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The connection might not be obvious, but the surging popularity of the “wellness” movement is just part of a wide and deep strain of anti-science flakery in our culture that implicates almost all of us on one way or another. If we want to understand why we have so much trouble with vaccine denialism, it might be worth starting by admitting that we’re all part of the problem.

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It is impossible to overstate the impact of public vaccination programs. In an era that saw enormous advances on a number of fronts, mass immunization was probably the single greatest public health initiative of the 20th century. Aside from the MMR vaccine that had brought those diseases under control, we’ve largely eliminated smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis, whooping cough, and polio. Chicken pox is usually harmless, many of us had it as kids, but there’s a vaccine for that now too, along with one for HPV.

In short, the anti-vaccine movement is not a joke, it’s not even some mostly-harmless hippy dippy fugue

Yet slowly but surely we’re turning our back on this success. The United States declared measles eliminated from its soil in 2000, but now the map of communities that are losing the critical mass of herd immunity grows by the day. Japan, Italy, France, New Zealand and Ukraine all face significant measles outbreaks, and in Madagascar over 1,000 people, mostly kids, have died since October.

In short, the anti-vaccine movement is not a joke, it’s not even some mostly-harmless hippy dippy fugue, even in the form of resistance that is currently being soft-pedalled by a blowback-shy media as “vaccine hesitancy.” The World Health Organization lists it as one of the top ten global threats to public health ­— alongside such apocalyptic horrors as antibiotic-resistant microbes and Ebola.