The first post-Covid presidential elections are taking the anti-vax movement to the next level

Donald Trump will be sent to the White House for a second term amid inflation concerns sparked by the pandemic, with a leading vaccine skeptic – Robert F Kennedy Jr. – at his side, and proposals from conservative supporters to fundamentally restructure central public health authorities. to pandemic-era fury.

Covid-19 was never seen as the central issue of the 2024 presidential campaign season, but in the first post-pandemic presidential election it reverberated as the anti-vaccine movement soared to its greatest political heights yet.

Even in his acceptance speech on Wednesday morning, Trump hinted at the changes he expects as his administration enters the picture.

Vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr. is going to “help make America whole again,” Trump told his supporters, before adding: “We’ll let him go there.”

Dr. Howard Markel, a historian of medicine at the University of Michigan who has studied pandemics, said he was struck by widespread anger and called the theme of the election “the spirit of the pandemic future.”

“Did you ever think,” Markel told colleagues, “if you did all that hard work and stayed up all night, that not 1% or 10%, but like 50% of the country would say you destroyed their country?” live and keep them indoors, out of harm’s way during the pandemic?”

Although it was never at the top of his agenda, the pandemic reverberated throughout Trump’s campaign. He adopted Kennedy’s slogan: “Make America healthy again” and answered recent questions from supporters about it Covid-19 vaccine mandates in the armyand spoke with popular podcaster Joe Rogan about polio vaccines. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative playbook, repeatedly drew on anger over mask mandates.

A prominent concern among experts is the damage that could be done if a vaccine skeptic takes the helm of powerful federal health agencies. Trump has not announced a specific role for Kennedy in the administration, but Kennedy said he had been “promised” control over health policy.

His influence appears to have increased with repeated mentions of “Bobby” in the run-up to Election Day.

Kennedy, who ran as an independent candidate in the 2024 presidential election but withdrew in August and endorsed Trump, is a conspiracy theorist known for his spreading unfounded claims. Some of these included the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS and thoroughly debunked theories that vaccines are linked to autism.

“The first topic on the table is vaccines,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Even without changing public policy, Osterholm said, if authorities with the imprimatur of the federal government speak out against vaccines, “it discourages people who might otherwise get vaccinated, and at that point that’s as bad as no vaccine at all.” to have”.

The effects are not theoretical. As recently as last weekthe CDC released a report showing that fewer than one in six healthcare workers had received updated Covid-19 vaccines in the 2023-2024 respiratory virus season, and fewer than half had received flu shots.

Vaccinations for children have also fallen since the pandemic. In the US, for children born in 2020-2021, the percentage of children under two who had received all their vaccinations fell, while the percentage who had received none grew. The largest decrease occurred in children who received both flu shots (-7.8%). Doubts about vaccinations and misinformation were both cited by researchers as important reasons.

“We forget what this country was like 50 years ago — how many children died every year from polio, whooping cough and measles,” Osterholm said. “We will see the return of diseases we have controlled for decades, and with them many more serious illnesses in hospitals and deaths – and that will only come from the rhetoric, not to mention the vaccine withdrawal.”

Kennedy has already recommended another vaccine skeptic and current Florida surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, as secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), a massive federal agency that houses 13 divisions and 10 subagencies, including the CDC and the National Institutes of Health ( NIH), the largest publicly funded biomedical and behavioral research agency in the world. Ladapo urged Florida residents not to get the Covid-19 vaccine and allowed unvaccinated children to attend school amid a measles outbreak in the state.

“RFK Jr. has a series of false beliefs that are not supported by scientific evidence, and he is always a threat to vaccines,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit added that proposals in Project 2025 could pose a similar threat.

Currently, the CDC makes recommendations about which vaccines people should get and when, including for children; the CDC works with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which approves vaccines.

Project 2025, the conservative playbook written in part by Trump’s former director of the civil rights office at HHS, proposes to limit the CDC’s options to make policy recommendations, such as establishing vaccination schedules.

“Their idea was, ‘Let the parents and doctors decide’ – the idea was that the parents and doctors are as informed as the people sitting around those decisions,” Offit said.

Put another way, by Osterholm: “We often say that a doctor who treats himself is a fool.”