Every step of the way, they are an obstacle to public health.
The Texas group that lobbies against vaccine mandates is now launching a campaign against COVID-19 contact tracing, the public health measure used for decades around the world to contain disease spread.
Texans for Vaccine Choice this week called on its members to contact Gov. Greg Abbott and let him know they “do not wish to be monitored or surveilled for any reason” in response to a new state program hiring and training workers to identify people who’ve come into close contact with those who recently tested positive for the coronavirus. Such people are then asked to quarantine until testing shows they don’t have the disease.
“The government should stop thinking its job is to keep everyone healthy and instead focus on protecting our rights,” says a post on the organization’s website. “We here at TFVC will remain vigilant as our government expands greatly and the threats to our members grow.”
The campaign drew an immediate rebuke from Dr. Peter Hotez, the Baylor College of Medicine infectious disease specialist who has led public health’s fight against the anti-vaccine movement, which he holds responsible for the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and whooping cough.
Thanks to the movement’s efforts, some 60,000 Texas parents currently obtain non-medical exemptions for school vaccines, some 25 times higher than 2003, the first year such exemptions were allowed. A 2018 study by Hotez found Houston and three other Texas cities rank among the 15 metropolitan “Shotspots” of such exemptions.
“Awful to see the #antivax lobby in Texas now going the extra measure to halt #COVID-19 prevention,” Hotez tweeted Tuesday in reply to a Texans for Vaccine Choice tweet alerting people to the campaign. “In the name of fake ‘health freedoms’ slogans, they aspire to land thousands of Texans in our hospitals and ICUs.”
John Wittman, a spokesman for Abbott, noted that a contact tracing program was part of the guidelines laid out by President Donald Trump in order to reopen the state and has been used in Texas and the country for decades. He said the program is “completely voluntary” and that the state health department has “taken steps to ensure it protects individuals’ liberty and privacy.”
There are certainly questions to be raised about the state’s contact tracing plan, though those questions should mostly be about competence and cronyism. I can sort of see the rationale behind the anti-vaxx movement, if I squint and do some deep-breathing exercises. The point of contact tracing is to find and notify people who may have come into contact with a person who has tested positive for COVID-19. I’m really hard-pressed to see what the problem is with that, beyond the usual tinfoil-hat paranoia about RFID chips, UPC codes, and our precious bodily fluids. We already know we have a long fight ahead over an eventual coronavirus vaccine, which is now a partisan issue as well as another thing for these people to froth about. The rest of us need to recognize this for what it is, which is a direct threat to our health. What are you going to do about that, Governor?