NOTE: This post has been corrected.
Kiera Butler reports today that since the pre-pandemic era the overall childhood vaccination rate has fallen from 95% to 93%:
Childhood Vaccination Rates Are Declining. You Can Blame MAGA.
This latest development is no random statistical blip—actually, I’ve been dreading it for a while now. What started as a campaign by a small group of influencers who exist in the nexus of wellness culture and rightwing politics has entered the national conversation as a major talking point of powerful conservative politicians.
As usual, this got me curious: can we blame MAGA? The CDC reports vaccination rates by state, and it's easy enough to plot this against each state's vote for Donald Trump in 2020:
The regression line does show a slight correlation between vaccination rates and Trump vote, but the trendline fit is lousy. It may slope downward slightly, but it doesn't mean much.
So I tried something else. Here's the same kind of plot, but this time for vaccine exemptions requested by parents:
Once again, there's a slight correlation with Trump voters, but once again the trendline fit is lousy. It really doesn't mean anything.
So can we blame MAGA for the decline in childhood vaccination rates? Maybe slightly, but it doesn't really look like it. Note, however, that plotting this on a state basis runs the risk of getting the wrong result via the ecological fallacy. Maybe someone with fancier tools will take a closer look at this.
Prior to Covid I thought the anti-vaccination people were mostly lefty “traditional medicine” types. Marin County was notorious as an ant-vax area. But no more:
For more than a decade, few places in the nation were associated
with anti-vaccine movements as much as Marin County, the bluff-lined peninsula of coastal redwoods and stunning views just north of San Francisco.
This corner of the Bay Area had become a prime example of a highly educated, affluent community with low childhood vaccination rates, driven by a contingent of liberal parents skeptical of traditional medicine. Marin was something of a paradox to
mainstream Democrats, and often a punching bag. In 2015, during a measles outbreak in California, the comedian Jon Stewart blamed Marin parents for being guilty of a“mindful stupidity.”
But Marin is the anti-vaccine capital no more. In the pandemic age, getting a Covid-19 shot has become the defining “vax” or “anti-vax litmus test, and on that account, Marin County has embraced vaccines at rates that surpass the vast majority of communities in the nation. It comes after public health efforts to change parents’ opinions, as well as a strict state mandate that students get vaccinated for childhood diseases.
And as the nation has grown more polarized, Marin residents are less comfortable
wearing the “anti-vax” label increasingly associated with conservatives. Americans who identify as Democrats are more than twice as likely to be vaccinated and boosted against Covid — and Marin County is one of the bluest enclaves in America.
“It kind of became the cool thing to do to get vaccinated,” said Naveen Kumar,
physician-in-chief for Kaiser Permanente San Rafael Medical Center.
http://courses.washington.edu/smithint/karlamangla.pdf
Yup
I suspect the situation is similar for Vashon Island, WA. Traditionallly known in Washington state for the highest percentage voting for Bernie Sanders and the lowest percentage vacinating their kids.
I submit that it is education or lack there of, with a lack of institutional memory of how bad the measles, mumps, chicken pox etc are for children's health. The generation of parents today simply don't know that measles can cause sterility or even kill a child. Then add in the "government control issues" and "safety issues" coming from the conspiratorial segment of our society and you have a drop in vaccination rates across the nation. MAGA is not to blame for the drop but the last 40 plus years of educational breakdown caused by Republican policies certainly has not helped.
Maybe the bottom 8 states were enough to make a 2% difference?
You misread the data, KD. The percentage you were looking at is the percentage of kindergarteners polled.
I would think the thing to plot would be changes in vaccination rate. For a baseline, use the 2019-2020 school year: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7003a2.htm Probably all the vaccination decisions for that year were made pre-COVID, and were certainly made prior to the controversy over COVID-19 vaccines.
In Tennessee, vaccination rates dropped 1.4% for MMR, 1.6% for DTaP, and 1.5% for Varicella. In California, rates were unchanged for MMR, dropped 0.6% for DTaP, and rose 0.2% for Varicella. If these results generalize across all the states, that would suggest that MAGA may be responsible for the drop.
As D_Ohrk_E1 noted, what Kevin plotted was the percentage of kindergarten children included in the data, which is not what Keven intended to plot.
Data should be weighted by political leaning. The marginally educated hard left is as whackadoodle about vaccines as the hard right.
I had read in the past that vaccination rates for Black children are extremely high (anti-vaxx is mostly a White people thing). Many MAGA states also have very large Black populations, which could mask changes among Whites..
I had always noticed that during the pandemic and as it seemed to be winding down, mask-wearing among blacks was much higher than among whites, and even after I roughly adjusted for political leanings in this small-town environment.
