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.
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It’s not just the USA with vax idiocy. The UK also, and a Dutch friend of mine has gone down the rabbithole, so much so that she’s now claiming every vaccine now has the Covid vax in it because SHUT UP THAT’S WHY. Alarmingly, she told her elderly mother with dementia and COPD that she is not allowed to get any shot from here on out–not the pneumonia shot her doctor wants her to get, not the flu shot her doctor wants her to get, nothing.
In other news, my spouse trolled his conspiracy theory brother who insists medbeds are real because Trump said so, by saying we got our medbed cards already.
To summarize: to these people, putting on a mask, washing your hands, and keeping a safe distance from other people is crazytalk…but a magic bed that uses alien-given technology to regrow limbs and rewrite human DNA is totes for realsies.
Yes, this one is subscribers-only. But it’s free to subscribe. 🙂
What’s really astounding me about the anti-vaxxers is that children are dying of preventable diseases…and that still doesn’t break their bubble of willful ignorance. In some cases, their own children are dying of preventable diseases, and it still doesn’t break the bubble.
Part of the problem may be that once they’ve committed themselves heart and soul to a movement, they literally can’t EVER bring themselves to admit, even to themselves, that they’d picked the wrong side and that they share the blame for whatever inexcusable atrocity resulted from their actions. This is also why Republicans probably won’t lose very much support among their “base,” no matter how obviously wrong and senile Trump shows himself to be, even when they’re among the people most shafted by Republican policies.
Another part of it may be that, while parents tend to have an instinctual drive to love and protect their children, they may also have another instinctual drive to “toughen them up,” and let the weakest ones die for the overall health of the tribe.
In the 80s, the Thatcher government put out a whole bunch of ads – print and video, the latter memorably voiced by no lesser actor than John Hurt – about the new scary thing on the block – AIDS. The tagline was “Don’t die of ignorance”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT-RH_2gfog
Americans are starting to die of ignorance, and the trend seems to be accelerating.
It’s almost like the people in power there are actively trying to abdicate their status as a superpower and help China take over setting the agenda.
Anti-vax lunacy has been there from the beginning, in many countries including the UK. From a recent BBC article: “In the UK, a series of Vaccination Acts, passed in 1840, 1853 and 1871, made immunisation for children first free, then compulsory.
But almost immediately, another challenge emerged: a spate of anti-vaccination leagues sprung up around the country.
The “personal freedom” argument, in particular, seemed to be especially compelling to the residents of Stockholm, Sweden – only 40% of whom were vaccinated against smallpox in 1873, while in the rest of the country, 90% of the population was. The following year, a massive smallpox outbreak hit Sweden, leading to a death toll of 330 per 10,000 residents of Stockholm – more than 10 times the mortality rate for the rest of Sweden.
Still, the anti-vaccine movement denied all evidence of vaccine efficacy, attributing such improvements to things like improved sanitation. In the late 1800s in Leicester, anti-vaccine campaigners insisted that quarantining and mandatory reporting – measures supposed to be used alongside vaccination – were sufficient on their own. Following an outbreak in 1894, proponents declared this strategy a triumph: 20.5 per 10,000 people in the population were infected. But they ignored the fact that healthcare workers were already vaccinated, and that children were disproportionally hit, with two-thirds of cases in Leicester afflicting children.
By contrast, London, where most of the population was vaccinated, saw far fewer children sickened or killed. Its overall measles case rate also was just one-quarter of Leicester’s, at 5.5 per 10,000.
Anti-vaccine activism did not disappear, however. Instead, the advent of the information age – particularly the internet – gave new life to some of the messages first spread 225 years ago. With the dawn of social media in the early 2000s, this only intensified. In 2018, nine in 10 UK adults said vaccines were safe and effective. In 2023, seven in 10 did.“