Getting moms to believe in vaccines again
Moms vs. moms: We should be ready to fightWhen Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, offered an opening statement during his confirmation hearing in January, a gaggle of supportive moms sat behind him. Some of these women wore branded MAHA T-shirts, and many others had satisfied grins. In his speech that day, Kennedy called this army of mothers in his Make America Healthy Again movement "one of the most powerful and transcendent" groups he's ever seen. Kennedy innately understands that Americans place a kind of halo on mothers when it comes to the nation's health, and he uses that to bolster his message. And mothers who care about children need to wrest this moral authority away from him. While the number of self-proclaimed "MAHA moms" is difficult to quantify, they certainly have an influential social media and podcasting presence and a direct line to health policymakers. In March The Wall Street Journal described a "closed-door MAHA moms Roundtable" with cabinet members and other Trump administration officials where the agenda included "food additives, infant formula and screen time." One of the bitter ironies of the MAHA moms is that they champion some policies that could have broader support among people who don't support Kennedy or this administration. I bet I agree with 75 percent of what was said in those closed-door meetings about food additives and screen time. Yet those aren't the areas where they've had much success. A draft of the "Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy," a White House report on children's health that was leaked last week, stops "short of proposing direct restrictions on ultraprocessed foods and pesticides," according to my newsroom colleagues. Many in the MAHA movement reacted with profound disappointment to the toothless recommendations. Moms Across America, one of the highest-profile MAHA grass-roots groups, described the vague single-sentence approach to pesticides in the report as "beyond laughable. It's an embarrassment. It's an insult to the intelligence of the American people. A stalling tactic with dangerous and deadly results." In contrast, vaccine skepticism — Kennedy's long-term pet cause — is where MAHA has already been able to cause irrevocable damage. In just six months, Kennedy fired all the expert members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and canceled almost $500 million in mRNA vaccine research, and he may alter the federal vaccine court in a way that could cause some Americans to lose access to certain immunizations. The "Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy" suggests that the administration will focus on vaccine injuries — which are mentioned multiple times in the draft, even though they are rare — rather than ensuring access to lifesaving inoculations. And there's some recent polling indicating that vaccine skepticism continues to spread. A pair of surveys of pregnant women and parents led by researchers at Emory University and the C.D.C. found that less than half of respondents planned on getting their children all recommended vaccines. Vaccination rates among kindergartners for polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis have declined about three percentage points since before the pandemic, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health research organization. I don't mean to be alarmist about vaccine rates. Around 92 percent of kindergartners are still vaccinated for the diseases listed above, and when was the last time you got 92 percent of Americans to agree about anything? But the threshold for herd immunity in measles, for example, is 95 percent, and trends are going in the wrong direction. In some red states the percentage of vaccinated 5-year-olds has dropped aggressively since the 2019-20 school year. Per KFF, Idaho has the lowest rate of measles, mumps and rubella coverage among kindergartners at only 78.5 percent, which is down over 10 percentage points in five years, leaving pockets of the state particularly vulnerable to outbreaks. One thing I admire about MAHA moms is their ability to organize in their own communities, which reminded me of how, four years ago, Moms for Liberty quickly built up support for their conservative educational agenda. Moms for Liberty correctly identified a problem — many parents were upset about how their children's education was handled during the pandemic — and swooped in with a sympathetic ear and an answer. It was the worst answer, of course. Book banning and screaming about wokeness at school board meetings isn't helping Covid learning loss and absenteeism. But they were still able to hold their coalition together. MAHA moms found, several years later, a similar postpandemic vulnerability in our public health systems. They too have a lot of wrong answers. But what MAHA moms have on their side is a cemented distrust of experts. This means that to counter the continued gains of MAHA, pro-vaccine parents need to take a note from both groups and figure out new ways to gather, communicate and persuade their neighbors. I wish we still lived at a time when people trusted their state's health commissioner more than a random mom next door or a toned lady in matching athleisure on TikTok, but I accept that we no longer live in that world. I called Katie Paris, who is the founder of Red Wine & Blue, a group she started in 2018 that has organized over 600,000 suburban women around issues like reproductive freedom and public education, to ask her about how they fought back against Moms for Liberty. While many Red Wine & Blue members lean left, the group welcomes women of all backgrounds, particularly those who never thought of themselves as political in the first place. I wanted to know whether pro-vaccine parents could use similar tactics. Last fall, nearly 70 percent of the candidates Red Wine & Blue backed in school board races across the country won, according to the group's calculations. And while Moms for Liberty is still influential among Republican politicians, the organization's power seems to be on the decline. Paris said that a way to start is identifying what the specific goal is in your state and which legislators could aid you. If I lived in a state that allowed nonmedical exemptions to vaccine mandates in public schools, I would try to close that loophole, as no major religious group opposes vaccines. I would also try to raise awareness about state legislatures that are introducing bills to allow more vaccine exemptions. Then, Paris said, the key is what she calls "relational organizing," which is peer-to-peer: holding local events around community health issues and listening to the concerns that arise. The problems are bound to be different depending on the location. Your neighbors' concerns might be about their babies catching vaccine-preventable diseases or closing rural hospitals and polluted waterways, but they might be about something else. The Trump administration's cuts to health care have been wildly unpopular among people of very different political backgrounds. That could provide an opening to convince a not especially partisan group of people that MAHA moms don't have the answers to what ails American children. In July we passed a horrible milestone: the highest number of measles cases in the United States in 33 years. As long as Kennedy is in the cabinet, I believe he will continue to chip away at support for and access to vaccines. As Dr. Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told Axios, parents "feel like if the government has chosen RFK Jr. to be the head of Health and Human Services, there must be something to that. There must be a reason to question vaccines." Those who oppose his policies need to use every possible tool to prevent Kennedy from causing more harm. If it means mom-versus-mom organizing on the ground, we should be ready for the fight. End Notes
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