As the kids used to say, the stupid it burns (boldface mine):

In recent months, he [Trump] has escalated his attacks on Covid mandates in particular. And he is using his sweeping anti-vax pledge as a wedge issue against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another notorious vaccine skeptic. In a recent video posted on his Truth Social platform, Trump denounced Kennedy for being insufficiently hostile to vaccines.

“So, Republicans,” Trump said, “get it out of your mind that you’re going to vote for this guy because he’s conservative. He’s not. And by the way, he said the other night that vaccines are fine. He said it on a show, a television show, that vaccines are fine. He’s all for them. And that’s what he said. And for those of you that want to vote because you think he’s an anti-vaxxer, he’s not really an anti-vaxxer.”

As Trump ramps up his anti-vaccine rhetoric, he is pushing the opposition of vaccines away from the fringe and toward the center of the culture wars. The danger is that, in doing so, he could turn opposition to vaccine mandates more broadly into the same kind of litmus test for the right as hostility to mask mandates and other Covid-era restrictions.

Removing vaccine mandates for schoolchildren would be a disaster. Probably not a COVID-pandemic level disaster, but kids will be disabled and killed (murdered actually) without these mandates. For most diseases, we need around 95% vaccination to stymie the spread of disease, but it would drop much lower than that without mandates.

Stupid and murderous.