You probably saw this one coming. But after two years of absolute brawling over COVID vaccine mandates, the battle over vaccines has come to the doorstep of schools around the country.
Thanks to the misguided parents’ rights advocates out there and their simple fear-mongering messaging tactic, a not-insignificant 35 percent of parents surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation now believe they should have the right to choose whether or not their kids get the vaccines that prevent against diseases such as measles, mumps, and rubella.
As you might expect, there is a huge divide among political party lines. In the Kaiser Family Foundation’s latest survey, 44 percent of those who identified as Republicans said parents should have the right to opt out of these vaccine mandates, up from 20 percent in a prepandemic poll. As far as Democrats go, 88 percent endorse the mandatory vaccines, which is up from 86 percent in 2019 and, truthfully, still feels too low.
The issue here is that parents – 28 percent of them overall – think this is about their “rights,” but it’s more about the continuing erosion of trust in public health standards, which started long before the pandemic but was certainly exacerbated over the past two years.
Plus, if we want to talk about parents’ rights, what about the rights of parents to be able to confidently send their children to school and avoid a whole host of dangerous illnesses? One of the great marvels of the 20th century was that we as a society were able to essentially wipe out some of these diseases and, yet, here we are in what is supposed to be the golden age of information, dealing with a growing segment of the population that is being fed dangerous misinformation that puts our children at risk.
That being said, much of the United States population has reveled in its ignorance throughout the brief history of the country. A distrust of science and the catch-all “elites” has permeated our culture from the very beginning of our inception, and we are once again seeing it rear its ugly head.
So when one sees a number like 35 percent of parents who no longer want to be “forced” to keep their kids safe, it really doesn’t come as a surprise. A crushing disappointment, of course, but certainly not a surprise given what we’ve seen over the years.
