And, in fact, being against public health mitigation efforts at all is actually anti-vax because NPIs (Non-pharmaceutical Interventions) are actually needed to support the vaccines. And vaccination itself is a community level intervention, not an individualistic solution.
I’m getting a little tired seeing people cherry-picking stuff that they think doesn’t sound 100% anti-vax from some Trump cabinet picks. One must remember that anti-mandate IS anti-vax, as vaccine efficacy requires HIGH UPTAKE. That’s the way vaccines and public health works! Also, covid contrarianism itself is anti-vax, as it undermines the regard for the seriousness for the disease, and makes people think they don’t need vaccines when in fact they are needed.
Doing a “if you wanna” or trying to restrict vaccines to just the elderly (kind of eugenicsy!), or making vaccines hard to access if uninsured, or instructing public health workers to keep vaccines a secret – that’s all undermining vaccines, so it’s all anti-vax. There needs to be proactive vaccine campaigns or people, even those at high risk, just won’t get the message. And our safety depends on social contracts like vaccine mandates for high risk professions particularly. We really don’t want doctors and nurses all over the place that refuse to get vaccinated for stuff circulating, often among patients in the hospitals! People in jobs or living in congregate settings like schools or nursing homes need to be vaccinated for measles, covid, flu, and whatever else is circulating.
Think about how in our modern society with so much more travel, so much more consolidation of schools, healthcare facilities, and companies… This all happened after Johnson’s Great Society public health programs and the introduction of vaccines. The idea of having these big consolidated schools, big hospitals and nursing homes, huge senior high rise apartments, large arenas full of people, big airports, and people traveling all over, but with the lack of public health provisions of a century ago… I don’t see how that’s going to work.