Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is seeking forgiveness. But I’m not ready to give it just yet.
The retiring North Carolina senator is on a book tour to promote “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents,” his new memoir/political manifesto about President Donald Trump’s mistakes and his regrets in advancing them.
Tillis’ new book is, in part, supposed to be him taking accountability for his role in advancing the rogues’ gallery of the Trump Cabinet, including Robert F. Kennedy — an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist whose brain worms outnumber his medical degrees.
Even a worm could have predicted what happened next. He fired all members of the Vaccine Advisory Board, handpicking multiple fellow vaccine skeptics as their replacements. That board overhauled the vaccine schedule — including for measles, which is seeing a comeback in states like Pennsylvania and South Carolina.
Tillis had said he hoped Kennedy would “go wild.“
Before the confirmation, Tillis had said he hoped Kennedy would “go wild” as an outsider with new ideas. When he went on “The Weeknight“ to promote his book, I had a personal question.
As the father of a 10-week-old daughter — far too young for the routine measles vaccine, which begins at 12 to 15 months — I asked: “Did he go wild enough for you?”
Tillis responded: “I’m not worried about your daughter because you’re going to make an informed decision and you have the means and the access.”
When I explained that — under the longtime guidance of actual experts — infants can’t receive the measles vaccine until after 12 months, Tillis responded: “Is it illegal to get it sooner?”
He went on to say that I “don’t have to worry” about the new vaccine schedule because “you’ve got an educated choice in the resources.”
To me, this exchange summarized the entire problem with the MAGA philosophy and the Republicans like Tillis who helped it along, regardless of whatever they say about it now. Tillis seemed to think that the problem facing me was an individual one and that any consequences would be individual. Under this view, the United States is not a united country, but just a collection of hundreds of millions of rugged individualists whose actions have no effects on their neighbors.
According to Tillis, I could somehow get my child vaccinated early, so I shouldn’t have to worry. But at 10 weeks old, that was not a choice available to me.
This kind of zero-sum thinking is making us a weaker nation. If you have enough money for retirement, you shouldn’t worry about whether Social Security will help your neighbors. If your kids are in a good school, you shouldn’t worry about whether the educational system is falling apart. If you live on a hill, you shouldn’t worry about the homes being flooded in the valley.
Setting aside the moral implications of ignoring the needs of your neighbors — and the rather old-fashioned question of whether we are our brother’s keeper — this isn’t how things work. If my neighbors are sick or poor or uneducated, that will affect me, too, eventually.
It’s especially misguided on public health. Vaccinations don’t just protect you. They protect your neighbor who can’t get a vaccination because they are too young or their immune system is compromised by cancer treatment or an autoimmune disorder.
If enough of us get vaccinated, the virus has a much harder time gaining a foothold, protecting people who cannot safely be vaccinated or are still too young to receive a shot. It’s called herd immunity, and epidemiologists have understood its basic logic for more than a century.
We learned this week that Kennedy intends to create a new clinic at the National Institutes of Health focused on vaccine injuries, devoting more government resources to an agenda built around his crackpot conspiracies.
In theory, Tillis should regret his role in making that possible. But his exchange with me suggested something more troubling: He may not understand why it was wrong in the first place.
Evan Brechtel contributed to this report.
For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders Townsend and Luke Russert, watch “The Weeknight” every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW.
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