FDA’s Arbitrary Restrictions on Vaccines Are Right Out of Anti-Abortion Playbook

Part of the Series

Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19

For the first time since COVID vaccines were made widely available in 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has severely restricted who can access them. After years of allowing everyone to access this life-saving vaccine, the FDA has said that it is limiting COVID vaccines to people who are 65 years or older and at high risk. Some states, including Illinois and Colorado, have chosen to ignore this guidance, because it isn’t based on science, and it isn’t about protecting anyone’s health — it’s about cowering to fanatics while maintaining the veneer of decorum.

It’s a tactic vaccine deniers learned from another radical, anti-science faction — abortion opponents. For the decade leading up to the Dobbs decision that finally overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion opponents grew ever more creative in their attempts to undermine access to abortion without outright banning it.

TRAP laws, short for Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, became all the anti-abortion rage in the 2010s because they allowed hostile legislators to force abortion clinics to close without directly banning abortion. These laws required abortion clinics to meet onerous and medically unnecessary requirements — requiring that abortion clinics meet the facility standards for ambulatory surgical centers, for example. Abortion is an outpatient procedure that is 14 times safer than childbirth, according to one study, and has a lower complication rate than knee surgery. There is absolutely no need for an abortion clinic to meet the standards of an ambulatory surgical center, and it is extremely costly to do so. That was the entire point. While abortion opponents branded TRAP laws as “protecting women’s safety,” in reality, they were designed to force abortion clinics to close. And they were extremely successful at it — between 2018 and 2023, 139 abortion clinics were forced to close their doors, according to the Abortion Care Network.

Limiting COVID vaccines arbitrarily, without any scientific basis and after years of unfettered access, is straight out of the TRAP law playbook. It undercuts access without banning vaccines. Who counts as “high risk” and who doesn’t? Even if you are over 65 years of age, access to the COVID vaccine isn’t guaranteed. In Florida, folks over 65 have reported that they’ve been told they require a prescription in order to get the vaccine. That isn’t specific in the new FDA guidance, either. So, who can get a vaccine, where can they get it, and how? There is no definitive answer.

That confusion is a critical part of the ban without a ban. If you make health care inaccessible, it doesn’t matter whether it’s technically legal or not.

That confusion is a critical part of the ban without a ban. If you make health care inaccessible, it doesn’t matter whether it’s technically legal or not. And if you have competing messages and requirements, all the better — not only do vaccine seekers not know the requirements, but the pharmacists dispensing the vaccines may not be clear, either.

We’ve seen the same thing when it comes to attempts to restrict and ban access to mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs commonly used in medication abortion. Even in states where abortion is legally protected, some companies have refused to fulfill prescriptions for the medications. Costco has refused to provide mifepristone in its pharmacies, including in some states with abortion protections. Other pharmacies, like Walgreens and CVS, have said that they will provide the medication. The patchwork of legality and access regarding abortion care has made it difficult for the average abortion seeker to understand what the law is, where they can get one, and if they could face criminalization.

This kind of rampant confusion and chaos created a chilling effect among abortion seekers, and it is now being used in service of vaccine deniers.

In my home state of Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis (D) and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment issued a public health order ensuring access to the COVID vaccine for anyone who wants one. My husband and I were both able to get our COVID vaccines without any issue. But even with that order in place, some Coloradans have reported being denied access to the COVID vaccine because they don’t meet the FDA’s preconditions, even though the state’s public health order guarantees them the ability to have one. Even in a “protected” state, folks still aren’t able to easily access the vaccine; and when they tell their friends and family, that confusion grows and spreads. It becomes all but impossible to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle to make clear who can get a vaccine — which, of course, is the point.

But even if you can get a COVID vaccine, vaccine deniers are still working to stigmatize this kind of basic care that enjoys broad American support, just as abortion opponents did.

Taking a page directly out of the anti-abortion playbook, the Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo equated vaccine mandates with “slavery.” Ousted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Susan Monarez testified before Congress that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told her that the “CDC told hospitals to turn away sick Covid patients until they had blue lips before allowing them to get treatment,” an absurd lie.

What RFK Jr. and Ladapo are doing is reframing vaccines — a traditionally nonpartisan, broadly supported, basic health care service — as threatening and destructive. Vaccines are very safe. Ladapo even acknowledged that he didn’t review the evidence when rescinding the state’s vaccine mandate.

Vaccines save lives. Abortion care saves lives. Both are safe, effective, and essential to your fundamental right to bodily autonomy.

That’s because attacks on vaccines, like attacks on abortion, don’t just defy evidence — they are anti-evidence. Like so much of the Republican Party’s positioning today, these attacks rely on drumming up fear and distrust of the scientific advancements that have provided stability and safety for millions of Americans. When fanatics can erode our public confidence in basic health care that has been proven to save lives, they can easily consolidate control in even broader, more insidious ways. Stigmatizing vaccines is a means of making us disbelieve what we see with our own eyes.

Supporters of science and common sense shouldn’t back down in the face of vaccine deniers. Do not allow fanatics and bad actors to brand basic health care as somehow deviant and wrong, to convince you that they alone have the answers, to wipe out decades of research about vaccines’ safety, from right under your noses. Vaccines save lives. Abortion care saves lives. Both are safe, effective, and essential to your fundamental right to bodily autonomy.

Take it from those of us who have been fighting for abortion rights — once that right is gone, it’s hard to get back.