Skepticism toward vaccines is no longer confined to the margins of American life—it is now a mainstream position, according to a Politico poll.
The survey, conducted in March, sampled 3,851 American adults and found that a significant share of the public questions whether vaccines are as safe as officials claim, wants fewer of them administered, and believes personal bodily autonomy should take precedence over disease prevention.
Close to half of those polled said they consider vaccine science an open question rather than settled fact, and that compulsory vaccination does more harm than good. The divide breaks sharply along party lines: 60 percent of Republicans said they’d prefer to see the number of vaccines reduced, against roughly 30 percent of Democrats. Republicans were also considerably more likely to express doubt about the scientific consensus on vaccines — a gap that held even after researchers adjusted for demographic variables like age, income, education, and gender.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement doesn’t appear to be universally associated with vaccine reduction in the public mind — only about a third of respondents linked the two. But those who do identify with MAHA were notably more skeptical of vaccines than those who don’t. That includes 22 percent of self-described MAHA supporters who say they plan to vote Democrat in November.
Perhaps the starkest finding in the survey involves the trade-off between disease risk and personal freedom. When asked whether protecting the right to decline vaccination was worth the potential return of diseases like measles, 39 percent said yes — only 8 points behind the 47 percent who said no. Among Republicans, a plurality of 49 percent said that trade-off was acceptable. Among Democrats, 58 percent said it was not.
It is worth placing those disease risks in historical context. Infectious diseases are nowhere near the existential threat they once were. As Kennedy himself has pointed out, the dramatic fall in deaths from infectious disease in the mid-twentieth century owed far more to improvements in nutrition and sanitation than to vaccination. Measles, which was deadly on a large scale in the 1800s, had already seen a roughly 98 percent decline in mortality by 1960 — years before the MMR vaccine was introduced. The World Health Organization has acknowledged that Vitamin A supplementation plays a meaningful role in preventing measles deaths. As for COVID-19, the overall survival rate is approximately 99.8 percent, with risk to children statistically zero.
There is also a less-discussed but legally significant shift in how vaccines themselves are now defined. Traditional vaccines were designed to prevent infection. When the Supreme Court upheld state vaccine mandates in 1905, the case involved smallpox, a genuinely lethal disease, and the vaccine at issue was designed to prevent disease. That was the entire premise of the ruling.
But as America’s Frontline Doctors Founder and President Dr. Simone Gold points out, that is not what vaccines today are designed to do. In 2015, the CDC watered down the definition of vaccine to mean an injection that produces “immunity” to a specific disease, rather than prevention.
When it became apparent by 2021 that the mRNA COVID shots did not stop transmission, the CDC further revised the definition of “vaccine” to mean simply “protection.” That distinction matters enormously in debates over mandates: if a product cannot stop a person from contracting or spreading a disease, the public health rationale for compelling its use — and any legal basis for doing so — becomes very difficult to defend.
Perhaps because so many of our children have been harmed by these vaccines. My youngest almost died after receiving MMR. He changed forever