Trump's reckless vaccine ultimatum

The former president panders to his supporters with a campaign promise that would bring mass, unnecessary death

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

For all the talk of Project 2025 and the debate over whether it is or is not a roadmap for a second Trump term (it definitely is), you don’t really need to delve through a 900-page document to find potentially catastrophic proposals that, in a sane world, would be disqualifying for any major party candidate. You can just look at what Trump has said himself.

What’s sobering is just how many such promises he has made. He proposes about a dozen things in every speech that would have doomed any other candidate early in the primaries. Some of these promises have been well-covered. But some he throws out almost as an aside, and given the rambling, stream-of-consciousness nature of his speeches, they don’t get nearly as much attention.

So I want to take a more in-depth look at some of the more destructive policies Trump has promised his followers. Today, we’ll start with one of the most gobsmackingly ignorant proposals to ever escape the lips of a major party candidate: Trump’s vow to withhold federal funding for any school that requires students to be vaccinated.

This policy wouldn’t be limited to the COVID vaccine. He’s talking about all vaccines.

Here he is on Saturday, speaking at a rally in Minnesota: “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.”

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This has been a long time coming.

Trump is the most boastful man in American politics. He takes credit for things others did, things he actually opposed, and things that never happened. But since leaving office, Trump has stopped taking credit for one of the few unquestionably laudable achievements of his administration — facilitating the rapid discovery, approval, manufacture, and delivery of the COVID vaccine. The vaccine has saved millions of lives. Its effectiveness and the speed at which it was brought to the public is one of the most miraculous scientific achievements of our time.

Yet Trump didn’t mention it in his acceptance speech at the RNC. He rarely mentions it at all anymore. This is because vaccine denialism has swallowed the right whole.

Trumpism is a cult of personality. There’s almost nothing he can say that his fans won’t thirstily lap up. Vaccines are the exception. Here, for example, is Trump getting booed in Alabama after telling rally attendees that they should get vaccinated:

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Here’s a Dallas crowd booing him for revealing that he’d recently received a COVID booster:

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Vaccine conspiracism was once the province of hippies, far-left wellness zealots and technophobes, Christian Scientists, and libertarian off-the-grid types. It’s now a mainstream position in the Republican Party. The political right’s six year slide into vaccine denialism is perhaps the most striking and destructive examples of how the bizarre obsessions of a rich, eccentric old man who has long lived in a bubble of yes-men merged with the fierce devotion of his increasingly radical supporters to mainstream ideas that had once been properly shunted to the far fringe.

Trump himself has long dabbled in vaccine skepticism. But by the time he announced for president in 2015 he at least seemed to realize this was a fringe position that made him look like a loon to moderate voters. The pandemic changed all of that.

When COVID first hit, Trump played down the threat, not for deep-rooted ideological reasons, but for purely selfish ones — he didn’t want to be blamed for it. So he discouraged testing, interfered with the distribution of tests, and pressured the CDC to change its testing guidelines. This undoubtedly resulted in infected people remaining ignorant of their status, then infecting others. It undoubtedly caused unnecessary deaths.

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Trump also led by example. After he tested positive himself, he carried on with his debate with Biden as if nothing had changed. He likely infected and nearly killed Chris Christie, who helped him prep for the debate. He then put Biden at risk too. And of course, Trump himself then nearly died of the disease.

Trump’s followers dutifully ran with his COVID skepticism. As hospitals flowed over with the dying and morgues filled up with the dead, prominent, once-mainstream Trump supporters pushed bleak conspiracies that it was all an elaborate lie. Opposition to basic personal COVID precautions — not even public policies like lockdowns — quickly became a MAGA purity test.

This COIVD skepticism almost immediately bled into sowing fear about a possible vaccine, even before it was clear that a vaccine was possible. Once it was clear a vaccine was coming, Trump pushed back on the conspiracists, rightly defending the coming vaccine and his record in accelerating its approval.

But with Biden in the White House, Trump has been increasingly willing to entertain vaccine conspiracists. He occasionally defended his record, such as when he directly confronted Candace Owens in December 2021 about her absurd claim that the vaccine was killing people. But six months earlier, he was telling parents that they shouldn’t vaccinate their kids.

