Wired has a long piece by Amy Wallace about the anti-science anti-vaccine crowd.
Ah, risk. It is the idea that fuels the anti-vaccine movement -- that parents should be allowed to opt out, because it is their right to evaluate risk for their own children. It is also the idea that underlies the CDC's vaccination schedule -- that the risk to public health is too great to allow individuals, one by one, to make decisions that will impact their communities. (The concept of herd immunity is key here: It holds that, in diseases passed from person to person, it is more difficult to maintain a chain of infection when large numbers of a population are immune.)
Update: I am on Team Tom Scocca on this issue:
Anti-vaccine activists are degenerate idiots who deserve to get polio and live out their days in iron lungs while Child Protective Services takes away their children to be properly raised. Or tetanus. Get lockjaw and shut up and die. What's the point of living in 21st-century America if not to avoid dying of stupid, easily preventable disease?
And Slate has an article about the effects of unvaccinated children on those with weak immune systems.
Ordinarily I wouldn't question others' parenting choices. But the problem is literally one of live or don't live. While that parent chose not to vaccinate her child for what she likely considers well-founded reasons, she is putting other children at risk. In this instance, the child at risk was my son. He has leukemia.
(thx, cedar)
Update: Ben Goldacre on anti-vaccine scares as a cultural thing, not a science thing:
There's something very interesting about vaccine scares. These are cultural products. They're not about evidence. If vaccine scares were about genuine scientific evidence showing that a vaccine caused a disease, then the vaccine scares would happen all around the world at exactly the same time, because information can disseminate itself around the world very rapidly these days. But what you find is that vaccine scares actually respect cultural and national boundaries.
(via lined and unlined)