For decades, vaccine mandates were treated as untouchable in American politics. Democrats and Republicans alike accepted them as a settled fact of life. But that bipartisan consensus has shattered. New polling makes it clear: Republican support for vaccine mandates — and even for vaccines themselves — is collapsing. And with good reason.
According to a 2024 Gallup poll, 60 percent of Republicans now oppose government vaccine mandates for children. Only about one-quarter say it is “extremely important” for parents to get their children vaccinated. Among Democrats, the picture is the opposite: six in 10 call childhood vaccination “extremely important,” and a majority continue to back mandates. The two parties began to diverge even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the gap widened dramatically after 2019.
The reasons are not hard to see. During COVID, Americans were told that if they obeyed the experts — if they masked, locked down, and rolled up their sleeves for the shots — the virus would be defeated. Instead, the shots failed to prevent infection or transmission. Promises of “safe and effective” crumbled in the face of breakthrough cases, myocarditis, blood clots, and sudden deaths. And the government’s response was not humility or transparency, but censorship and coercion.
Millions of Americans were threatened with the loss of their jobs, their education, and their ability to participate in public life if they refused the COVID shots. Children were masked for years against all evidence. Colleges and hospitals expelled the unvaccinated. Entire communities were divided between the “compliant” and the “unclean.” Public health became less about persuasion and more about punishment.
Republicans watched this unfold and drew the obvious conclusion: If government health bureaucrats will lie, manipulate, and coerce in one case, why should they be trusted in any case? The collapse of trust is reflected in survey after survey. A recent KFF poll found that Republican trust in the CDC, FDA, and NIH has plummeted. For many, those agencies are no longer seen as guardians of public health but as captured institutions — protecting pharmaceutical companies and government power at the expense of ordinary citizens.
And this collapse of trust did not happen in a vacuum. It is rooted in real suffering. Families testified before Congress this summer about children who regressed into autism after vaccines, or young adults who died suddenly after COVID shots. Parents who buried their babies after routine well-baby visits were told it was “just SIDS.” Nurses and doctors who suffered injuries were told it was “in their heads.” For decades, Americans accepted the idea that vaccine injury was vanishingly rare. They are now seeing with their own eyes that it is not.
The result is a political earthquake. Republicans are no longer willing to rubber-stamp vaccine mandates. What was once a bipartisan given is now a sharp partisan divide. Democrats remain the party of coercion. Republicans are increasingly the party of medical freedom.
This has major implications. Just as the GOP once distinguished itself on issues like parental rights and Second Amendment rights, it now has the opportunity to lead on the right to informed consent. Parents, not bureaucrats, should decide what goes into their children’s bodies. Adults, not employers or government agencies, should decide what medical risks to accept. This is not a fringe view. It is now mainstream among Republican voters — and Republican lawmakers ignore it at their peril.
The old consensus is gone. Americans have seen too much. They know now that mandates were not about health, but about control. They watched experts weaponize medicine against the people. They saw how the government silenced dissent and punished the noncompliant. They saw who benefited — the pharmaceutical giants shielded from liability — and who suffered: ordinary families left with sick children, lost loved ones, and no justice.
Republican voters have turned the page. The question is whether Republican legislators will follow. States like Florida, Idaho, and Louisiana have already enacted laws to repeal vaccine mandates. It is time for New Hampshire to do the same.
The collapse of Republican support for vaccine mandates is not a problem. It is an opportunity to reclaim liberty, to restore trust, and to stand with families instead of bureaucrats. Vaccine mandates are politically finished. Now it is up to Republicans to finish the job in law.
