Vaccines have been much in the news the past couple years but I fear this ubiquitous publicity bodes ill for the future of vaccination, the monumental medical achievement that has spared so many children from illness and death over the past century.

COVID-19 vaccines, of course, have dominated headlines since the spring of 2020.

And since last summer the focus has widened to include not just COVID-19 vaccines, but also mandates, some imposed by government and some by private businesses, that certain people be inoculated.

But my concern is for vaccines in general.

I worry that the debate over COVID-19 vaccines and mandates, a debate driven largely by political beliefs rather than by scientific reality, will spread more widely and affect the other vital inoculations that have largely been insulated from antiscience hysteria.

Specifically, I’m troubled by the prospect that the frequently hyperbolic societal conversation during the pandemic might erode, even slightly, our well-found confidence in the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines that protect most of us from diseases which once sickened so many children and killed, or permanently harmed, some of them.

This would be an irrational reaction, to be sure.

But rationality has been a conspicuous victim during our 2-year ordeal since COVID-19 arrived.

A bill introduced in the Wisconsin legislature would prohibit schools and universities from excluding students due to their vaccination status — and it’s not limited to COVID-19 vaccines.

Although the bill wouldn’t repeal existing laws in that state requiring students to be vaccinated for diseases such as polio, measles and mumps, it’s not clear how the bill, if it becomes law, would conflict with those existing vaccine requirements.

A bill in Georgia would ban the state from requiring proof of vaccination “as a condition of providing any service or access to any facility.”

Its sponsors say the bill isn’t designed to curtail vaccine requirements for students, but it seems likely that if the bill became law, some people, for whom the combination of “vaccine” and “mandate” has become symbolic of tyranny, would claim that it applies to schools.

In one sense, I’m not surprised that there is considerable opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Many of the people subject to these mandates — in Oregon that includes health care workers and school staff — are relatively young and healthy people for whom COVID-19 does not pose a grave risk.

Moreover, COVID-19 vaccines have not accomplished what we’ve come to expect from vaccines — which is to all but eradicate the disease for which they were created.

During both the delta variant surge last summer, and even more so with this winter’s omicron wave, which is rapidly receding, the virus has infected quite a lot of vaccinated people.

But it hasn’t killed nearly as many.

In Oregon, breakthrough infections have accounted for fewer than 30% of COVID-19-related deaths in every month (the highest rate, 29.6%, was in January 2022; rates for other months, dating to the onset of the delta variant in June 2021, range from 12.9% to 27.3%).

The facts are beyond dispute — people who are vaccinated are considerably less likely to die, or even require treatment in a hospital, due to COVID-19 than people who aren’t vaccinated.

Unfortunately, some people cite breakthrough infection rates as proof that the vaccines don’t work.

This is plain wrong.

Unless you happen to believe that living is not preferable to dying or spending a few weeks with machines breathing for you.

There are multiple reasons why COVID-19 vaccines haven’t prevented infection — as distinct from severe illness and death — nearly as well as most of the other inoculations that are widely given. Most of those reasons involve complex matters of virology and immunology that neither I, nor almost everyone else who comments on the subject, understands well.

But none of those reasons can even begin to refute the indisputable, and overwhelmingly positive, effect that childhood vaccinations have had against a host of other diseases.

And all those lives have been saved in part because those inoculations, despite overly lenient exemptions for students in many states, including Oregon, are administered to the vast majority of children.

Yet despite the glaring difference between our experience thus far with COVID-19 vaccines, and the miraculous benefits that childhood vaccination has conveyed on our country, it seems to me that no small number of people are eager to conflate the two.

The legislation in Wisconsin and Georgia is an example of this misguided movement, one that would be easy to dismiss as the product of sloppy thinking and mindless political allegiances if it weren’t so potentially pernicious.

As we’ve seen over the past dozen or so years with regional outbreaks of measles and whooping cough, episodes largely confined to enclaves of people who eschew vaccines, the nearly complete protection afforded by childhood vaccination can be eroded when a relatively minuscule number of people subscribe to fantasy rather than reality.

This is a terrible trend regardless of its cause.

But it seems to me especially insidious if the long list of vaccines available to us, which have been largely apolitical (and appropriately, since their benefits accrue equally across the partisan spectrum) were to become collateral damage in the battle over COVID-19 vaccines.

Like all cases of guilt by association, this one is inherently unfair. Vaccines that have transformed debilitating and sometimes deadly infections such as polio, measles and diphtheria into historical artifacts rather than acute health threats ought never to be compared with COVID-19 vaccines, which like every aspect of the pandemic have been a tool of cynical propagandists.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.