Energized by Kennedy, Texas ‘Mad Moms’ Are Chipping Away at Vaccine Mandates

Rebecca Hardy and Michelle Evans helped found Texans for Vaccine Choice with a group of like-minded women in 2015, as measles was spreading in California. They defeated legislation tightening Texas school vaccine requirements, and helped oust the lawmaker who wrote it, earning a catchy nickname: “mad moms in minivans.”

Now, as a measles outbreak that began in West Texas spreads to other parts of the country, the “mad moms” have a slew of new allies. The 2024 elections ushered in a wave of freshman Republicans who back their goal of making all vaccinations voluntary. But no ally may be as influential as the one they gained in Washington: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptic.

More than five dozen vaccine-related bills have been introduced in the Texas Legislature this year. Last week, the Texas House passed three of them. Those bills would make it easier for parents to exempt their children from school requirements; effectively bar vaccine makers from advertising in Texas; and prevent doctors from denying an organ transplant to people who are unvaccinated.

The Association of Immunization Managers, a national organization of state and local immunization officials, is tracking 545 vaccine-related bills in state legislatures around the country, 180 more than last year — evidence, the group’s leaders say, that Mr. Kennedy is changing the national conversation. After peaking at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the number of vaccine-related bills had come down in recent years.

But the big fear of public health leaders that began during the pandemic, and accelerated with Mr. Kennedy’s political rise — that states will undo school vaccine mandates — has so far not come to pass.

“For the 10 years that Texans for Vaccine Choice has existed, we have had a federal government that has been wholly irrelevant or working against us,” said Ms. Hardy, the group’s president. “We’re excited about having individuals in the federal government who will actually cooperate with us. But what exactly that means, we don’t know.”