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.
Because it’s never the perpetrators that suffer. No child is born blind or brain damaged by rubella by a choice they made. They are born that way because of a choice that was made for them.
And those that perpetuate this unto children, when they suffer the consequences for their choices they fail to attribute it to their own misgivings. Instead they absolve their misgivings as the function of some deity who wishes to test their resolve. That this affliction is not of their own making but of some twisted logic test of faith.
No, this does not rid the world of those who would harm but it with absolute certainty harms those who were never given a choice otherwise.