In California, anti-vaccination nonsense isn’t the fringe. It’s mainstream and bipartisan

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologized last week for comparing the Holocaust — favorably, no less — to vaccination, which might have been more convincing if he had not repeatedly and recently made the same comparison. Kennedy thereby managed the remarkable feat of elevating deadly misinformation and minimizing genocide at the same time.

But the sheer lunacy of Kennedy and his anti-vaccination ilk does us yet another disservice. It makes all kinds of more polite nonsense about vaccines, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s conspicuous ambivalence, look deceptively moderate by contrast.

Consider state Sen. Richard Pan’s newly introduced bill to require that California schoolchildren be vaccinated against the coronavirus, which shouldn’t be controversial. The vaccines have proved safe and effective against the worst effects of a deadly transmissible disease. For those who missed it, it’s the transmissible bit that ends any rational argument about individual rights or COVID’s limited danger to one group or another.

It’s been nearly a century, moreover, since California began requiring inoculation against communicable diseases — no fewer than 10 of them under current state law — just to get through the schoolhouse doors.

The reflexive, bipartisan resistance that nevertheless greeted Pan, a Sacramento Democrat and pediatrician, demonstrates the extent to which anti-vaccination sentiments once relegated to the fringes have infected the cultural and political mainstream.

“Now it is clear,” Assemblyman Jim Gallagher, R-Yuba City, foreboded. “The government doesn’t want your family to have a choice.”

Well, of course it doesn’t: No one in their right mind wants your family to have a choice about sending your kid to kindergarten with whooping cough or, for that matter, driving your SUV drunk. The notion of “choice” undermines the whole point of vaccination, which is to confer population-level protection against diseases that, as we keep learning, otherwise inflict wave after wave of unnecessary suffering.

Gallagher’s position typifies the ostensibly reasonable splitting of the difference between Pan’s science-informed legislation and Kennedy’s disinformational fulminations. But it has the ultimately indistinguishable effect of endorsing invented and imagined misgivings about vaccination. And it’s not confined to Republicans.

Newsom’s office, for example, greeted the measure with determined disregard. If Pan’s bill survives a long and likely difficult legislative journey ahead, it will supersede the porous school vaccination requirements put in place by the governor last fall, which depend on full rather than emergency federal approval of the shots and allow exemptions for “personal beliefs.” Pan’s bill would limit exceptions to legitimate medical reasons, the only kind allowed from other required vaccinations.

While state law requires personal belief exemptions for new vaccines without legislative action, Newsom led with the loophole. “The mandate we put in place for the state of California includes personal (belief) exemptions, not just religious and/or medical exemptions, so there’s plenty of latitude for families to make decisions,” he said in a television interview last month — sounding a lot like Gallagher, a supposed political antagonist. Meanwhile, Newsom urged Los Angeles school officials to “accommodate” those resisting a local vaccination mandate.

School officials in Los Angeles and, last week, Sacramento ultimately delayed local vaccination mandates after the governor failed to offer regulatory or even rhetorical support. It’s not likely a coincidence that Pan unveiled his mandate alongside some of the school officials thus hung out to dry.

The senator is no naif when it comes to the increasingly poisonous politics of vaccination. Back in 2019, before vaccine resistance and capitol attacks went national, an anti-vaccine zealot hurled a cup of menstrual blood at Pan and other legislators on the state Senate floor. At the time, Pan was championing legislation to fight fake medical exemptions from school vaccinations, which fueled a resurgence of previously well-controlled childhood diseases. Newsom, meanwhile, was feeding the fringe by publicly waffling on the effort, repeatedly demanding concessions that weakened the legislation before he finally signed it.

Californians have heard plenty about the rights of people who refuse to avail themselves or their children of the best protection science has provided against the worst consequences of COVID-19. Pan is refreshingly reasserting the right not to be sickened or deprived of schooling because of others’ irresponsibility.

Especially as we return to normal activity and drop other precautions against the virus, real mandates can dramatically increase vaccination rates and prevent illness not just in schools but also in workplaces, restaurants and other high-risk indoor environments. Here’s hoping Pan and other members of the Legislature’s newly formed vaccine working group propose similarly science-based legislation to require vaccination in workplaces, restaurants and other high-risk places.

Pursuing such policies, especially in full knowledge of what their most unmoored opponents are capable of, takes courage. Pandering to paranoia while pretending to be reasonable does not.