The anti-vaccine movement now has too many adherents in the GOP for the party to risk alienating them. jonathanchait writes on how it's too late for Republicans to purge the kooks
When an ideological extreme faction with unpopular views emerges, it becomes a threat to the party that hosts it. At first, the party’s incentive is to banish the extremists, lest their toxic ideas taint the party’s brand with the broader electorate. But if the radical faction’s growth is not arrested, the calculus changes, and barring the doors can no longer work. It forms a large enough part of the base that the party can’t afford to alienate its members.
One indication of the anti-vaxx movement’s rise is through the explosive growth of anti-vaccination media personalities like Joe Rogan and Alex Berenson, who have forced established conservative pundits to co-opt their appeal. The Fox News prime-time lineup is creeping farther and farther right on vaccines.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has held rallies with anti-vaxxers, appointed an anti-vaxxer as his state’s top health official, and recently suspended a county health official for the crime of scolding his staff on email for having a vaccination rate under 50 percent, a truly harrowing figure for a health agency.
DeSantis asserted, falsely, the agency lacks “a shred of evidence” for its decision. His staff fanned out to spread unhinged tweets charging Biden with “canceling *proven* life-saving treatment for the sick and elderly so Fauci-Pfizer can get a few extra points in the stock market” and accusing the FDA of trying to kill Republicans.
In my newsletter last week, I wrote about how conservatives were using this tactic to wish out of existence DeSantis’s embrace of the anti-vaccination movement: Trump went after unnamed “gutless” politicians who refused to disclose their vaccine status in interviews. This was broadly taken as an attack on DeSantis, who publicly disclosed getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine last April, as part of his vigorous advocacy of the vaccine in Florida, but who has refused to say whether he has received a booster. The latter reticence is part of a broader pattern of DeSantis’s siding with the rights of the unvaccinated to resist various mandates.
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