On Monday morning, the Today show broadcast an interview with President Barack Obama in which he urged parents to get their children vaccinated. “The science is, you know, pretty indisputable,” the president said. “There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren’t reasons to not.”
History’s Greatest Monster
The president didn’t say anything new or controversial. Nor did he say anything partisan. But for those who view him as inherently partisan and illegitimate, anything Obama says has to be immediately contradicted. And so — as with health insurance mandates, immigration reform, net neutrality and a host of other prior examples — Republicans responded by coming out swinging. If Obama is for vaccination, then they would have to be against it.
This has made for a really weird couple of days, with a growing split among Republicans between those who apparently feel bound to automatically gainsay whatever Obama says and those who are willing to maintain their prior support for motherhood, apple pie and the blueness of the sky even after Obama has also spoken in favor of such things.
So for the past two days, we’ve seen a steady parade of ambitious Republican officials denouncing the evils of vaccination and attacking the germ theory of disease, followed by another group of Republican officials trying to control the damage by arguing that #NotALLRepublicans think that preventing disease is a Bad Thing.
Please do read the whole post here. It captures what prominent Republicans were saying about vaccination in 2015. Some of those Republicans are now against what they used to be for, but others have been consistently wrong for the past seven years.
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