I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about anti-vax ideology on the ascent in America, and the utterly predictable consequences that are soon to follow.
Vaccines empowered us to banish the killers that have plagued humanity for thousands of years. It was a victory that would have seemed unimaginably miraculous to anyone who lived before modern medicine. But in our victory, we got complacent. We forgot why we’d ever needed them, which left room for anti-vaxers to slip in, sowing their poisonous lies. Now this anti-rational ideology has gained control of one of our two major political parties, and through them, the government.
Red states and the corrupted federal government are rolling back vaccine mandates, and as sure as night follows day, these preventable diseases are reappearing: measles, polio, diphtheria, and more. Tragically, it’s the next generation of children who will pay the price. If we keep going down this path, we may end up revisiting the era when childhood death was a normal and expected part of existence.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only (registration is free!). Members of OnlySky also get a subscriber newsletter:
The consequences of ignorance are completely predictable, and we’re already seeing them. In 2022, polio reappeared in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave in upstate New York.
Then, in 2025, the U.S. suffered its biggest measles outbreak in at least twenty-five years, mostly striking unvaccinated religious communities in West Texas. Dozens of people were hospitalized, and three died: two children and an adult.
Pertussis, or whooping cough, is also surging. We’ve had over 20,000 cases so far, more than at this point last year, which was itself a fivefold increase from the year before that. There have already been ten infant deaths.
How much worse could it get? A research paper from April 2025 simulates the result for the U.S. if vaccination rates continue to drop, and arrives at some grim numbers.