Alex Seitz-Wald discovers that upper-class Americans are prone to not vaccinating their children:
Public health officials see large clusters of unvaccinated children in latte-drinking enclaves everywhere, like Ashland, Ore., and Boulder, Colo., where close to 30 percent of children are exempted from one vaccine or another. In some schools in Ashland two-thirds of the students have exemptions, according to Mark Largent, a James Madison College professor who wrote a book about the vaccine debate last year.
And new data out this month from the Centers for Disease Control shows what Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, calls a disturbing uptick in the number of children forgoing vaccinations. “For the first time ever, there are a handful of states which now have people who are choosing not to get vaccines at the greater than 5 percent level, which is a problem. That’s where you’re going to start to see some of these diseases coming back. And you’re already seeing it with whooping cough and other diseases,” he told Salon. Indeed, the anti-vaccination movement was blamed for helping cause the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years.
Marcotte wonders why the rich are becoming more anti-vaccine:
Seitz-Wald interviews some experts like Nina Shapiro, a professor at UCLA, who notes that anti-vaxx sentiment is “a little bit of a trend.” She describes it as “I’m going to be pure and I want to keep my child pure.” But that doesn’t quite get at why there’s such class differences here, since presumably people of all stripes object to the notion of poisoning their children and therefore are vulnerable to propaganda that paints vaccinations as poisonous. I’d posit that refusing vaccination has become something of a status symbol, a way to distinguish your special snowflake from the herd. It’s in line with other trends of varied inherent value, such as putting your kid in a private school, not allowing him to ever eat trashy “kid” food like hot dogs or macaroni and cheese, or forbidding her from engaging with pop culture.
The Dish 