Evidence continues to mount that Americans’ vaccine skepticism is on the rise. Predictably, experts bemoan the fact. Yet many of these same experts “own” the fact: Their actions—specifically, vaccine mandates during the Covid pandemic—bear no little blame for today’s vaccine reluctance.
Recently, Morning Consult included polling that shows yet another decrease in Americans’ vaccine acceptance. Since 2022, women’s vaccine acceptance has fallen for polio (78% to 69%), measles (79% to 72%), and chickenpox (77% to 71%), effectively erasing the gap that used to exist between women and men. While the drop is greater for Republican women, it also fell for Democratic women.
These are not isolated results. Another recent survey found 35% of parents felt vaccines did not go through sufficient safety checks before being recommended for children; 26% felt the CDC recommends too many childhood vaccines.
Assuredly, more such results will occur before the trend reverses.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, experts were, and continue to be, quick to blame misinformation for the unmistakable decline in vaccine acceptance. However, they have been even quicker to look past the role that the pandemic’s vaccine mandates played in today’s drop in vaccine acceptance.
They have because these experts played no little role in facilitating the Covid-19 mandate from the Biden administration—a mandate that then President-elect Biden had promised to not impose in December 2020: "No, I don't think it should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand it to be mandatory." As President, Biden announced on September 9, 2021, proposals to impose a vaccine mandate on about two-thirds of America’s workforce, including larger employers, federal employees, federal contractors, and most health care workers. U.S. military personnel had already faced a requirement to be vaccinated. Numerous private companies also mandated Covid vaccination.
The House of Representatives’ Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH2), wrote regarding vaccine mandates in its 2024 report: “A May 2022 British Medical Journal Global Health paper written by Dr. Bardosh and several other public health and bioethics experts from around the world found that COVID-19 vaccine mandates caused significant collateral damage.” The Select Subcommittee quoted the summary of the paper by Dr. Kevin Bardosh of the University of Washington and his colleagues: “Our analysis strongly suggests that mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policies have had damaging effects on public trust [and] vaccine confidence…We question the effectiveness and consequences of coercive vaccination policy in pandemic response and urge the public health community and policymakers to return to non-discriminatory, trust-based public health approaches.”
During a July 27, 2023, Select Subcommittee hearing, Dr. Bardosh was asked: “Do you feel that the decrease in individuals receiving routine pediatric immunizations for their children…is due to mandates of the COVID vaccine?” Dr. Bardosh responded, “Yes, I do.”
Dr. Bardosh’s May 2022 paper noted that mandated behavior has consequences such as the falling vaccine acceptance that we are seeing today: “Moreover, insights from behavioral psychology suggest that these policies are likely to entrench distrust and provoke reactance—a motivation to counter an unreasonable threat to one’s freedom.”
In their book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee summarize what happened as the pandemic unfolded across America: “We think it is fair to describe what happened in March 2020 as panic on the part of policymakers, a panic fed by dire estimates from mathematical models and constantly amplified by news media.”
A stampede is an apt analogy. Ideally, experts should have been able to stem it, to put cool guidance in place of emotion’s heat. Many, such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration that was released in October 2020, tried. However, too many experts joined the stampede they should have been working to avert. As with stampedes, the result was many Americans got trampled by mandates that they did not support.
In light of the mandated vaccinations that the American people faced or endured throughout the pandemic, the decline in vaccine acceptance we are witnessing today should not be so surprising—not simply due to doubts about what were once formerly routine vaccines, but also as a result of “reactance” to having faced forced compliance against their doubts and will (and, in the case of those who had already been infected by Covid-19 and recovered, need).
Instead, what is surprising is how few people, politicians and experts alike, have been held to account for their roles in the concerted vaccine mandate effort—one that was warned against prior to the pandemic and ignored real-time data (natural immunity) that contradicted it during the pandemic.
Instead, all too often the experts lamenting today’s predictable fallout from vaccine mandates are the same experts who joined in the push to mandate vaccines then.
