Science as Anathema

In June of this year, California voted into law the nation's strictest school vaccination law. It requires children enrolled in public and private schools to be vaccinated against whooping cough, measles, and some other diseases. No exceptions are provided for religious or personal beliefs. Moving away from the facts somewhat, I'd like to offer up my personal feelings regarding this situation.

Finally! Finally logic and modern medicine prevail over irrational thinking. Finally we take the safety of our children and our public spaces out of the hands of those who would argue, against all logic, for unproven holistic medicinal practices over proven science.

But that also isn't really my point. My question is really, "Why?" Why the irrational fear of vaccines? Why the misplaced trust in a scientific article linking vaccines and autism by a proven fraudulent scientist? Why do people jump on the anti-vaxxer bandwagon when the evidence against them seems so insurmountable?

This divide, between vaccine advocates and anti-vaxxers, is very prominent within my own family. My direct family is very closely tied to science, as a result we put our trust in the medical establishment above alarmist new sources. My cousins, on the other hand, run a yoga/meditation studio up in the mountains of Colorado. One in particular posts daily on the evils of vaccines and the conspiracies behind it. I have read the articles he links to, and simply cannot understand how someone who seems to be intelligent would be unable to see through these artifices.

The anti-vaccine movement is not a new phenomenon. I think, rather, it is a continuation of a historic mistrust of science, something that has existed since Galileo declared the Earth was not the center of the universe. It is hard for me to understand this mistrust entirely, but I can guess at one cause. The most controversial scientific thoughts often defy what our own eyes, ears, and intuition tell us. It appears, without the aid of more detailed instruments, that the sun revolves around the Earth and not the other way around. It seems illogical that injecting virus into our bloodstream in fact protects us from the virus. Yet science says it is so. This refutal of what seems self-evident is understandably terrifying, and to many, the only response is to reject science entirely.