The Sad Truth About the Vaccine Debate's Superstitious Roots

Things looked pretty darn good in the middle of the twentieth century. We split the atom, using its energy for power and to send the most dead-end, dead-enders of the Axis scurrying. The Green Revolution saved a billion people from starving to death. On the micro level, we developed vaccines for polio, mumps measles and rubella.

In other words, we had the future and it was so bright, the world had to wear shades.

Fast forward another half-century.

In January 2015, we have at least 91 people infected in an outbreak linked to Disney Land. School districts are quarantining some students. The disease has spread from the happiest place on earth to other states and beyond our borders.

To keep this in perspective, we had 644 cases of measles in the United States for the year of 2014. That was a record year.

But hey, these things happen. After all, President Obama made our border easier to crack than a high school kegger and invited an unprecedented surge of illegal alien kids to crash that party. So an uptick of children’s diseases makes sense, right?

One problem.

The disease is hitting the unvaccinated Americans and those unvaccinated aren’t born in East LA.

According to the National Institutes of Health,

“[u]nvaccinated children tended to be white, to have a mother who was married and had a college degree, to live in a household with an annual income exceeding 75,000 dollars, and to have parents who expressed concerns regarding the safety of vaccines and indicated that medical doctors have little influence over vaccination decisions for their children” (emphasis added).

So it’s not the poor and ignorant who avoid vaccines. It’s the Real Housewives of Orange County.

Why?

Well, in their defense, they have Jenny McCarthy on her side. And Jenny McCarthy went on both Oprah and Larry King.

The reality is that a significant subset of our population has bought hook, line and sinker that vaccines cause autism. They even had a study that showed the link between vaccines and autism.

Of course that study is discredited, not as an error but as an actual fraud by a man paid by the lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers. Its author lost his medical license. His coauthors removed their names from the study. Lancet, which carried the fraudulent data, pulled it.

Yet the non-vaccinated children still come from educated households.

Because autism.

Okay, that’s just one crazy superstition that can kind of make sense because a washed-up Playboy model glommed onto a fraudulent study.

That’s no reason to see a trend, right?

Well, look at the case of manmade global warming.

Well, wait. Here the elites have science. After all, didn’t President Obama point out that 2014 was the hottest year in human history?

If you can’t trust a president who just had his butt handed to him in the midterms, whom can you trust?

Except, well, science and its refutation of his claim.

In ancient days, when life was nasty, brutish and short, people looked for any sort of advantage to reach the ripe old age of 30. First, there was fire and with it came cool things like keeping the animals at bay and not having bleeding runs every time you ate your latest kill. Then came the wheel, an easier way to get that steaming carcass of meat from here to there.

But let’s face it. In the game of survival, there’s no better way to get an edge on the local saber-toothed tiger — or your annoying neighbor — than seeing the future.

Thus we have the casting of bones because everybody knows that if anything is linked to the future, it’s chicken bones.

I mean, that’s just logic.

Global warming alarmists have their own version of chicken bones, in the form of computer climate models:

Chart via the Wall Street Journal 

Problem: When compared to what is actually observed in the real world, the climate models fail to make accurate predictions. And this is a consistent problem.

You have to think that if our chicken-bone-throwing ancestors noticed that none of their throws matched up to actual events, they’d realize something was wrong. Perhaps they might not give up on the enterprise of chicken-bone throwing altogether – after all, who can deny chicken bones? – but they might decide that they’d killed a defective chicken.

Today’s educated savages can’t even make that leap. An honest man would say since the models don’t figure in things like water vapor – just a small part of the atmosphere, after all – and don’t actually predict the future, let’s try something else.

Instead, the educated savages award the computer modelers the Nobel Prize.

Primitive superstition is also strong in Leftist economics.

In World War II, the tribes of Papua New Guinea saw vast amounts of wealth coming into the Pacific on both the Allied and Axis sides. They had no way to comprehend the power of industrialized economies fully mobilized and dedicated to the largest war the world had ever seen. The natives made the natural assumption that spirits sent cargo to the earth and the evil outsiders jacked the loot.

So they built fake airplanes. They erected structures in the jungle and filled them with fake cash, sometimes even making fake suitcases.

Hmmm. Make work projects paid for with worthless currency. Doesn’t that sound like Obama’s stimulus plan or Paul Krugman – another educated savage Nobel laureate –  looking for an alien threat in order to create demand to boost the economy?

Yes, Keynesian economic theory is a cargo cult, dressed up in suits and the flowery rhetoric of the university. Unfortunately, it shows the same effectiveness.

Welcome to the new Dark Ages, a time of policy based on superstitions easily recognized by savages sitting around the campfire. They might not understand the terms of the new cargo cults that have risen but they’d understand that old time religion.

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image illustration via shutterstock / maximillion