Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin with Donald Trump

It’s been a banner week for anti-vax, anti-science, anti-sense information that is anti-American in the most fundamental sense: because it directly threatens the health and lives of Americans. And unfortunately, one of the most prominent voices for anti-vax on the left is contributing to this threat in a way that could raise the body count as much as those on the right could.

On Thursday, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin let it be known that he had intentionally exposed his nine children to chickenpox rather than give any of them the chickenpox vaccine. Bevins was smugly proud of this, explaining that “it all turned out fine.” Except that it didn’t, because this exposure set his children up to develop shingles later in life, a condition that can be not only extremely painful, but potentially disabling or blinding. And that’s far from the limit of what might have happened, or what might still happen.

Chickenpox may strike children, but it’s not kid’s stuff. Previous to the development of the vaccine, nearly 13,000 Americans ended up hospitalized each year for complications related to chickenpox. Between 100 and 150 of them died. The availability of the vaccine dropped the number of deaths by 87 percent, but in encouraging people to not get vaccinated, Bevin in setting up a situation that could easily—easily—lead to increased deaths, disability, and disfigurement.

Unfortunately, he’s not alone. And his companions in attempting to murder Americans via ignorance aren’t limited to parents who refuse vaccines for measles or whooping cough because they’ve been falsely convinced of a nonexistent link between vaccines and autism. On Thursday, Robert Kennedy Jr. used the prominence of his family name—again—to suggest that there’s a connection between increased rates of anxiety and depression among American teens and the Gardasil vaccine. This vaccine protects Americans, both men and women, from developing life-threatening cancers caused by human papillomavirus. In particular, these viruses are a leading cause of cervical cancer in women. In the United States, there are an estimated 24 million active cases of papillomavirus infection, leading to between 100,000 and 200,000 cases of cervical cancer each year, and around 12,000 deaths.

Anti-vaxxers made the Gardasil vaccine a target shortly after it became available, using claims of toxicity and playing off parents’ fears that the vaccine would somehow license young people to be “more sexually active.” Those claims have already resulted in decreased use of the vaccine in some areas, and have made the effort to deploy the medication more difficult. Even the most casual Google search for information on papillomavirus or cervical cancer is likely to turn up false information on “the dangers of vaccines.”