A reminder that failing to believe in well-supported facts, overwhelming evidence, and broadly accepted science comes back to cause real misery. That includes those who want to use climate change denial as a reason to keep altering the environment. And it most definitely, directly, and immediately applies for those unlucky enough to be associated with anti-vaccine activists.

The young mother started getting advice early on from friends in the close-knit Somali immigrant community here. Don’t let your children get the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella — it causes autism, they said. ... a discredited theory that spread rapidly through the local Somali community, fanned by meetings organized by anti-vaccine groups. The advocates repeatedly invited Andrew Wakefield, the founder of the modern anti-vaccine movement, to talk to worried parents. Immunization rates plummeted and, last month, the first cases of measles appeared. Soon, there was a full-blown outbreak, one of the starkest consequences of an intensifying anti-vaccine movement in the United States and around the world that has gained traction in part by targeting specific communities.

What do anti-vaccine advocates have to say about providing information that has, so far, led to 41 cases of measles?

“The Somalis had decided themselves that they were particularly concerned,” Wakefield said last week. “I was responding to that.”

Anti-vaccine advocates exploited a vulnerable community, already isolated from neighbors by prejudice and rumors that Somali refugees are tied to terrorism. Wakefield used this situation to bolster his own importance and continue spreading information that’s both incorrect and harmful.

They organized meetings, handed out pamphlets, bullied those trying to correct their lies—and the result was a lot of sick kids.