re: #43 Charles

That’s simply not true. This is not a “left wing” issue. There are plenty of right wingers who are just as crazy about vaccines.

Yeah, I was not trying to suggest that anti-vax is “only” a liberal thing. However, my personal experience has been that conservatives who refuse vaccines do so on a religious basis — i.e., they acknowledge vaccines have utility, but take the position (right or wrong) that their religious beliefs are more important. There are undoubtedly some that avoid vaccines because they think they are a plot by space communists from beyond Neptune, but thankfully I don’t interact with those folks (same thing with the ‘fluoridated water = brain control’ squad). On the liberal front, the anti-vax stance seems to be a more direct and active refutation of the underlying science — namely that vaccines cause autism or mercury poisoning or harelips or something. These were the folks Klein was concerned about when he attended a family health meeting and, as I recall the article, a doctor started talking about how the odds were pretty good of polio not really harming your kids anyway. I guess I don’t like how conservatives can be generally smeared as “anti-science” when liberals have just as many subsets of anti-science quacks of their own. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to throw on my circulatory magnet wristbands and pound some St. John’s Wort to really limber up my chakras.