Vermont political campaigns have largely gone dormant in the two weeks since coronavirus arrived in the state. But a story published Saturday by Politico has changed that — igniting a feud between two Democratic gubernatorial candidates over vaccination policy.
In the story, former education secretary Rebecca Holcombe criticized her opponent, Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, for his past opposition to mandatory vaccination. “It’s scary that anyone in public office or seeking public office would cast doubt about the value of vaccines,” she said. “It’s unbelievable this is even up for debate.”
Zuckerman, meanwhile, slammed Holcombe for engaging in such a debate during a public health crisis. “The fact that any political campaign is trying to use this moment for political opportunism is unconscionable,” he told Politico.
Precisely how Zuckerman’s record came to Politico’s attention is not clear. Holcombe and her campaign manager, Cameron Russell, told Seven Days that her team did not pitch it to the national news outlet. But since the story’s publication, Russell has contacted multiple Vermont news organizations seeking follow-up coverage.
“Rebecca disagrees strongly with the Lt. Governor on this issue, and I wanted to be be sure you all were in the loop on this story,” he wrote Seven Days on Saturday. “I’ve already spoken with Vermont Digger about likely coverage tomorrow, Sunday, March 22nd. Could you let me know if you or anyone else at 7Days would be interested in covering this story?”
Holcombe’s supporters appear cognizant of the risks of campaigning during a pandemic. After sharing the Politico story on Facebook, Burlington Democratic Party vice chair Joanna Grossman encouraged her friends to do the same and to text it to others. “Rebecca could run a texting campaign on this in theory but it would be perceived as u[b]er negative if it came from her,” she wrote. “I think it’s way more viable if it comes from us — ya know the people.”
Grossman, a Holcombe supporter, followed up with a sample script for others to use: “Hey ____! Hope you guys are doing ok surviving life in the time of corona! I wanted to reach out because I recently learned that David Zuckerman is anti-vax. That really makes me uncomfortable because ______. I wanted to make sure you’re aware.”
Like other candidates for statewide office, including Zuckerman, Holcombe has suspended in-person campaigning in light of the outbreak. But unlike others, she has continued to attack her political rivals — including Republican Gov. Phil Scott.
“Gov. Scott’s response to the coronavirus is inadequate,” she wrote on Twitter last week. “The administration must move faster & more aggressively.”
In an interview with Seven Days, Zuckerman said it was perfectly appropriate to debate vaccination policy, but he argued that now is not the time.
“We are still in the emergency, and while it may be frustrating that there is little coverage of politics for those that think campaigning is more important than public health, I believe that my time is better spent serving as lieutenant governor and addressing constituents’ concerns and addressing the needs of our health care workers than spending time politicking in this way,” he said.
Holcombe sees it differently. Though there is currently no coronavirus vaccine, she believes that a failure to inoculate Vermonters against other diseases could have ramifications on the current crisis.
“In the context of coronavirus, when we know we need to save every single bed for those patients who may need them, we need to make sure that people who can be vaccinated for preventable diseases, we ought to be taking those steps to save those beds for people for whom it’s a matter of life and death,” she said.
As for Zuckerman’s views? “This is an issue in which we have a significant disagreement,” Holcombe said. “I think we need to be practicing leadership that relies on facts and science.”
The policy debate centers on a 2015 vote in the state Senate over whether to require more Vermont children to be vaccinated in order to attend school. For years, Vermont had allowed parents to seek philosophical, religious or medical waivers to the mandate. That April, several senators sought to amend an unrelated bill to remove the philosophical exemption, arguing that doing so would make children safer by increasing herd immunity.
When the amendment first came up, as Seven Days reported at the time, Zuckerman questioned the science behind vaccinations and argued that the pharmaceutical industry was pushing vaccines to make money, not improve public health.
“For me, as long as there’s the extreme financial conflicts of interest out there that are driving much of this debate and discussion, I have to maintain the individual right for someone to do their own research as well and make that decision,” said Zuckerman, who was serving in the Senate at the time.
When the debate resumed a week later, Zuckerman sought to further amend the bill with a provision that would only repeal the philosophical exemption after “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determines that there is a reliable DNA swab test to check for the genetic predisposition to an allergic reaction to various immunization ingredients.”
