30 Issues in 30 Days: Vaccine Policy

Brian Lehrer (0:07)

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We are in our 30 Issues in 30 Days election series. Let other media focus only on the polls and personalities and attack ads. We are choosing an issue a day for 30 straight shows to help you be as informed a voter as you can in the November elections. Today issue 21 or up to 21, how control of Congress and the results of certain governor's races might affect RFK juniors war on vaccines. Let's start with perhaps the most extreme Republican candidate. Here is the Republican candidate for governor of Iowa, Zach Lane, speaking at a primary debate earlier in the year, sponsored by the conservative group Moms for Liberty. He would pull COVID vaccines entirely off the market if he could.

Chelsea Cirruzzo (0:54)

That was one of the, maybe the first signer of the pledge to pull the COVID shots off the market.

Brian Lehrer (0:58)

We know they're unsafe. We know about the myocarditis.

SPEAKER_3 (1:01)

We know about pericarditis.

Brian Lehrer (1:02)

We understand that we cannot trust the medical establishment anymore.

SPEAKER_3 (1:06)

They have lost our trust.

Brian Lehrer (1:10)

Zach Lane, Republican candidate for governor of Iowa. On the other end of the spectrum, here's Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic Senate candidate in South Carolina.

She's a board certified pediatrician. Here she is in a video from South Carolina ETV.

SPEAKER_3 (1:26)

She's advocating impeachment proceedings against RFK Jr. We experienced here right home in South Carolina in Spartanburg County, a measles outbreak where we had nearly a thousand documented cases of measles, which is a disease I learned about in medical school from a textbook, because it was really a disease of the past. And now not only is that disease come back because of the anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that RFK. Jr. has been spreading for decades, many other diseases are going to see a resurgence. We're seeing increased cases of whooping cough. We're going to see increased cases of flu and RSV.

Who knows if we're going to see polio come back? We're also seeing a rise in bacterial meningitis because some of the vaccines we give to young children are to prevent that devastating disease.

Brian Lehrer (2:09)

Dr. Annie Andrews, a Democrat running for Senate in South Carolina against the late Senator Lindsey Graham's sister. And with those clips as starting points, we welcome for this edition of 30 Issues, Chelsea Cirruzzo, Washington correspondent for the health news website STAT News, who has been reporting on this. Thanks for doing this, Chelsea. Welcome back to WNYC.

Chelsea Cirruzzo (2:31)

Thank you so much for having me again.

Brian Lehrer (2:33)

Let's start with Zach Lane in Iowa, who signed the pledge to remove COVID vaccines from the market altogether. He's running on something less than that for the moment, right?

Chelsea Cirruzzo (2:45)

Yes. I mean, that is a part of his platform. He is largely focused on agriculture and farming, but he has said that he wants to remove COVID vaccines from the market and that he would lift school vaccination requirements.

Brian Lehrer (3:00)

And that's the first thing that would come forward trying to remove the COVID vaccines from the market altogether, remove all school vaccine mandates. And we should say it's very salient in a governor's race because vaccine policies are actually set state to state, not dictated by Washington. How does that work?

Chelsea Cirruzzo (3:20)

Yeah. So the way it works is the CDC or a panel of advisors will recommend vaccines for children, for adults, for seniors. From there, federal insurers are required, or I'm sorry, not federal insurers, insurers are required and federal insurance programs are required to cover the vaccines. However, that doesn't mean states need to follow those recommendations. States largely do. They do set their public school recommendations or requirements based on those federal, but it's not necessarily legally bound. They can decide their own restrictions.

Brian Lehrer (4:01)

Would you say he is the most outspoken candidate on that side this year when it comes to vaccine policies? Or are there other candidates for governor or for Congress who have signed the Take the COVID Vaccine Off the Market pledge?

Chelsea Cirruzzo (4:17)

Yeah, I would say that he's the most surprising, at least to me.

You know, not only has he made these overtures, he's also really lined himself with Secretary Kennedy. And in fact, Kennedy has traveled to Iowa to support him, to campaign with him. They've gone fishing together. They have a very close relationship. And Lane has really positioned himself as a maha or make America healthy again candidate. He also was kind of a surprising candidate to gain this much attention at this point in the race. So that's a big one. There are other candidates who do also have similarly vaccine skeptic or more outright anti-vaccine views. I would say Lane is probably going the furthest.