Countries with a high absorption of the HPV vaccine, which protects against a virus that causes certain tumors, have seen dramatic reductions in cervical cancer. That is why, for example, providers in Austria try to offer as many people as possible.
But with one Cancer prevention -event In the capital of the country at the weekend there was a special sense of urgency to manage free recordings. An initiative to provide the vaccines to people younger than 30, when they are usually available to people under the age of 21, will expire at the end of the year.
Elmar Jew, who specializes in gynecological oncology at Medical University of Vienna and who attended the event, has no high expectations of the program. The political party that could take leadership in the next government of Austria will probably not support such an effort.
“They have an anti-vaxxer position,” said Joura prior to the event.
Joura referred to the Freedom Party, or FPö, one of the right -wing parties that Ascendant has been throughout Europe and who won the most votes in the Austria elections last year. And his concern that a government -led government would reject a successful vaccination campaign is a reflection of how populist movements in some parts of the world have embraced political messages that resist, or at least distract from, mainstream scientific and public health efforts.
The alliance between populist movements and enemies of established public health practices a result of the frustrations of people who are unleashed during the COVID-19-Pandemie-Is perhaps most obvious in the US, President Trump, whose first administration was responsible For the enormously successful Operation Warp Speed Plan that delivered Covid -vaccines in record time, tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has undermined faith in vaccines for years, to be the best health in the country. Kennedy has sown distrust of the agencies that he has now entrusted to manage and calls civil servants there corrupt.
What happened in Austria offers another window on how and why some extreme right -wing parties have continued to turn complaints from the pandemic era on measures such as vaccine policy and forced limitations. Although the anti-vaccine sentiment has been around for a long time, experts say that the decision of leading political parties to take that mantle and to challenge measures for public health marks a new and painful turn.
The leader of the Freedom Party, Herbert Kickl, has called COVID-19-vaccines ‘an experiment with genetic technique’, and when a rumor arose in 2021 that he had secretly vaccinated against the coronavirus-like that could have been able to damage his status – He denied noisy The claim. Kickl also pushed Ivermectin as a COVID treatment, despite studies that showed that it didn’t work.
Certainly, the debate about public health generally takes a backs’ backseat for issues that are more animated in Europe by, namely immigration, the economy, nationalism, distrust of the European Union and skepticism about the support of Europe for Ukraine. But the fact that the Platform of the Freedom Party last year included promises that were at odds with the regular views of public health – continuing to warn of hazards of the COVID vaccine that does not actually exist, to prohibit the World Health Organization and promised experimental research On Vaccins-Was a sign of how the anger of the pandemic era of people a striking strategy Remained to reach a certain segment of voters, experts said.
“They identified this as a trigger subject, a subject where you could polarize a society and aim certain constituents and voter groups, and you could come from there” political communication.
Although much of the anger of these parties and their voters have focused on COVID measures and vaccines, the fear that their continuous attacks on public health can threaten confidence in other immunisations, from HPV to measles, at a time when covering the coverage of the vaccine was baptized. Research has shown an overlap in supporting people for right -wing parties and a lower chance of being vaccinated, and in some countries right -wing media have started suspicions about vaccines in general. Austria already has one of the highest percentages of measles in Europe.
“If you start to convince people that the COVID vaccine, which took millions and millions and millions of people and who have saved millions of lives, does not work or is a danger, this will have overflow effects on other vaccines,” said Jakob-Moritz, “” said Jakob-Moritz Eberl, who studies political communication at the University of Vienna.
It is not clear whether the Freedom Party can form a government. After the elections in September, in which it received a leading 29% of the votes, various parties tried to form coalition government, with FPö most recently negotiated with the conservative Austrian People’s Party and Kickl who views the Chancellor position. But the negotiations fell apart earlier this monthAnd the following steps are uncertain. From Thursday, Central parties had started conversationsExclusive FPö.
Not all extreme right -wing European parties have embraced a hard rhetoric as the Freedom Party of Austria. In France, where the National Rally worked to portray itself as a regular movement with a broad attraction, party leader Marine Le Pen criticized the government’s movements during the pandemic to limit people who were not vaccinated by bars and cultural locations. But the party did not make an anti-vaccination rhetorical core of its message, with the aim of nodding at the basis of supporters who can oppose immunisations without defying scientific standards and alienating others, said Jeremy Ward, a sociologist at France’s National Institute Or health and medical examination, known as insermet.
“The issue is not going too far, and maintaining a form of credibility and seems moderate enough in their criticism to appear as a government party,” Ward told Stat last year.
In many ways, attacks on public health correspond to the anti-elite, anti-establishment philosophy that defines these populist parties. They claim that the health officials of the government force people without work and forced them to wear a mask and stay at home, all because of a virus that was not so dangerous. Ivory-tower scientists, profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies and bureaucrats in Geneva and Brussels were those who pushed these vaccines, the argument went. In this vision, all these interventions trampled the rights of ordinary people.
But the extreme right -wing parties also saw a political opening with the pandemic and decided to burn it to their advantage, experts say. They used people’s indignation to deepen their attraction with their bases and make contact with a good audience. They have leveled on protests Against COVID measures, so that they are often provided with incorrect information about the safety of vaccines.
In Austria, the indignation flared up when the government explained a Covid vaccine mandate, which kicks Compared to TotalitarianismAlthough the plan was eventually abandoned.
“I am sure there are many individuals in the party who do not trust the vaccines,” said Katharina Paul, a political scientist at the University of Vienna. “But more generally it is something that represents their anti-government, anti-establishing position. It is a problem that can be used to polarize very effectively. ”
Some conservative policy experts have argued that the failures and incompetence of governments and public health institutions during the Pandemie brought people to seek political alternatives. Societies also debate about whether governments exceeded with certain COVID interventions, who saw their architects as well-intended movements to protect people during a rapidly changing emergency situation, but that critics saw as unjustified restrictive.
But in particular, prior to the pandemic, the populist parties did not say much about vaccinations, experts said. Covid showed them the potential of vaccination as a collective force and gave them an incentive to continue to hammer the theme.
“They more or less jumped on the train,” said Sebastian Jäckle, a political scientist at the German University of Freiburg, about the alternative to Germany or AfD, who, just like the Freedom Party in Austria, Fanned anti-vaccine sentiment And said the government outdated the dangers of Covid.
In many cases, European populist parties were able to collect their bases against public health measures during the pandemic because they were in opposition. Reigning parties have different responsibilities, experts noted.
In Hungary, for example, where the extreme right -wing leader Viktor Orbán has long been in power, the government provides vaccines for people. But Hungary also brought Covid -vaccines from China and RussiaThe use of purchases as a way to move the European regulatory and distribution processes to move too slowly, which reflects the anti-EU attitude of the party.
In the US, Kennedy is now shifting from external critic to an official who is responsible for protecting the health of the nation. His rhetoric has sometimes shifted. Despite his long and well -documented history of undermining trust in vaccines, Kennedy, shortly after Trump’s victory, insisted that he had no plans to take away vaccines from someone. His message was partly aimed at processing the concerns of Republican senators who eventually voted to confirm him as a health secretary, although he would not confirm during his confirmation hearing that vaccines do not cause autism, as repeated studies have demonstrated.
In his first message to staff of the Health and Human Services department, He also said that the vaccine schedule should be revised in children.
Health experts are concerned that, even if extreme right -wing figures do not try to increase the availability of vaccines if they take the current, they will not work to improve the coverage of vaccination at a time when the rates are drifted down.
A week after Kennedy’s period, there is already a problem for him to cope: a growing outbreak of measles from West -Texas. Of the 58 reports to date, the vast majority does not seem to be vaccinated.