SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Americans have become more polarized about vaccines in the five years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. NPR's Jude Joffe-Block reports on the challenge this poses to combating public health threats.
JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK, BYLINE: When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there was a moment when some people thought it could be a unifying time for the country, like 9/11 had been. But Matt Motta remembers when he felt convinced the pandemic would divide Americans instead. It was late March 2020, almost exactly five years ago.
MATT MOTTA: Many states and municipalities had shut down. People were stuck at home - right? - stay-at-home orders. And Trump promised that he was going to reopen the economy, have people back at work, leaving their houses again by Easter Sunday, 2020.
JOFFE-BLOCK: President Donald Trump was speaking on Fox News on March 24, 2020.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So I think Easter Sunday, and you'll have packed churches all over our country. I think it would be a beautiful time.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Motta says those statements were at odds with public health experts at the time. He studies public attitudes towards science at Boston University's School of Public Health.
MOTTA: It's the efforts that President Trump made to portray COVID-19 as not being that serious that led to polarization.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Trump made false claims about the virus and pushed remedies that didn't work. Motta traces a direct line from Trump's comments five years ago to public opinion trends that persist to this day.
MOTTA: Why would you vaccinate if the infectious disease threat isn't all that serious? That's when we started to see a split in public opinion, such that Republicans came to hold more negative views toward vaccinating, and Democrats came to hold more positive views.
JOFFE-BLOCK: There's a bigger trend. Americans with negative views toward COVID-19 vaccines are increasingly negative about other vaccines, too. One in four Republican parents are now skipping or delaying some childhood vaccines for their kids, according to a study from KFF, a nonprofit health policy organization. There are, of course, many factors that got us to this moment. University of Washington's Carl Bergstrom, who studies the spread of infectious diseases and misinformation, calls the pandemic...
CARL BERGSTROM: A big opportunity for people pushing anti-vax propaganda to get their foot in the door with new segments of the population, and they did that quite successfully.
JOFFE-BLOCK: One of the most prominent spreaders of that kind of propaganda was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's now Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services. A very real consequence of declining vaccination rates is the growing number of measles cases in Texas and New Mexico.
DAN SALMON: There's very real concern that this could result in widespread outbreak of measles.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Dan Salmon directs the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University.
SALMON: I mean, I really hope that doesn't happen, but the U.S. is quite vulnerable right now.
JOFFE-BLOCK: There's irony to the partisan divide on vaccines. The COVID vaccines were developed quickly thanks to Trump administration initiatives such as Operation Warp Speed. Carl Bergstrom again.
BERGSTROM: The COVID vaccine saved millions of lives. It was remarkably successful. It was developed in a tiny fraction of the time of any previous vaccine.
JOFFE-BLOCK: A success that would be harder to replicate in our current political environment. Public health experts are worried we aren't learning the right lessons from COVID-19, especially with concerns about a potential bird flu pandemic. Recently, the Trump administration slashed funding for research on vaccine hesitancy, and scientists fear research on the same mRNA technology, which was used in the leading COVID vaccines, could be next.
Jude Joffe-Block, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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