In October, ProPublica reporter Audrey Dutton wrote about Idaho’s ban on vaccine mandates. She wrote to you both as a journalist who’s covered the anti-vax movement for years and as an Idahoan with a young child in school.
She posed a question about how the Idaho Medical Freedom Act, which makes it illegal to require almost anyone to take a vaccine or receive any other “medical intervention,” would protect children if there was a measles outbreak at a day care. Specifically, what if a child was too young to be immunized but still needed to attend day care so the parent could work?
The parents, one advocate of the state law told Dutton, could simply keep their kids out of day care or seek some other sort of communal care outside of schools or day cares, where students wouldn’t be required to be vaccinated.
This moment underscored for Dutton how the Idaho law wasn’t just about policy — it’s about a major shift in what is considered normal.
“It is about flipping the script on what we’ve considered the norm for generations now: that if you’re going to be part of a community, you must help protect the other people in your community,” Dutton wrote. “The thinking behind the Idaho Medical Freedom Act not only rejects that norm when it comes to vaccines, it makes it illegal.”
At ProPublica, we have reporters across the country. As Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. touts Make America Healthy Again on the federal level, our reporters have also covered how these changing health norms seep into state and local policies, from vaccine mandates to fluoridation.
ProPublica reporter Anna Clark has written extensively about how these seismic shifts away from a community public health mindset have led to some states banning water fluoridation. And reporter Jessica Schreifels of The Salt Lake Tribune, part of our Local Reporting Network, has shown how the federal government can, in turn, embolden local “medical freedom” efforts, such as when Attorney General Pam Bondi dismissed charges against a surgeon who falsified vaccine cards.
We hope you’ll spend some time with our reporting on the Make America Healthy Again movement. We’ve compiled a guide below on where to start.
