For a long time, skepticism about vaccines was a fringe view – concentrated in certain enclaves and promoted by B-list celebrities and political gadflies like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
But a new Gallup poll shows a massive increase in vaccine skepticism. And, what’s worse, the issue has become distinctly partisan. Democrats’ views haven’t changed. But Republicans are quickly becoming the party of vaccine hesitancy or even outright opposition.
What the polling says
The Gallup poll asks about the importance of vaccinating children. The graph below shows the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who say it’s “extremely important.”
As political scientists David Jones and Monika McDermott noted in an earlier paper, a modest partisan gap had opened by 2019. But that gap has grown much wider. Only 26% of Republicans say it’s extremely important for parents to vaccinate their children.
The partisan divide is even clearer if you look at the complete set of responses:
Almost all the Democrats who don’t say “extremely important” do say that childhood vaccinations are “very important.” But it’s a different story among Republicans. Only 52% say that these vaccinations are extremely or very important.
Unsurprisingly, the same partisan divide emerges on the question of whether “the government should require all parents to have their children vaccinated against contagious diseases such as measles.” Only 36% of Republicans believe the government should require vaccines – down from 53% in 2019. Democratic views haven’t changed: About 70% continue to support this requirement.
The same pattern emerges in other polling. In October 2019, a Pew Research Center poll asked respondents to choose between these two options for vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR): “Healthy children should be required to be vaccinated in order to attend public schools because of the potential risk for others when children are not vaccinated” or “Parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children, even if that may create health risks for other children and adults.” At that time, 20% of Republicans and 12% of Democrats favored parental exemptions even if it created health risks.
But when KFF repeated this question in December 2022, 44% of Republicans favored parental exemptions, compared to 11% of Democrats. For more on how partisanship affects childhood vaccine mandates, see this piece by political scientist Matt Motta.
Why this is happening
Where is this vaccine skepticism coming from? And why is it concentrated among Republicans?
For one, partisans tend to distrust the government when the other party controls the White House. Political scientist Masha Krupenkin found that during the George W. Bush administration, Democrats expressed more skepticism about the smallpox vaccine than Republicans did. But during the Obama administration, Republicans expressed more skepticism about both the H1N1 flu vaccine and the MMR vaccine. The same may be true with Biden in the White House.
A second reason is more pernicious: Partisan opposition arises when a party’s leaders actively delegitimize vaccines. This happened with the H1N1 vaccine. Political scientist Matthew Baum has written about the concerted effort by conservative media personalities, including Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, to oppose the Obama administration’s vaccination campaign.
That’s obviously what happened with covid-19 vaccines. Many Republican and conservative leaders encouraged vaccine skepticism or outright opposition, something explored in The Bitter End, which I wrote with Chris Tausanovitch and Lynn Vavreck, as well as in Pandemic Politics, by political scientists Shana Gadarian, Sara Goodman, and Tom Pepinsky.
And even though the Trump administration pushed Operation Warp Speed and catalyzed the development of covid-19 vaccines, Trump himself waffled. Faced with opposition to the vaccine among rally attendees in 2021, he endorsed the vaccine but then also told them they should “have their freedoms,” undercutting the endorsement.
The result: Only 66% of Republicans report having received a covd-19 vaccine, compared to 91% of Democrats, according to a Oct-Nov 2023 KFF poll. This discrepancy had life-or-death implications. There was actually higher mortality among Republicans than Democrats after the vaccines were introduced.
Covid vaccine skepticism has metastasized
Opposition to the covid-19 vaccine appears to have spilled over into concern about vaccines and vaccination generally – a sort of “partisan metastasis.”
In The Bitter End, for example, we document that a common and false claim about vaccines – that they cause autism – is now more accepted among Republicans. When a July 2013 YouGov poll asked, “Do you think vaccines cause autism?” only 11 percent of Democrats and 9 percent of Republicans said yes. But in July 2021, when a YouGov poll asked whether it was true or false that “vaccines have been shown to cause autism,” the same small fraction of Democrats (11%) said it was “definitely” or “probably” true. But among Republicans, that fraction was significantly higher (27%).
Republican skepticism may carry over to newly developed vaccines as well. In a recent study, Motta asked respondents about their attitudes toward a potential personalized cancer vaccine and found that Republicans were less likely than Democrats to say they would be willing to receive this vaccine. When he randomly assigned some Republicans to read a partisan cue – the mention that a Republican member of Congress had championed funding for these vaccines – Republican support for the vaccine increased, but not enough to eliminate this partisan gap.
And, in fact, Motta and his co-authors show that this politicized vaccine hesitancy can even spill over into hesitancy to get dogs vaccinated!
What comes next?
Getting people vaccinated against routine illnesses has long been political. Decades ago, Americans organized campaigns against the polio vaccine and the mumps vaccine, among others. But now, vaccine hesitancy is less a fringe view than an increasingly mainstream position on the political right.
The question for the future is whether this trend continues. Right now, the signs are not good. We’ve seen a raft of recent GOP bills in state legislatures targeting vaccine mandates. Trump himself has long been sympathetic to the myth that childhood vaccines cause autism. In July, according to a recent profile of RFK Jr., Trump reiterated this myth, saying “And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically.” And Trump has also proposed defunding schools that require vaccinations.
Meanwhile, in 2023 the Biden administration announced a $5 billion initiative to develop a new wave of coronavirus vaccines. Scientists have been pressing for a version that can protect against a range of variants – and, just as important, a nasal spray that would overcome many people’s aversion to needles.
With a fresh wave of covid infections – plus an outbreak of bird flu and an uptick in measles cases – broad-based support for vaccines seems even more necessary. But if vaccines become the newest grist for polarized party politics in the U.S., that will pose serious risks for public health. Without more vocal endorsements of vaccines by Republican leaders, Republican support may only continue to decline.
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