Trump and Vaccine Hesitancy

Donald Trump’s recent defense of COVID vaccines has earned him a bit of strange new respect from his opponents, along with criticism from rabid antivaxxers in MAGA World. Vaccine supporters should hold their applause, at least for now. Over the years, Trump has poured barrels of kerosene over the anti-vaccine fires. We should not get too excited when he tosses a teacup of water.

It didn’t start with COVID. As early as 2007, Trump was raising doubts about vaccines. “When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor,” Trump told a Florida newspaper. “And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’ve giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.”

Between 2012 and 2015, he repeatedly tweeted about the topic and disparaged medical professionals. A few examples:

• “Autism rates through the roof — why doesn’t the Obama administration do something about doctor-inflicted autism. We lose nothing to try.”
• “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes — AUTISM. Many such cases!”
• “I am being proven right about massive vaccinations — the doctors lied. Save our children & their future.”
• “So many people who have children with autism have thanked me — amazing response. They know far better than fudged up reports!”

During an early primary debate in the 2016 presidential race, he repeated his claim about vaccines and autism. Accordingly, he had the support of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, author of the fraudulent 1998 article that fueled the contemporary anti-vaccine movement. And for the record, as study after study has shown, there is no connection between vaccines and autism.

Trump’s fact-free rantings apparently had an effect. In a 2016 survey for The Daily Beast, respondents who did not plan to vaccinate themselves or their families most often named Trump as a figure they thought agreed with their views. A few years later, an experimental study found that reading Trump’s antivax tweets increased vaccination concern among Trump voters. He did not single-handedly cause antivax sentiment, but he stoked it and basked in the flames.

Like many antivaxxers, Trump always insisted that he was actually for vaccines in general, just against particular kinds, such as the measles-mumps-rubella combination shot. That is a distinction without a difference: the combination shots are not any more dangerous than single shots In any event, the hype about combination vaccines fostered overall vaccine hesitancy.

In 2019, amid outbreaks of measles, Trump did make a brief comment in support of vaccinations, leading some observers to suggest that he had changed course. But he did not follow up, and Trumpist Republicans stuck to the antivax hymnal. Foreshadowing the notion that we should let people get sick to build up herd immunity, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin said that he deliberately let his kids catch chickenpox instead of getting them the varicella vaccine. (Don’t try this at home.)

The Trump administration does deserve credit for Operation Warp Speed. But when the COVID shots became widely available, Trump was unwilling or unable to push back against the vaccine hesitancy that he had once encouraged. Partisanship became the single most effective predictor of vaccination status, with many Republicans refusing a potentially lifesaving injection. An NPR study found that people living in counties that went strongly for Trump in 020 had had nearly three times the death rate of those that went strongly for Biden.

It’s nice that Trump has finally spoken up about the efficacy of vaccines. But it’s too little, too late. When it comes to vaccine hesitancy and acceptance, he deserves a teacup of credit and barrels of blame.

###

John J. Pitney, Jr. is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.