Speaking on the Senate floor that day, Zuckerman said vaccination science was “disputed” and argued that the human body was sacrosanct. “We are adjusting the laws of our state to such that someone else is determining — we in this room are determining — what is going to go into every single person’s body,” he said, according to a Seven Days account of that debate.
Zuckerman’s amendment failed, but the underlying measure passed. Days later, he delivered a tearful speech on the Senate floor about the online backlash he had faced over the matter. “I have been attacked as being anti-science, not caring for those who are less able to protect themselves and mocked for my profession as being unqualified to make informed comments,” he said, according to an Associated Press story from the time.
He explained that his father, a thoracic surgeon, had died of stomach cancer when Zuckerman was 13 years old — likely because the risks of a radiological procedure he performed were unknown at the time.
“Why do I tell you this? Because science is good, but it is not perfect,” he told his colleagues at the time. “Such imperfection can cause harm. Absolutism can cause harm.”
The 2015 vote has dogged Zuckerman in subsequent elections. When he first ran for lieutenant governor the next year, Republican opponent Randy Brock ran radio ads accusing him of backing laws “that would expose our schoolchildren to dangerous diseases by discouraging vaccinations.” Zuckerman responded that he trusted science and had vaccinated his own daughter, but that others who had bad reactions to vaccines should be able to opt out of them.
Now that he’s running for governor, Zuckerman says that if he were faced with a vote similar to the one he took in 2015, he would “probably not” vote the same way. “My position is very clear that I support our current law,” he said. “The bottom line is, I support vaccines and I’ve always believed in their efficacy.”
Zuckerman also now claims that he voted for the underlying bill after his amendment failed — an assertion that cannot be verified because no roll-call was requested. He also claims that his position has not changed.
“I had the same view then as I have now with respect to the efficacy of vaccines and that vaccines are a good thing for the health of society,” Zuckerman said. “So I don’t know that I’m actually changing in that regard.”
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You don’t get to put on the Bernie hat and duck out the back door on this one, Dave. This coronavirus pandemic is the sort of thing that happens when you make vaccines optional and you want to make vaccines optional.
It sounds like he actually has a pretty nuanced view about vaccines, and he had his daughter vaccinated, so any claims that he’s 100% against vaccines are completely false. Also, there’s no evidence that the current pandemic is in any way related to vaccines and whether or not they are mandatory or optional.
The patients, children, Rep. Zuckerman refers to, who have had allergic reactions to vaccines in the past, are pretty much always exempt from these laws, as long as an actual attending doctor verifies the allergy happened. This would be a medical exemption, and unrelated to any philosophical exemption. He’s throwing out apples and elephants. I’ve supported him in the past, but likely will not now
It’s incredibly relevant to these dark times, and to opine that the state of vaccination science is disputed is wrong, misguided, and dangerous.
David Zuckerman graduated UVM with a Political Science degree. Unfortunately, I think he misunderstood it to mean that science is political and you can pick and choose the science to believe based on your politics. Climate science = good. Medical and agricultural science, not so much.
We eradicated measles and polio because of vaccines. Until an anti-vaxxer explains how the risk of polio is less than the risk from allergies and vaccinating against it, I’ll never accept their arguments.
Ice cream kills some small percentage of people, that doesn’t mean it’s inherently dangerous. Historians will weep writing about remarkable and miraculous medical advances that were rejected due to ignorance, propaganda, and intolerance. I weep for humanity being dragged back by those seeking to appease the one percent who were harmed by vaccines and medicines that saved the rest of us. If you’re waiting for a cure that never does any harm, you will wait forever.
Amazing story. We are seeing worldwide problems because medical science has big gaps. And yet we are supposed to believe that when it comes to vaccines there are no questions and no gaps and no reasonable concerns. Sorry. I don’t buy it.
On the subject of reactions to vaccines, there are other reactions besides allergic reactions, although allergic reactions are the only sort currently being acknowledged. Getting medical exemptions in states without other exemptions is impossible at worst and close to impossible at best. Basically, without exemptions, many parents will face a choice between risking a serious vaccine reaction in their child or homeschooling. Is this really the best we can do in terms of managing a medical intervention which is supposed to be given to healthy people to prevent a possible illness?