Trump has now completely capitulated to his base. He admitted as much last year in an interview with Brett Baier. When Baier asked Trump why he no longer touts his role in expediting the vaccine, Trump replied, “I really don’t want to talk about it, because, as a Republican, it’s not a great thing to talk about.” The RFK, Jr. campaign recently shared a video in which Trump told Kennedy in a phone call that he shares Kennedy’s vaccine nuttery.

It’s difficult to overstate the threat of Trump’s public school policy. Currently, even here in deep-red Tennessee, public schools require students to receive the vaccine for Hepatitis B; Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis; Poliomyelitis; Measles, Mumps, Rubella; Varicella; and Hepatitis A.

Prior to vaccines, whooping cough alone killed 30,000 children each year. Polio killed 1,500, and paralyzed another 30,000. The World Health Organization estimates that measles vaccinations have saved 57 million lives globally since 2000. Forcing public schools to end these requirements would be a public health calamity.

But even if Trump isn’t able to implement his school policy, another four years of MAGA will further entrench vaccine skepticism in the Republican Party.

It’s already pretty bad. In April the New Hampshire legislature passed a bill removing the requirement for a polio and measles vaccine to attend public schools. Republicans in Wisconsin, Georgia, Montana, and Iowa have tried to restrict or remove vaccine requirements for public facing government jobs, which may include public schools. Other Republican legislatures have passed or introduced bills that erode support for vaccines in other ways, such as barring state governments from advocating them. The Republican party in Lee County, Florida, wants to ban the COVID vaccine for everyone, and Montana Republicans have tried to ban people who have received the COVID vaccine from donating blood.

According to Pew, the percentage of Republicans who think the MMR vaccine should be required to attend public school has dropped 22 points since 2016 — from 79 percent to 57. The gap between those in favor of an MMR requirement and those opposed shrunk from 59 points to just 15. And while a large majority of Democrats and independents say the benefits of vaccines far outweigh the risks, slightly more than half of Republicans now say the opposite. And this is over a vaccine that has been safe and effective for decades.

Polls have also shown that the more supportive Republicans are of Trump, the more skeptical they are of vaccines, and the loudest voices tend to intimidate the saner ones.

It’s notable that a key component of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s strategy to defeat Trump in the primaries was to outmaneuver him on vaccine skepticism. So DeSantis appointed a vaccine truther as state surgeon general — who then advised against the COVID vaccine for Floridians younger than 65. DeSantis also floated the idea of appointing RFJ Jr. to a high-level position at the FDA or CDC.

Trump responded in kind, amplifying a supporter who criticized DeSantis for “vaccinating more people than Trump and Fauci combined.” This is now what constitutes an attack between Republicans — “accusing” one another of vaccinating too many people against a deadly disease.

Multiple studies have also shown that the Republicans’ vaccine skepticism has been killing off their own supporters. There’s a strong correlation between excess COVID deaths and Republican registration, Trump support, and viewers of Fox News — and this disparity in excess deaths widened after introduction of the vaccine.

Here’s a particularly staggering snapshot from the pandemic: Early on, COVID deaths were concentrated in urban areas. That’s to be expected. Disease spreads from person to person, so areas with higher population densities should have higher death rates. But by March 2021, the least populated counties in the country had a higher rate of COVID deaths. Note that this was the cumulative death rate, going back to the start of the pandemic. So it isn’t that the rural death rate was higher only in March 2021 because by then COVID had already worked its way through the cities. Overall death in rural areas had caught and surpassed overall death in urban areas.

Given Trump’s capitulation on vaccines, it seems reasonable to speculate that if he retakes the White House, anti-vaxers would have considerable influence over the bully pulpit, the federal government’s vast public health funding, and the platforms of agencies like the CDC and HHS to spread their message — just as DeSantis has allowed in Florida.

If vaccine denialism continues to spread, it will eventually threaten our hard-won herd immunity from long-conquered diseases. We’ll create a population for mutations that could render existing vaccines useless. The long-tail potential death toll is nearly limitless.

Herd immunity is one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments — and to let reckless stupidity and craven politicians unravel it all would rank among our greatest failures.

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