Several points to ponder about anti-vax
Disclaimer, I realize some anti-vax love their kids and are people who think of themselves as liberal. However, I urge you to think about who is putting out anti-vax memes.
It is no accident that both Chris Christie and Rand Paul got on the anti-vax wagon. These are people who HATE GOVERNMENT, and hate to admit that GOVERNMENT researched and GOVERNMENT mandated vaccination did a genuine amount of good. It is not because they mind lots of sick and poor people dying. A lot of this "You know better than those doctors" bs is just the same anti-intellectual stuff the GOP has been selling for years, along with some supposed Good old days which never were. If Vaccines become demonized, so will the support for the idea that the government has a right to speak on health issues, which means that the big pharma that so many anti-vax people blame will get EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT, a bunch of confused, ill informed sick people.
There is another spectre here, good old fashioned racism. After all, Latinos get blamed for bringing disease in this country. If Vaccines do not work, it will be easy to demonize brown people as some sort of plague carrying menace, and make people shut their doors. Never mind the irony that Latinos are the descendants of the most intense campaign of biological warfare ever conducted, one so intense that when Hitler claimed he could exterminate the Jews, he pointed to the fact we had successfuly exterminated native americans by doing nice things like infecting blankets with smallpox. You remember smallpox, one of the diseases they have a vaccine for. If Vaccines are demonized, than people with easily preventable disease will be demonized, both immigrants, and the native poor that neither paul nor christie want to vaccinate.
Yes, I understand that doctors have done a LOT to earn distrust, but we cannot go the other direction and, because of stuff that is NOT proven, start thinking we can go back to the days where we used shamans more than pills.
