Some kids in North Carolina didn't get vaccinated, so some kids in North Carolina got chickenpox. That's the takeaway from a Washington Post report examining the latest infectious disease outbreak in an anti-vax hotbed—this one, thankfully, outside the usual confines of California. It's about time we ramped up the geographic diversity, and it seems they've got a bit of a problem at the Asheville Waldorf School:

Chickenpox has taken hold of a school in North Carolina where many families claim religious exemption from vaccines. Cases of chickenpox have been multiplying at the Asheville Waldorf School, which serves children from nursery school to sixth grade in Asheville, N.C. About a dozen infections grew to 28 at the beginning of the month. By Friday, there were 36, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported.
The outbreak ranks as the state’s worst since the chickenpox vaccine became available more than 20 years ago. Since then, the two-dose course has succeeded in limiting the highly contagious disease that once affected 90 percent of Americans — a public health breakthrough.

There is something quintessentially American about being able to get a "religious exemption" from something that exhaustive scientific study indicates will keep your child healthier. (Also, it's not just your kid: some people cannot get vaccinated, and depend on so-called herd immunity—where a big enough percentage of the community is vaccinated that it's difficult to transmit disease—to avoid illness.) Apparently, the percentage of kids under two who go unvaccinated in this country has quadrupled since 2001, because yeah, your doctor says they're safe, but did you read that email with the subject "FW:FW:FW:FW:FW: vaccine DEATH??"

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As the Post went on to spell out, there is absolutely no question—among people who actually know about these things—whether the chickenpox vaccine is safe and effective:

That was before a two-dose vaccination program was introduced in the United States in 1995. The virus used to crop up in about 4 million cases annually in the United States, causing more than 10,000 hospitalizations and between 100 and 150 deaths...
The vaccine, which the CDC says is about 90 percent effective, hasn’t eliminated the varicella zoster virus, which causes chickenpox. But since the regimen became commercially available, it has reduced the number of cases, as well as their severity. A 14-year prospective study published in Pediatrics in 2013 found that the incidence of infection was nine- to 10-times lower than in the pre-vaccine era.

None of that's enough to stop an American with the courage of their own boneheaded convictions, however. In recent years, we've seen measles (!) outbreaks in New Jersey, Minnesota, and California. In 2014, the CDC reports there were 23 measles outbreaks in the United States. The majority of people who got it were unvaccinated.

While a lot of the anti-science in America is concentrated on the right—where the scientific consensus that, say, climate change is real and man-made is often dismissed out of hand—anti-vax is closer to equal-opportunity insanity. Plenty of those refusing to follow doctors' advice out in California are card-carrying liberal types, though only the Republican Party was home to two (2) presidential candidates last time around who raised doubts about the safety of vaccines. One, of course, is now the president:

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Another was, incredibly, a world-renowned neurosurgeon. Perhaps Ben Carson is proof that experts, too, can have wild ideas—or can disregard the work of experts. Carson, for instance, also disregards the work of Egyptologists to claim the Pyramids at Giza were built by the biblical Joseph in order to store grain. But claims about vaccines—and climate change—are built on expert consensus, in which claims become the prevailing view of the wider scientific community only after extensive testing and debate. It's not just some guy spouting off on a street corner—or, you know, the presidential debate stage.

There's a current of anti-intellectualism in American life, where expertise is conflated with elitism—and experts are dismissed as arrogant know-it-alls in favor of "common sense" or "all-natural" solutions. Common sense isn't common. Listen to your doctor.

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Jack Holmes
Senior Staff Writer

Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.