In the country’s most conservative states, lawmakers have fallen in line with recommendations from federal agencies and have limited access to vaccines, according to a tracker maintained by the Common Health Coalition. However, other Democrat-led states have issued executive orders to preserve vaccine access.
Experts are concerned that this issue is a harbinger for the future of U.S. healthcare policy, where care is fractured along partisan lines and access increasingly hinges on where patients live.
“It’s a huge problem. Viruses don’t see borders. They don’t care what state you live in,” said Deborah Fuller, vaccinologist and professor of microbiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “If you have an outbreak somewhere, it’s a problem for everyone, everywhere.”
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Providers say anti-vaccine rhetoric from the HHS and some state lawmakers is sowing doubt among parents about what information to trust …. Previously, physicians might have pointed concerned parents to information from the CDC, but now they worry the website is based more on politics than science.
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