Measles and madness

From the early 1930s to roughly the late 1960s and early 70s, the United States experienced a series of progressive transformations that taken together can be considered a non-violent revolution. The changes included more economic security for the poor and the elderly, civil and voting rights for Blacks, empowerment and better wages for workers thanks to their unions, the women’s movement and the right to an abortion, the end of a racist immigration policy that favored white northern Europeans, and an expansion in the rights of gays, lesbians, Latinos and other marginalized groups.

For the last five decades, in contrast, this country has undergone an accelerating and multifaceted counterrevolution led by the Republican Party. The objective is to undo all that was accomplished through that bloodless revolution.

We have gone from the New Deal and the war on poverty to the old deal of deep economic inequality and a moral and monetary war on the poor. We have moved from progressive taxes to trickle-down economics and regressive taxation. We have witnessed the destruction of unions and with it the bargaining and earning power of workers. We have transitioned from a generally liberal and fair immigration policy toward a more restrictionist and discriminatory one. We have regressed from Roe v. Wade to a law, approved in Alabama this week, that prohibits almost all abortions; from multiculturalism to white nationalism; from environmentalism to corporate depredation of soil, air and water. Last but not least, from being the nation that thanks to science put the first person on the moon and discovered vaccines that wiped out ancient maladies to a country in which the anti-vaccination crusade of charlatans has produced an outbreak of the measles, declared eradicated in 2000, and where climate change denialism powered by profit and willful ignorance has brought the world to the brink of mass species extinction, including the extinction of our own species.

Analyzing deeply and in detail all of these reactionary trends requires a major book. Today, I will focus on just one small manifestation of the anti-science counterrevolution and leave the big one for a later article.

The current outbreak of measles is a direct result of the unscientific belief that vaccines cause autism. The myth is belied by the fact that neuroscientists can detect the telltale signs of autism as early as three months, long before vaccines are administered, which is not before the age of one year. Since causality does not run backwards, a vaccine administered at age one cannot be the cause of a disease already evident in an encephalogram at three months. But the cranks and the charlatans continue to spout the myth of a vaccine-autism connection, and too many people believe them. This is madness. This is dangerous.

While the alleged connection between vaccination and measles is bogus, the connection between non-vacccination and unnecessary mortality is real. As late as 1990-91, fourteen-hundred people in Philadelphia came down with the measles. Six died, all of them unvaccinated children.

By 2000, measles was declared eradicated. Now it’s back, thanks to misinformation, ignorance and sheer stupidity. So far in this outbreak, over 800 cases in 23 states have been identified. The danger is not only the risk of disease and death for the children of parents who refuse to vaccinate them. The more children that should could be vaccinated that are not vaccinated, the higher the risk for those too young or too sick to be vaccinated.

The counterrevolutionary tide we are living through bears many faces, has many facets. A common thread that runs through all or most of them is that they are a grounded in a mindset that flies in the face of reason, evidence, and facts:

• No, lowering taxes at the top doesn’t trickle down to those below. 
• Yes, mammoth tax reductions greatly increase the deficit, and they don’t pay for themselves through increased economic activity and revenue. 
• Immigrants are an asset and not a liability, Chinese immigrant workers made the railroad that brought east and west together. 
• Black women are not a bunch of welfare queens. They perform some of the most necessary, messy and ill-paid jobs in the economy. 
• Shithole countries are not the ones saddled with underdevelopment and mass poverty. 
• Shithole nations are those who boast about all the aid they give poorer countries but really give only a minuscule amount relative to their national income and are unwilling to even provide health care for 100 percent of their own people. 

And Rogue Nations are those who refuse to abide by international law and constantly threaten adversaries and trample over friends.