Finally, neither polio nor measles has been eliminated. In the case of polio, the vaccine itself can cause paralysis AND, acute flaccid paralysis, which is exactly like polio but occurs for myriad other reasons, continues to paralyze and kill children in the US and other countries. Counting polio cases and pretending that this means an end to childhood paralysis is deceptive. Measles vaccine fails sometimes. Often enough that our chance of totally eliminating measles, even with mass forced vaccinations is pretty low.
I find the use of mandatory vaccination abhorrent and the demands that politicians express their total faith in mandatory vaccination or be attacked as “anti-science” and “anti-vaccine” disgusting.
Yes, Zuckerman does have a nuanced view on vaccinations, as we all should. There is no link to corona (or any other virus) and concerns for vaccine safety.
That Holcombe is using this as a political issue in this way at that time DISQUALIFIES her to lead Vermont’s government. (Besides, I was shooting video in the House Education Committee when she led the charge to consolidate schools. She has her own self-interest at heart, not that of the people and communities in Vermont.)
“… as long as there’s the extreme financial conflicts of interest out there that are driving much of this debate and discussion, I have to maintain the individual right for someone to do their own research as well and make that decision.” Medical Ethics requires the HUMAN RIGHT to choose what we do and do not put into our bodies.
BEWARE the information you think you know until you understand fully where that information comes from. Big Pharma is #!–ahead of the military industrial complex–as a profit-making conglomerate. Corporate firms like Merck (and others) have their own public relations divisions to circulate information that says what they want you to believe: Like Big Tobacco did in the 50s and like Big Energy did in the 70s & 80s and like the vaping industry has done more recently (not even to mention Monsanto/ glyphosate).
Public relations firms use human behavior, linguistics, & other communication sciences to make us believe what they want. And we do. Unless you happen to know how the public relations process works, it is easier to believe what you read. They represent the 0.01% we learned about from “Occupy Wall Street.” That 0,01% own 90% of corporate mass media, and they pour their money into narratives that serve their own corporate interests.
Part Two:
Until we all understand how this works, we will have political administrations that represent the corporate interests, rather than our own. Whether the topic is vaccinations, or electoral fraud by voter suppression and electronic voting machines owned by that same 0.01% or which pharmaceutical products are good for us, and what chemicals supposedly do no harm … if we want the facts, then we must be very well informed by independent, fact-based information sources that represent the public interest, rather than the profiteers.
When I see media reporting like this–that polarizes an emotional opposition “debate”–(and I’m thinking Politico, and Holcombe, and–to whatever degree Seven Days is contributing–I understand that public relations experts are at work. it turns my stomach and should frighten every single one of us who believe in wise political leadership that benefits the public good.
Whether I agree with David Zuckerman on every issue of not, he is a smart and compassionate and decent human being with the best interests of Vermont and Vermonters at heart.
This kind of mediated attack should be a red flag to every Vermonter and cause us to SHUN the political team that initiated it.
Part Two:
Until we all understand how this works, we will have political administrations that represent the corporate interests, rather than our own. Whether the topic is vaccinations, or electoral fraud by voter suppression and electronic voting machines owned by that same 0.01% or which pharmaceutical products are good for us, and what chemicals supposedly do no harm … if we want the facts, then we must be very well informed by independent, fact-based information sources that represent the public interest, rather than the profiteers.
When I see media reporting like this–that polarizes an emotional opposition “debate”–(and I’m thinking Politico, and Holcombe, and–to whatever degree Seven Days is contributing–I understand that public relations experts are at work. it turns my stomach and should frighten every single one of us who believe in wise political leadership that benefits the public good.
Whether I agree with David Zuckerman on every issue or not, he is a smart and compassionate and decent human being with the best interests of Vermont and Vermonters at heart.
This kind of mediated attack should be a red flag to every Vermonter and cause us to SHUN the political team that initiated it.
Pretty sad when a candidate for public office launches an attack against our sitting Lt. Governor, David Zuckerman, during a public health crisis, that not only misrepresents his views, but also distorts his words and rewrites history. Nice try Ms. Holcombe. As I try to decide whom to support, you will have to work your way up from the bottom of my list.