A Vaxxing Dilemma

Is support for childhood vaccinations a partisan issue? Polls indicate that it isn't, yet Republicans appear to be getting stung by this needle more than Democrats are.

The question has come up after Republican presidential hopefuls Chris Christie and Rand Paul said that parents should have a choice and not be required by law to immunize their children.

Paul, a senator and licensed ophthalmologist from Kentucky, went further in a CNBC interview. He expressed belief in a link between vaccines and "profound mental disorders," even though the only study that claimed such a link was later debunked.

Christie, the New Jersey governor who famously and unnecessarily confined a nurse on the suspicion that she might have Ebola, clarified his immunization stance a bit after a backlash. Scientific support for vaccination was "pretty indisputable," he said.

President Obama and other leading presidential hopefuls in both parties also urged parents to get their kids vaccinated, while mostly tiptoeing around the question of whether the vaccine should be required.

Among Democrats, Hillary Clinton, still holding the Democratic field pretty much to herself, tweeted confidence: "The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork." President Obama on NBC's "Today" show similarly urged parents to get their kids vaccinated.

As parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids, often called "anti-vaxxers," receive widespread blame for a resurgence of measles in this country, a partisan dispute has arisen over which anti-vaxxers to blame: upper-income, organic-food-buying liberals or libertarian, anti-government, tea party conservatives?

After all, conservatives have been quick to point out, the new measles epidemic originated in politically blue California, one of the states that offers a variety of voluntary "personal belief" exemptions to parents who want to opt-out of mandatory vaccine requirements.

Red-state Mississippi, by comparison, offers no religious exemption for vaccines, has the highest compliance rate in the country and hasn't had a reported measles case in two decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Liberals respond that, while anti-vaxxers certainly exist on the left -- and some even fit the stereotypes about yuppie organic food shoppers -- they have essentially no political influence as a group. Since the Bill Clinton era, the Democratic Party has tried to corral its fringe elements, while Republicans have struggled between their right wing and their far-right wing.

Even so, on the vaxx issue, a new Pew Research Center poll finds the divide falls along lines of generations more than politics. While strong majorities across the board support vaccination, about one-third of Republicans and independents say parents should make the decision about immunizations, compared with 22 percent of Democrats.

Interestingly Pew found no such divide between Democrats and Republicans in 2009, the pollsters said.

That's a disturbing development on several levels. If vaccine denialism becomes like climate change and President Obama's birth certificate, issues to be divided by political leanings more than evidence, we are likely to see an increase in anti-vax refuseniks and a larger pool of vulnerable, unvaccinated children to spread more dangerous diseases.

Critics on the right point out that both Obama and Clinton raised questions in 2008 about a possible link between vaccines and autism. That's true. But two years later the only study that claimed such a link was retracted by the medical journal that published it and its author lost his medical license.

Yet the lie persists, partly because of something called "confirmation bias," a fancy way of saying that we believe what we want to believe.

New evidence is offered by major new study in the journal Pediatrics led by political scientist Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College. In testing four separate pro-vaccine messages, including three that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) use, the study found none of the messages increased the intent of parents to vaccinate their children -- and in several cases actually increased the unfounded belief that vaccines cause autism.

Such grim determination by many humans to believe the worst offers a tempting territory for politicians who are not above pandering to fears and suspicions. But when our elected leaders fear the criticism of anti-vax factions more than they fear for public health, it leaves all of us more exposed.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.