Anti-vaccine activism has never had a particular political affiliation. On the left, the concern has been avoiding anything with a chemical name, such as buffering agents or stabilizing agents or preservatives or inactivating agents or manufacturing residuals that are often contained in vaccines. The all-natural crowd. Indeed, the measles outbreak in southern California in 2014 centered on a heavily Democratic district. On the right, the issue has been the libertarian notion that the government shouldn’t mandate vaccines. During the COVID pandemic, however, people were much more likely to be hospitalized and die from COVID if they lived in heavily red counties than in heavily blue counties. At one point, people started calling it “Red COVID.”
The first evidence of this tilt to the right in anti-vaccine activism appeared in 2015 when Renee DiResta, a researcher at Stanford, noticed “an evolution in messaging” in Twitter (X) posts from anti-vaccine activists. No longer were activists focusing on false claims about vaccine safety. Rather, they focused on “medical freedoms.”
By July 2021, 86 percent of registered Democrats but only 54 percent of Republicans had been vaccinated. By the end of October 2021, 25 of every 100,000 people in counties that heavily supported Donald Trump had died from COVID. In counties that heavily supported Biden, the rates were as low as 0.4 deaths per 100,000—a 60-fold difference.
