Anti-Vaxxers and American Anti-Intellectualism

The measles have come to Chicago’s suburbs. The measles. You know, that completely preventable and once eliminated disease that used to kill children every year? Anti-vaxxers are to blame, plain and simple. I’m not the first to say it, obviously. Critics of vaccines are getting sad because people are blaming them for this. Aw, that’s too bad. Are your feelings hurt? Well, thanks to you, children will die from things that are completely preventable. You should feel sad. And responsible for their deaths.

Much of this anti-vaccine nonsense goes back to a fraudulent 1998 study linking vaccines to autism. Criminally negligent doctor Andrew Wakefield, who is British, set off a wave of anti-vaccine hysteria that has led to our nation’s public health regression. We have, in some ways, become victimized by the success of the MMR vaccine – nobody in this generation has gone through a measles infection, and so we have forgotten how bad it can be.

Roald Dahl understood how terrible measles could be. His seven-year old daughter died from it:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

He wrote that in 1988, and pointed out that in America, where immunization is compulsory, measles has been virtually wiped out. Conversely, in Britain, 20 children a year were dying of measles.

So how did we go from having compulsory immunizations to having communities in California with fewer immunized children (percentage-wise) than Ghana? Well, that all goes back to America’s hatred of all things intellectual.

Most Americans report that they respect Science, but they don’t follow up those statements by actually relying on the results of meticulous peer-reviewed studies. How else do you explain the anti-vaccine movement? It’s ironic that the parents who refuse to immunize their children rely on the discredited Wakefield study, yet refuse to acknowledge the truths of every other vaccine study ever done. When presented with evidence that refutes their position, they just go clicking away on the internet to find something that reinforces it (never mind that what they find is easily refuted with facts – and by the way, don’t click the link unless you feel like being really angry for a while.)

Let’s step back for a moment, though. How could one discredited study in a British medical journal turn so many American parents into blithering idiots? Oh, right. That study needed to be championed by someone relatively famous. Enter Jenny McCarthy. What is she famous for, you ask? She took her clothes off and posed for a magazine. Thus began her ascent into stardom.

America is great, isn’t it?

The problem is that parents are predisposed to worry. If they hear the same anti-vaccine drumbeat over and over again, then they might find themselves thinking that vaccines are great and all, but why should I risk my own child’s well-being? I mean, there’s controversy, right? Better to wait it out.

It’s hard to think rationally as a worried parent. Why should a parent elevate the concerns of society over her own child? The chances that a vaccine will harm a child is so infinitely small compared to the chances that a communicable disease will cause harm. But since there is a chance, parents assume their child will be “the one.” It’s the same rationalization that people use for playing the lottery – well, somebody has to win.

The truth of the matter is that there are some people who can’t have vaccines. Babies, for example. Immuno-compromised people. A tiny fraction of people are allergic to the vaccines. But we can protect them. It’s our duty to other people’s children to get vaccinated if we can. When we have 95% immunity, then the herd is more or less protected. We have to remember that humans have survived because they have banded together. Every man for himself is a terrible social policy.

The anti-vaccine movement joins two sides of the political spectrum in an unholy alliance against all things sensible: right wing Christians waiting for the apocalypse (any day now) and left wing all-natural tree-hugging hippies that don’t want to put any “toxins” into little Braxxxton’s arm.

Okay. For the Christians – didn’t Jesus go around healing everyone? Wasn’t that, like, one of his things? I would hazard a guess that he would be pro-vaccine, given that vaccines have prevented innumerable deaths from measles, polio, and just about everything else.

Now for the hippies – you know viruses are natural, right? Things that are natural aren’t always better. No amount of fish oil is going to prevent little Jaxon Jayden from getting measles. Vaccines will, though.

Rational people should despair. It turns out, spreading pro-vaccine messages just doesn’t work. It causes lunatics to retreat further into their own belief systems. Why assimilate new facts and make a rational decision when you can just plug your ears and say, “nuh-uh?”

Anti-intellectualism isn’t new. Isaac Asimov famously said:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. We saw a burgeoning of anti-intellectualism during George W. Bush’s administration. Voters liked him, because he wasn’t an intellectual snob (though I would contend that he is actually very smart and politically savvy.) Voters wanted to “have a beer” with that guy. It’s pretty much the only qualification you need to be the leader of the most powerful and influential nation in the world.

So, politicians have picked up that ball and run with it. Rick Santorum famously called President Obama a snob, because Obama suggested that Americans should get a post-secondary education. That was curious to me. I can’t imagine a lot of parents thinking, “Hell yeah, no college for my kid!”

More recently, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has proposed a $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin system (the largest in its 45-year history.) Walker suggested that professors could just “work harder” to overcome the budget cuts. Walker, himself, never earned a college degree. Meanwhile, he’s also proposing a tax kickback to the billionaire owners of the Milwaukee Bucks. Sports are more important than education. I wonder if the owners of the Bucks will contribute to Walker’s 2016 presidential run.

So, we’re off and running. The US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is all about privatizing K-12 education, so it’s not like Republicans are the only ones to blame. The anti-intellectualism leads to middle-aged school teachers being deemed union “thugs” and education dismantlers to be called “reformers.” Soon, our education system will benefit the haves even more than it already does. And cable news networks and websites will tell the have-nots how good they have it as they die from their preventable diseases.

And when someone presents the facts of the situation, the undeniable facts, somehow these people will find a website that supports their own position and disregard reality. The internet is great and all, but it has definitely led to the closing of American minds.

Slave-owners didn’t want their slaves to be literate. Likewise, if the power brokers can somehow convince the American populace that learning things if for “snobs” and then remove funding for universities so that only the richest can attend, then they will have accomplished the same thing. Anti-intellectualism, at its heart, is a tool for maintaining power and dominance over others.

There was no revolution in the Roman Republic. The citizens more or less willingly gave up their democracy. Eventually the Roman Empire crumbled under the weight of its opulence, income disparity, and corruption.

(Spoiler alert – We’re Rome.)