The measles outbreak across the United States has become the largest in 25 years, less than two decades after the disease was thought to have been eliminated thanks to vaccinations and public-health efforts to protect our children. From Washington state to New York, health departments are doing their best to get people to vaccinate their children while also working to quarantine sick (mostly) children from unprotected populations. The outbreak is in no small part due to the lowering of vaccination rates among children. The anti-vaxxer sentiments behind the lower vaccination rates are fueled by fear, misinformation, and bad science. They are also the keys to the anti-vaxxer movement’s success.
The Washington Post reports that, like any good group of charlatans, anti-vaxxers are targeting the very communities being ravaged by the infectious disease. Chief among them are people such as Del Bigtree, who recently held an anti-vaxxer rally in New York, where hundreds of families are dealing with sick children, unvaccinated and now suffering from preventable diseases.
“The moment we began expanding the vaccination program, our health has been declining in our children,” Bigtree said recently on a weekly live show he distributes on Facebook and YouTube. For his HighWire show, he has about 140,000 Facebook followers and 44,000 YouTube subscribers.
Is this supportable? No. No, it isn’t. The anti-vaxxer movement claims that diseases themselves are easily treatable with modern drugs and, that it’s safer to endure a disease than to have a vaccination. A parent, who would only give his first name as “Ethan,” told the Post that, while he “loved doctors,” he felt that “blind obedience” to them was not healthy. “God gave us a wonderful, beautiful body that heals itself,” he said.
That’s not true. All one has to do is find a family tree that goes back to the 1800s to see how many children were stillborn or died in the first years of their lives to understand that God may have created our “beautiful bodies,” but God also created viruses and diseases and bacteria that humans have had to figure out ways to fight off or perish.
But what is true and what anti-vaxxers want to believe are two different things, as evidenced by lawsuits brought against public health departments by parents unwilling to accept that the science of infectious diseases and vaccines doesn’t care how they feel. For all of the talk of government overreach and “blind obedience,” the foundational underpinning of the anti-vaxxer movement is a lie. Despite what anti-vaxxers insist, vaccines don’t cause autism. The single “scientific” study that anti-vaxxers continue to rehash as proving so has long been debunked as fraudulent. Specifically, the MMR vaccine has been proven again and again, in study after study, to have zero connection to autism. In fact, there is some evidence that children who receive childhood vaccinations lead healthier lives than children who do not.
The United States is not the only country facing historic measles outbreaks. Madagascar, Ukraine, and the Philippines have all been hit catastrophically, with hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases and thousands dead.
