Trump Makes Bizarre Threats About Schools, Vaccine Mandates

donald trump promised at a rally Tuesday that if he is reelected, he will cut funding to all schools with vaccination mandates — even though all 50 states have such laws in place.

“I will not give a dime to any school that has a vaccine or mask mandate,” he declared at his rally in Racine, Wisconsin. The crowd went wild.

It’s a promise he’s made several times in recent months, repeating the same phrase verbatim at rallies in March It is It could.

If he followed through with this, no school in the United States would receive federal funding. All 50 states and Washington, DC, there are laws requiring specific vaccines for students, including measles, rubella, chickenpox, tetanus, whooping cough and polio. Exemptions The rule varies by state, with California, New York and some other states maintaining the strictest mandates.

Public health experts credit these vaccine requirements with eradicating diseases that once killed thousands of people a year. Poliomyelitis, a disease that infected, paralyzed or killed almost 60,000 American children It was only in 1952 that it was completely exterminated in the USA thanks to mass vaccination programs.

Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to questions about which vaccines he was referring to. Months earlier, their spokespeople he said he was only referring to COVID-19 vaccine mandates in schools. But he refused to make that distinction during his speeches, including at Tuesday’s rally — a decision that pleases his party’s anti-vaccine crowd.

A growing faction of conservatives has begun to question the safety of vaccines in recent years, despite the intense scientific scrutiny they are subjected to before the public receives them, and the dearth of evidence that they have any lasting adverse side effects. A Political Poll/Morning Consult found last year that while vaccine skepticism was about equal among Democrats and Republicans before 2020, more than half of Republicans now say they worry more about the potential health risks of vaccines than the benefits.

Although he was once credited with developing COVID-19 vaccines, Trump has since scaled back his endorsement of them and vaccines in general. Last month, he even attacked independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the most prominent voices in the anti-vaccine movement, for not being anti-vaccine enough.

“Republicans, get it out of your head that you’re going to vote for this guy because he’s a conservative. He is not. And by the way, he said the other night that the vaccines are fine,” Trump said in a video posted on social media. “He said on a program, on a television program, that vaccines are good. He is everything to them. And that’s what he said. And for those of you who want to vote because you think he’s an anti-vaxxer, he’s not really an anti-vaxxer.”

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