From the Tuesday Morning Jolt:

Inoculating Ourselves from ‘Gotcha’ Stories on Vaccine Skepticism

Ace explains the media’s sudden interest in vaccination policy:

Vaccines are the media’s new “Birth Control Pills” question for the GOP — injecting an out-of-nowhere wedge issue question into the debate just because it hurts the GOP.

Almost all GOP politicians are pro-vaccination, of course — but a distressing number of GOP voters are against it, making this a politically difficult question.

Note that the media could drop any number of such wedge issue questions on Democrats — do you favor the making taxpayers pay for voluntary sex-reassignment surgery — but they don’t because they’re Democrats themselves and want to hide such wedge issues, not expose them.

As I noted Monday, Barack Obama – and Hillary Clinton! – called for further research into an alleged connection between vaccinations and autism rates back in 2008. This isn’t because they’re true vaccination skeptics, and not, as Obama defenders insist, that back in 2008 the case for a connection between vaccinations and autism was stronger. When you’re a politician, and you do town halls, there’s a good chance you’ll encounter a parent of a child with autism utterly convinced that some vaccine is what caused it. The last thing a politician wants to do is come across as an unsympathetic jerk to a parent of a child with autism. So the safe answer is not, “no, there’s no link between vaccinating children and autism, and your denunciations of vaccination programs endangers public health”, it’s for the candidate to express deep concern and sympathy and call for more research.

Of course, that sympathetic punting non-answer leaves the candidate sounding like he may agree with the parent who is convinced that vaccines cause autism.

Plus, most officeholders and candidates probably feel some nagging doubt about their ability to evaluate the merits of the claims of parents and the contentions of the medical community.

Of course, there are some candidates who do know a thing or two about medicine:

Dr. Ben Carson, a prospective Republican presidential candidate, said Monday people should not be allowed to refuse vaccines on religious or philosophical grounds.

“Although I strongly believe in individual rights and the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit, I also recognize that public health and public safety are extremely important in our society,” Carson said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.

Carson said diseases of the past should not be allowed to return because of people avoiding vaccines on religious or philosophical grounds.

“Certain communicable diseases have been largely eradicated by immunization policies in this country and we should not allow those diseases to return by foregoing safe immunization programs, for philosophical, religious, or other reasons when we have the means to eradicate them,” Carson said in the statement.

“Obviously there are exceptional situations to virtually everything and we must have a mechanism whereby those can be heard,” he said.

But let’s face it; we’re never going to get a unanimous opinion in the medical community when we can’t even get a unanimous opinion between the doctors in the GOP field:

While vaccines have been one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in U.S. history, they should be voluntary, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told CNBC on Monday.

It’s an issue of freedom, he said.

“I’m not arguing vaccines are a bad idea. I think they are a good thing. But I think the parent should have some input. The state doesn’t own our children. Parents own the children,” Paul said in an interview with “Closing Bell.”

Paul was echoing comments he made earlier in the day to conservative radio host Laura Ingraham.

“What happens if you have somebody not wanting to take the smallpox vaccine and it ruins it for everybody else? I think there are times in which there can be some rules, but for the first part it ought to be voluntary,” he told Ingraham.

Rick Wilson warns, “If you’re relying on the libertarian argument alone, prepare for ads full of kids in iron lungs and with measles. It’s what I’d do.”

Here’s the good news: According to the CDC, 94.7 percent of the nation’s kindergartners are vaccinated for measles. But a few states have much higher levels of parents claiming a religious objection to the vaccination, or claiming. “philosophic exemptions.” Oregon is the worst at 7.1 percent of kindergartners; Idaho is at 6.4 percent, Vermont is at 6.2 percent.

Could the measles have come here from illegal immigrant children? It’s possible but perhaps not as likely as you might think. According to data from the World Health Organization and UNICEF, the three Central American countries that were the country of origin for most of last summer’s tsunami of children and teens actually have pretty good rates of immunization for measles. The measles immunization rate for children between 12 and 23 months of age in El Salvador in 2013 was 94 percent, for Guatemala it was 85 percent, and Nicaragua’s was 99 percent.

In the United States, the rate was 91 percent. Note that Mexico’s was 99 percent in 2012 but dropped to 89 percent in 2013.