Why Vaccine Hesitancy Is Unlikely to Go Away
More than 200 anti-vaccine proposals have been advanced in state legislatures this year.
Hesitancy concerning vaccination and related procedures has a long history in America.
Maturationally natural mental dispositions about sensitivity to contaminants fuel vaccine hesitant intuitions.
Legislative proposals from anti-vaccine campaigners (whom the World Health Organization has euphemistically dubbed the “vaccine hesitant”) have swamped the agendas of 34 state legislatures in 2026. Sympathetic legislators introduced more than 200 bills aimed at undercutting either the administration of vaccines or the public’s confidence in vaccines. Although only nine became law, the proposed bills did better than previously, with some passing in one or both of the various states’ legislative chambers (with some of the latter facing gubernatorial vetoes).
The proposals employed diverse tactics. Some challenged what had been the various states’ public health practices concerning vaccinations, either by easing or abolishing vaccination requirements or by complicating the processes through which the states provided vaccinations to their residents. Others sought to highlight worries about vaccine safety by, for example, compelling death reports on children to include all of the deceased’s recent vaccinations. More than 30 of the bills assailed the Covid vaccines, in particular, or mRNA vaccines in general, either by demanding, for instance, that blood donors’ mRNA vaccine history be included on their donations, or by labeling any mRNA vaccine a “weapon of........
