Antivaccine views even infected the 2016 Presidential campaign, and it wasn’t just because Donald Trump, with his antivaccine statements dating as far back as 2007 blaming vaccines for autism, was the frontrunner for the GOP nomination. Would that it were just him! Unfortunately, several of the GOP candidates, including Ben Carson, Rand Paul (who really is antivaccine), Chris Christie, and Carly Fiorina (remember her?) pandering to antivaxxers. Sadly, several of the GOP candidates from 2016, such as Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz, and former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who did at the time speak up and strongly support school vaccine mandates have since—shall we say?—adjusted their views to oppose vaccine mandates of any kind. In my own state in 2018, a Michigan Republican candidate for Congress in my own district held an antivaccine “roundtable” during the primary season, which included my outgoing antivaccine state Senator Patrick Colbeck (who was running for governor) and my state Representative Jeff Noble, who, if not antivaccine himself, clearly was antivaccine-adjacent. This not-so-dynamic duo had cosponsored a bill not just once, but twice, (both sets of bills fortunately never making it out of committee) that would have stripped the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services of the power to require parents requesting religious and philosophical exemptions to school vaccine mandates to travel to their county health office for an educational program about vaccines. They also co-sponsored a dubious “informed consent” (actually, fear mongering misinformed consent) about “fetal cells” in vaccines. By then, I was wondering whether the GOP had become the party of antivaxxers.

By 2019, the year before the pandemic, the situation had gotten even worse. With appeals to “freedom” and “parental rights” serving as a “gateway drug,” if you will, to antivaccine conspiracy theories, the Republican Party had not aligned itself decisively with antivaxxers. Examples abounded even prepandemic, with the Ohio Statehouse having become a hotbed of antivaccine Republican legislators, Oregon Republicans refusing to work until a provaccine bill was shelved, and multiple openly antivaccine Republican candidates running for office. Going beyond even that, antivaxxers have even attracted far right wing militia groups to their cause, a trend that has accelerated during the pandemic, with such groups contributing to the harassment of health care workers and even cancer patients at hospitals with vaccine mandates and, more recently, violent confrontations. As journalist Tara Haelle recently put it, the pandemic is the moment antivaxxers have been waiting for.

Given this history, the reaction of Republican Party luminaries to President Biden’s vaccine mandate was, sadly, predictable…