The Faces of Antivaccine Parents: Overwhelmingly Affluent, White, and Suburban
I’ve been paying attention to the antivaccine movement a long time. Indeed, it’s been just under a decade since I made what was my first big splash in the blogosphere, namely my particularly “Insolent” takedown of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s conspiracy-laden, pseudoscience-spewing super-concentrated antivaccine nonsense known as Deadly Immunity. So here it is, almost ten years later, and RFK, Jr. is still around, spewing the same nonsense that he did ten years ago, except that this time he’s using Holocaust analogies to describe the vaccination program. Unfortunately, some things never seem to change.
Ever since I’ve taken a special interest in the antivaccination movement, periodically the issue comes up of just who makes up the antivaccine movement. The stereotype is that it’s a bunch of liberal, hippy-dippy lovers of “natural” living, but that’s not quite it. As I’ve pointed out more times than I can remember, antivaccine pseudoscience is the pseudoscience that crosses political boundaries, and there are quite a few conservatives with antivaccine beliefs, and antivaccinationism fits in very nicely with libertarianism, including Rand Paul. But this is not about the politics of antivaccine beliefs; rather it’s about another stereotype about antivaccinationists. However, a recent study hot off the presses in Pediatrics actually seems to confirm this particular stereotype, mainly that those who claim nonmedical exemptions from vaccine mandates tend to be white, affluent suburbanites.