Anger and policy aren’t always good combinations. Betty Bumpers, however, proved that there’s an exception to that rule.
The former first lady of Arkansas was dismayed when her husband, Gov. Dale Bumpers, took office and she learned the state had one of the lowest childhood vaccination rates in the country.
That changed after she spearheaded a successful campaign to get more Arkansas kids vaccinated, an effort she later took nationwide with former first lady Rosalynn Carter.
Bumpers told the Los Angeles Times in 1994 that her campaign with Carter to get every child younger than 2 immunized was “fueled by anger.”
“Anger that we can’t figure out a way to care for our children,” she said.
Arkansas could use a little more of Betty Bumpers’ anger. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on childhood vaccinations threatens to reverse decades of progress on public health that Bumpers helped secure.Â
Trump’s order advocates splitting up the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three separate single-disease shots. It also recommends that all childhood immunizations be administered in separate medical visits.Â
Following such a recommendation poses logistical challenges and would create new burdens for families. Carrying it out would require drugmakers to build new manufacturing plants to produce more vaccine doses. For families, it would require multiple trips to the doctor and could strain pediatricians further.
The Trump administration is also issuing the recommendation as the president and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continue promoting widely discredited claims linking childhood vaccines to autism.
Experts say the order has questionable legal authority, but it threatens to add to the confusion and misinformation surrounding vaccines. It also comes as measles cases in the U.S. are reaching record highs.Â
Arkansas’ public health officials and elected leaders have an opportunity to speak out against the recommendations. History shows that Arkansas can be a leader on vaccinations and in battling misinformation about them.
Arkansas was the first state in 1916 to introduce a mandatory smallpox vaccination program for all children starting school. Bumpers’ efforts as first lady helped give Arkansas one of the highest immunization rates in the country, and her campaign was used as a national model.
“Because of Mrs. Bumpers’ efforts, more than 95% of American children today are protected against what once were the most dreaded childhood diseases,” then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said when Bumpers died in 2018.
More recently, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson showed the value of elected officials standing up to vaccine misinformation. The Republican governor endured jeers at times as he spoke out in favor of the COVID-19 vaccine, and even received his COVID vaccine booster shots on livestream to demonstrate their safety.
Arkansas has also seen the dangers of not getting vaccinated. A decade ago, a mumps outbreak in Springdale grew to nearly 3,000 cases and was one of the largest the U.S. had seen in decades. The outbreak accounted for 41% of the mumps cases in the country that year.Â
Bumpers showed how one person’s anger about the government not doing enough to protect children can translate into meaningful action. Imagine the anger she would have displayed at an order that won’t just undermine her legacy but threatens to reverse decades of progress in protecting children.
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