Anti-Vaccine Misinformation Keeps the Pandemic Going

This video is exactly the kind of PSA we need right now

For most of the past several decades, the anti-vaccine movement and general vaccine hesitancy did not fall along partisan lines. Despite common stereotypes of “anti-vaxxers” or “privileged granola moms” who wanted to skip vaccines as belonging to one or another political group, vaccine hesitancy as a whole was pretty evenly spread across the aisle.

“Vaccines aren’t a partisan issue. The consensus in favor of vaccination in this country is very strong and extends across every religious, racial, and political group,” Brendan Nyhan, PhD, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College who has published research on vaccine attitudes, told me back in 2015 when I wrote about the non-politics of vaccination.

And that was a good thing: As we’ve watched play out for decades with climate change, the worst thing that can happen in trying to solve a huge scientific problem is for the evidence to become politicized.

Unfortunately, there were inklings early on that vaccination risked becoming more partisan under the Trump administration. Then came the pandemic and the incredibly harmful politicization of public health evidence that seeded the vaccine hesitancy we’re seeing now toward…