‘Reject Big Pharma’: Anti-vaccine activists co-opt a populist slogan to try to repeal a state immunization law

The advertisements plastered across city bus stops and flooding television airwaves across Maine make a simple plea to voters: “Reject Big Pharma” by voting yes on a state-wide initiative.

But the referendum that Maine voters will decide on Tuesday, known as Question 1, has little to do with drug prices. Instead, approval would overturn a 2019 law that requires all schoolchildren to receive vaccinations unless granted an exemption by a doctor. The advertisements, meanwhile, are funded in large part not by drug pricing activists but by a nationwide network of anti-vaccine groups.

The media blitz marks a new effort by anti-vaccine activists to win new adherents, and to do so by co-opting public anger toward pharmaceutical companies — not just over exorbitant drug prices but because of the industry’s role in the opioid crisis, which has hit Maine hard.

If the effort to overturn the mandate is successful, public health advocates fear the momentum could bleed across state lines and jeopardize other recent efforts to ban non-medical vaccine exemptions. It would be the first instance in which a state’s effort