Anti-Vaxxers: Enjoying the Privilege of Putting Everyone at Risk

Anti-vaxxers have other arguments, too, and they are just as bad. Encounter one, Google it, and the slightest effort turns up some exhausted science blog debunking it. Anti-vaxxer science is science in the same way that saying the word “FUCK” came from “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” or “Fornication Under Consent of King” is etymology. It’s science the way “Catherine the Great died having sex with a horse” is history. It’s shit that sounds plausible only if you’re someone never in danger of double-checking it or stumbling across something like topical expertise. Christ, you could figure out most of this stuff is bullshit just by reading the questions and answers on NTN Bar Trivia at your local Buffalo Wild Wings for more than a few hours.

It’s no surprise that people believe stupid medical “data” because they won’t do the reading, or because they seek out reading that tells them what they already want to hear. There are thousands of kids at Hillsdale College and Liberty University right now learning that upper-income tax cuts eliminate wealth inequality and spending $25,000 per year to be told that they’re rational economic actors. People do dumb shit of little complexity all the time, so the fact that dumb shit trammels something as complex as biochemistry and neurology is at least going for par, if not a birdie.

But if people want to believe there’s a nefarious element to vaccines, those beliefs don’t originate in the same places.

For some, the anti-vaxxer pose is just Hofstadter run through biology class, a different update on an old paranoid style. America didn’t even invent it. Fin-de-siècle England abounded with conspiratorial anti-vaccination thinking, viewing mandatory injections as Trojan horses for the eradication of liberty via population control. America’s John Birchers updated that riff in the post-war world, adding socialism/communism and one-world-government control to the nefarious scheme.

Look, that’s fine. We can write these people off. Someone who believes that vaccination is a needlessly elaborate mind-control protocol is someone who reads this wailing jackass and InfoWars and nods without laughing. If vaccines weren’t a communist tool, then they’d be something else — drugs designed by Chinese triads to get Americans addicted to gambling and to create a flight of U.S. dollars out of the country via rigged mah-jongg games. Or something. These people don’t need a good reason, because they can just make one. Obama’s probably a Muslim because he got Indonesian vaccines. Hillary Clinton’s ovaries are filled with reptiloid eggs.

These people aren’t the problem. The problem is people too comfortable in life to give a fuck about yours.