracle which reduced disease. Clean water, good housing, good diets got rid of most of the childhood illnesses and rendered those remaining into mild childhood infections which primed a child’s immune system for lifetime protection. For healthy children, measles, chicken pox and whooping cough might not be nice, but certainly weren’t killers.”
From the introduction of the smallpox vaccine in the 19th century to the mass availability of flu shots today, vaccines have helped millions of people develop immunity to some of the world’s deadliest illnesses.
Thanks to vaccines, many infectious diseases — like smallpox and polio — no longer exist outside of laboratories in the US. Their lasting elimination has spurred researchers to work to develop new types of immunizations that could help people avoid other life-altering diseases.
Here are six once-common diseases that you no longer have to worry about thanks to vaccines.
https://www.businessinsider.com/vaccines-infectious-diseases-you-wont-get-2019-6
An interesting example of the pharma payday push to get every product possible on the USA child vax/medical schedule was highlighted in an interview by Casey Means, an ex pharma PR expert.
There is a nasty eye infection babies can catch from the birth canal if the mother has the infection, so they wipe a drug over the eyes of all babies at birth.
Thing is though, they test all the mothers before birth for this infection and most don’t have it.
But pharma persuaded the CDC to ignore this fact and give the drug to ALL babies anyway. $$$ Thay probably make the test aswell!
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