2026: State Legislatures as Vectors of Health Misinformation and Anti-Science

Anti-science health legislation doesn't just reflect misinformation; it institutionalizes it, cementing false beliefs into population-level risks.

The post 2026: State Legislatures as Vectors of Health Misinformation and Anti-Science first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

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For many years, Science-Based Medicine has documented the troubling trend of state legislatures increasingly substitute ideology for evidence in public health policy. This trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. No one chronicled this more diligently than Jann Bellamy, who read the bills most of us did not, and showed how sometimes subtle legal changes could erode real-world protections against infectious disease and medical misinformation.

I wish Jann were still blogging. That work matters even more now. The volume of legislation targeting vaccines, public health authority, and other evidence-based safeguards has not slowed. It has accelerated. As recently reported by the Associated Press,

Trump administration officials are directing activists to push anti-science legislation in the states – where public health authority rests – with the ultimate goal of changing laws and minds nationally.

These actions are the next step of an anti-science agenda: Normalizing anti–public health beliefs by formally incorporating misinformation into law. And it is happening at a moment when the consequences are no longer theoretical. As measles surges and vaccination rates fall below critical thresholds in some communities, lawmakers are advancing bills that weaken school immunization requirements and constrain public health responses to outbreaks. These policies do not merely reflect a misunderstanding of science. They are designed to cement it, transforming false beliefs into laws that will produce population-level harm for years to come.

One of the most obvious examples is the renewed push to weaken or eliminate school immunization requirements. Bills introduced or advanced in multiple states in 2025 (350 of them in 43 states, by AP’s count) target vaccines in different ways: from expanding non-medical exemptions, removing or weakening mandates, instituting waiting periods, or even requiring blood banks to test for evidence of vaccinations. Two Minnesota bills even call mRNA vaccines “weapons of mass destruction”!

These laws are often positioned as protecting parental rights, but their public health effect is predictable: lower immunization rates, more unvaccinated children, and increased risk of outbreaks that inevitably affect those who did not opt out, including infants, immunocompromised individuals, and others in whom vaccines are less effective.

This is not a controversial point in science-based public health. Protection against measles and other communicable and contagious diseases depends on maintaining vaccination rates above a critical threshold, typically around 95 percent. When coverage drops, the risk of transmission rises sharply, particularly in communities where the under-vaccinated cluster, geographically or socially. (This is why outbreaks tend to begin in pockets of low vaccination and then spread outward.) School immunization requirements were designed precisely to prevent this – not to limit individual (or “parental”) autonomy, but to preserve a level of collective protection to a community that no individual decision is certain to provide on its own.

As the same column by the Associated Press noted, this anti-science push extends well beyond vaccination policy. In some jurisdictions, legislators have moved to eliminate community water fluoridation, despite decades of high-quality evidence showing substantial reductions in dental caries, particularly among children and lower-income populations. Elsewhere, bills have been introduced to make the sale of raw (unpasteurized) milk easier, increasing access to a product that carries a well-documented risk of serious foodborne illness without any demonstrated health benefit. Framed as protections against government overreach, these measures instead disable proven public health interventions and safeguards, or promote higher-risk alternatives, substituting belief and ideology for evidence with predictable consequences.

The invisibility of public health

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