I had to take several deep breaths while reading this story. They only helped a little.
When speech pathologist Rebecca Hardy recalls her up-close seat to lawmaking during the 2015 state legislative session, she remembers how tough it was to find anyone interested in what she wanted: more choice for Texans when it came to getting vaccinated.
After forming Texans For Vaccine Choice the year before, she came to Austin to see if she could find lawmakers interested in policies to help parents who believe it’s their responsibility, not the government’s, to decide if and when a vaccination is administered to their child.
“We were on the scene far before COVID was even a word that anybody knew and 10 years ago, we did kind of have to sneak around the Capitol, have these conversations about vaccine mandates in the shadows,” the Keller resident now recalls. “And it was really hard to find people willing to put their names on protective pieces of legislation.”
What a difference a global pandemic makes.
Today, Hardy’s group and others in the vaccine hesitancy or anti-vaccine space have the ears of state lawmakers, especially on the heels of Texans for Vaccine Choice’s successful push back on mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations in the workplace in 2023.
While most of the vaccine bills 10 years ago were filed by Democrats to strengthen vaccine use, the opposite is now true — Republicans are filing most of the bills which aim to claw back vaccine requirements. There is even a House joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Texas Constitution that would preserve Texans’ right to refuse a vaccination.
The proposal is among more than 20 bills endorsed by Hardy’s group that have been filed, most of them before the legislative session began this month.
[…]
Terri Burke, who heads The Immunization Partnership, a pro-vaccine advocacy group, has the same Texas vaccine bills on her group’s watch list that Hardy does.
“I fear the vaccine issue is something they (state lawmakers) will continue to chip away at, like abortion, the border,” Burke said. “It’s like death by 1,000 cuts.”
She anticipates a hard legislative session, which runs through June 2, that will relax the exemption process as well as put more burden on health providers who could face more outbreaks if exemptions are made easier. “It’s going to be tough. It’s really going to be tough,” she said. “All we can do is block them.
[…]
Health experts like Dr. Peter Hotez of Houston, say vaccine choice or vaccine hesitant groups exaggerate the adverse effects of vaccines and downplay the good they do in keeping deadly diseases from killing more Americans.
Hotez, one of the nation’s leading vaccine experts, is worried about any reduction in the nation’s vaccination rate, and that Texas specifically could be setting itself up for becoming the stage for the next pandemic.
Whooping cough is now returning to pre-pandemic levels. After the measles was officially eliminated in the United States in 2020, the disease has returned, occurring usually after someone has contracted it in another country. Polio, another disease thought to be eradicated, was detected in New York State wastewater in 2022.
Hotez is concerned that hesitancy and refusal of the COVID-19 vaccine is having a “spillover” effect on childhood immunizations.
“I’m worried about it unraveling our whole pediatric vaccine ecosystem,” he said.
Who among us doesn’t want a speech pathologist determining our vaccination policies? You can read the rest for the list of bills or look at Bayou City Sludge’s recap, but please do remember the limitations of focused breathing here.
I’m just going to say this: I fear that since the start of the COVID pandemic, I’ve become a less compassionate person than I once was. Five years ago, I’d have been all over trying to correct misperceptions and improve education and all that. Now, I’m more of a mind to say “screw these morons, let them all get sick and treat themselves with bleach and raw water and snorting ivermectin if that’s what they want”. There are obvious problems with this line of thinking, beyond the peril into which they may put my mortal soul. For one, we’re mostly talking about the risk to their children, who don’t deserve any of this. And for two, restoring America to 19th century standards of public health will eventually threaten us all, starting with immunocompromised people (who, again, don’t deserve any of this) but ending with the rest of us. Vaccines are great but they’re never 100%. The microorganisms will greatly appreciate the head start.
One last thing: There’s only so much that Democrats can do to stop any of these bills from passing, if the Republicans want them to pass. But a Constitutional amendment requires Democratic votes to get to the two-thirds threshold. Any Dem who even thinks about supporting that anti-vaxx amendment needs to be threatened with the mother of all primaries, and that threat needs to be carried out as needed. What exactly do we stand for otherwise?
America may have a fatal overdose of political oppositional defiance disorder. Look at the vicious hypocritical nonsense about attaching strings to FEMA aid to CA. Or eliminating FEMA- never mind that the 3 biggest beneficiaries are TX, FL, and LA.