I think trying to measure the MAGA effect state by state is crude at best. MAGAs are everywhere. They may be even more angry and willing to make stupid decisions in blue states where they feel dissed all the time. The MAGAnauts here in Massachusetts seem more combative than the ones in say, Louisiana (insert picture of Mike Johnson here).
Agree with commenters above. What you really want to know is the change in rates if you are looking for an effect. You should also do it by county and not state. Even the most blue of states has Republicans. In my area vaccine resistance is not consistent everywhere. There are ministers who who support Trump but are less invested in being anti-vaccine and other pro-Trump ministers who really push their people hard on the issue. I would guess if you did it this way you would find that there are some larger jumps in some very pro-Trump areas accounting for most of the difference.
Steve
MAGA pockets in each state. Charles Gaba surely would know.
This has been another chapter in the continuing story of Kevin disputing the blindingly obvious by using mind numbing charts and graphs (I never read them; Kevin loves them, I hate them) to once again prove that Disraeli (albeit quite likely apocryphally) was right.
My knee-jerk reaction would be to blame MAGA, too. Certainly, a couple of decades ago, anti-vaxx was a bipartisan affair, with no particular political affiliation, while the COVID years have infamously concentrated the anti-vaxx movement on the hard right. But if the data really isn't there to support it, I suppose we'll have to look for something more subtle (although I would not ascribe too much significance to a state-by-state breakdown - remember the old adage that California has more Trump voters than any state in the nation - and if the data were available, would want to see it by county instead.)
Regardless, if we're really looking for causality, I would still point my finger at COVID. Anecdotally, I know a lot of people, both MAGA and non-MAGA, who grew tired of vaccinations, skeptical of their efficacy and fearful of side effects over just the past few years. Some of that can be attributed to anti-vaxx misinformation, but some of it can be attributed to the genuinely brief window of efficacy that the COVID vaccines have, and to the documented ability of vaccinated individuals to pass the virus on to others. Once you're arguing about rates and severity and other, more complicated rationales for COVID vaccines - and note, I am not an anti-vaxxer, and I enthusiastically endorse them all (I even updated my MMV recently, as a 50-something adult) - you're fighting a losing battle with people who have even the slightest aversion to needle sticks.
In March of 2020 -- two weeks before COVID shutdowns happened, as it turns out -- the state of Maine had a 'citizens veto' referendum attempting to repeal a law recently passed by the legislature that would just about eliminate philosophical and religious exceptions to the state's vaccination requirement for school enrollment. The state had had a series of especially pertussis outbreaks in elementary schools in the recent past.
The veto lost 70-30, and the vaccination mandate law remained in force.
I don't think it loses today. Not because of a sudden spike in customers for unpasteurized milk and Reiki treatments, either.
The following analysis is presented here for everyone to cynically and naively ignore.
The reason people don't trust science is because most scientists ignore the scientific principle, which is the same reason people don't trust religion and capitalism.
The scientific principle is to be skeptical and openminded, and not cynical and naive. The Christian principle is "do unto others as you would have others do unto you," aka be skeptical and openminded, and not cynical and naive. The capitalist principle is in the name of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759) book. The theory is that people must use sympathy to understand each other's perspectives, aka be skeptical and openminded, and not cynical and naive.
The reason people don't trust anything is same reason people don't trust everything. When people are skeptical and openminded, and not cynical and naive, then they trust.
Get the easy part right, and the hard part is possible. Get the easy part wrong, and the hard part is impossible. Respectfully, put that in your chart and plot it.
I think you're misreading the CDC report.
The 1.6% figure for Virginia is in the "surveyed" column; in other words, their stats in Virgina are based on a survey of 1.6% of Virginia kids, as opposed to a standard statewide process for collecting and reporting vaccination data. (Check the footnotes.)
Virginia's actual vaccination rates, according to CDC, are 95.8% for MMR, 97.8% for DTaP, 94.2% for polio, 95.6% for VAR.
Looking at your chart, it seems like you've used the "surveyed" column in place of vaccination rates. You are measuring, not vaccination rates, but state processes for reporting vaccinations. Seeing a bunch of data points at 100% should be a tip-off that something is wrong. Also, there should be not one but four data points per state, one for each of the vaccines reported on.
Very few states have low populations of red voters. Hawaii or (state equivalent) DC maybe. But even states we normally think of as “blue” (NY, CA, IL, MA, etc) have (tens of) millions of red voters in them - they’re simply outvoted by their cities. Many blue states still have 20-40% of the populations voting red, enough to bring blue state vaccination rates down if they’re avoiding vaccines.
States simply aren’t the appropriate geographic unit for what Kevin is trying to chart. Counties more likely are.
This doesn't seem like a good way of interpreting the data, while MAGA is primarily responsible, there are ignorant people across the ideological spectrum who have fallen for this idiocy.
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