Carly Fiorina says vaccines should be ‘parent’s choice’

Fiorina revealed on Thursday that she supports letting parents decide whether to inoculate their children against communicable diseases. And the vaccine causes enough serious adverse reactions (to about 1 percent of recipients) that there were lawsuits and injunctions filed in response to a Clinton-era program making them mandatory for military personnel.

As I observed: “If she were an average person who lost that AT&T coverage and had to replace it in an individual market where the insurers could sell it to her on their own terms, subject to the rules of the most lenient and consumer-unfriendly states…as a cancer survivor, she’d be uninsurable”. Later, in a conversation with reporters afterwards, she explained her stance on the issue.

Based off those two remarks, media outlets went nuts, especially liberal ones. Before the Cleveland debates, Carly Fiorina was little more than a dogged, hard-charging afterthought for most voters. “I think leaders, through all of their life’s experiences about which I have been completely transparent- whether it was getting fired at Hewlett Packard…” “I think when we’re talking about some of these more esoteric immunizations, then I think absolutely a parent should have a choice and a school district shouldn’t be able to say, ‘Sorry, your kid can’t come to school” for a disease that’s not communicable, that’s not contagious, and where there really isn’t any proof that they’re necessary at this point”.

Taken in context, Fiorina’s statement ought to be uncontroversial.

“And she got bullied”.

48 states now offer a religious exemption for vaccines, while 17 also offer a “philosophical” one. But that was because the law also eliminated religious exemptions. An additional 18 states allow for “personal belief” exemptions to skip vaccines and still attend public schools.

“Of course, people question: can a candidate prevail who has never held public office?” said Deborah Bowker, a longtime friend of FIorina’s who was chief of staff during her 2010 Senate campaign in California. But the worst were outlets like Slate that cut Fiorina’s statement in half and didn’t report the part about schools at all.

“When in doubt, it is always the parent’s choice”, Fiorina said during a town hall in an agricultural building in rural Iowa on Thursday evening.

Fiorina added that families face a “trade-off” when weighing their children’s health with public schooling. “These news reports may be influencing how parents perceive childhood vaccines across the country”, said Matthew M. Davis, director of the poll and professor at Michigan’s medical school, in a statement earlier this summer.

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You sure showed them, Jessica. Here in the Golden State, we know Carly Fiorina very well. The entire logic (and legal justification) behind mandated vaccines is that parents are legally allowed to make bad decisions about their children’s health, but not vaccinating against certain diseases puts public health at risk. “The reason they are so frustrated and sick of politics and politicians is because some of these answers are so obvious and people give big speeches and yet nothing really seems to change”, she said.