Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, reports have emerged of growing efforts by lawmakers across the US to have introduced legislation aimed at weakening existing vaccine-related policies (e.g., vaccine mandates in employment or educational settings). However, reports of anti-vaccine policymaking (AVP) across state legislatures have been largely anecdotal. The State Vaccine Policy Project (SVPP) is a first-of-its-kind effort to quantify and standardize reporting of the prevalence, characteristics, and correlates of AVP. When completed, SVPP data will contain a content-coded record of every piece of vaccine-related legislation introduced across US statehouses from 1985 – 2023. Preliminary SVPP data collected from 2019-2023 reveal that both the total volume and proportion of anti-vaccine bills introduced across state legislatures has been increasing steadily since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly 1 in 10 anti-vaccine bills being signed into law during that period. We also show that the rise in anti-vaccine legislating is attributable primarily to the legislative actions of state lawmakers affiliated with the Republican party, and that dozens of anti-vaccine bills directly aim to reduce the scope of vaccine mandates. In addition to offering a standardized and exhaustive assessment of the growth of anti-vaccine policymaking across US state legislatures, our work provides scholars with unique data for studying changes in the vaccine policy environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, reports have emerged of growing efforts by lawmakers across the US to have introduced legislation aimed at weakening existing vaccine-related policies (e.g., vaccine mandates in employment or educational settings). However, reports of anti-vaccine policymaking (AVP) across state legislatures have been largely anecdotal. The State Vaccine Policy Project (SVPP) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23921,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/no-sidebars.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/healthpolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/302"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/healthpolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/healthpolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/healthpolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23921"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/healthpolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/healthpolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":788,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/healthpolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/302\/revisions\/788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/healthpolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}