The anti-vaccine crowd is a combination of woo guzzling liberals and conservatives. The biggest difference is that the liberals who are not vaccinating their kids don’t have significant elements of their favorably inclined political representation encouraging them while it looks like anti-vaccination will be yet another litmus test used to determine who today is a True Conservative ™ and who is a squish. Why? I think it might have something to do with how vaccines solve collective action problems and how the right does not like to recognize that these problems exist as a class.
Vaccines provide protection through two means. The first is direct protection. I get a shot for something and the probability of me getting that particular disease declines dramatically as my immune system now knows how to fight that type of invader. The second is indirect protection via herd immunity. If I get a shot, I go from being a possible vector and transmitter of a disease to another unvaccinated person to a very low probability of passing the disease along. Herd immunity only works when the vast majority of the population already is immune to a disease as the probabilities of a current carrier bumping into a receptive individual is fairly low if the general population is overwhelmingly vaccinated. If I am the only person in my county vaccinated for Itch Elbowitis (and no, I did not watch a lot of Nick Jr. last night with my kids), any current carrier of Itchy Elbowitis will be highly likely to bump into non-immune individuals by the time they get their first cup of coffee. A nasty bug won’t have the chance to get established in my community as it won’t bump into any receptive carriers during its infectious/spreading phase of its life cycle.
Should everyone get vaccinated?