Texas lawmakers pushed dozens of bills to limit vaccine requirements. These 2 passed.
Anti-vaccine activism continued to grow in the Texas Legislature during its most recent session, with dozens of bills related to vaccine policy in the state.
The Texas Immunization Partnership, a nonprofit that advocates for vaccine policy and access, calculated that there were more than 50 vaccine-related bills filed during the 2023 regular session. The vast majority – more than 90% – were anti-vaccine in nature, said Rekha Lakshmanan, the chief strategy officer at the partnership.
Although only two bills directly related to vaccine access passed, advocates said the number of bills filed during the session and the number of bills that progressed toward becoming law was concerning for the future of vaccine policy in Texas.
“It’s the most bills most anti-vaccine bills filed i would say in over 10 years we’ve not seen this kind of a volume,” Lakshmanan said,
The history of vaccine opposition in Texas
Anti-vaccine activists have steadily grown and expanded their reach throughout the state since 2015, when scholars who study vaccine opposers say the groups began to change their narrative.
Initially, opponents touted the widely discredited narrative that routine childhood vaccines could cause autism. Decades of research has confirmed that there is no link between vaccines and autism, and the original research that set off the panic has been proven inaccurate and unreliable.
But in 2015, researchers say, anti-vaccine activists in Texas began to promote a narrative of medical freedom.
Since the birth of the new anti-vaccine movement in 2015, the number of bills filed has steadily increased in each legislative session. In 2021, researchers with Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy found the terms “medical freedom” and “bodily autonomy” repeatedly in bill captions or in the body of proposed bills. One-quarter of bills filed during that session used the word “discrimination,” according to their analysis.
Since the 2015 legislative session, the number of anti-vaccine bills has steadily grown, Lakshmanan said, and she doesn’t expect the trend to slow down in future sessions.
2023 legislative session
Two bills related to vaccines did pass during the 2023 session. One, SB 29, permanently enacts multiple executive orders that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had signed into law, including a prohibition on adding COVID-19 vaccines to the schedule of vaccines required to attend public school in Texas.
The second, HB 44, would penalize physicians who have vaccination requirements for their patients from being eligible for Medicaid reimbursement.
Although only two bills made it through every stage to become law, many more were debated and discussed during public hearings, during which both legislators and commentators spread misinformation about vaccine safety.
Scientists Robert Malone and Richard Fleming testified in support of multiple bills over the course of the session. Malone is best known for campaigning against COVID-19 vaccines, and has been a supporter of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been spreading incorrect information about vaccines since 2005. Kennedy, the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, has filed to run for president in the 2024 election. He was identified as one of the “Disinformation Dozen” by a research group identifying the top 12 purveyors of false information about COVID-19 vaccines online.
Government figures and health care professionals are becoming an increasingly common source of misinformation in the U.S., according to a report from the Public Goods Project. The group concluded that more than 70% of the world’s misinformation about vaccines and vaccine safety originates in the U.S.
“Anytime vaccine limiting beliefs are introduced or even given a hearing, it sets a really bad and dangerous precedent, because those are opportunities to spread misinformation,” Lakshmanan said.
