Chris Christie has done it again.
By “it,” we mean stumbled into a public health crisis.
Democratic societies are always preoccupied with striking the best balance between private liberty and the public good. Extreme examples: Should it be legal to smoke meth and drive-by shoot your neighbors’ mailboxes? Should the government track everybody’s every move, just to make sure none of us are up to anything naughty?
A significant majority of people would, we’re sure, agree that neither of those situations should be allowed to happen — but sometimes, the answer isn’t so obvious.
In the mind of Christie, this seems to be the case in regard to the recent flare-up of vaccination controversies. Measles, a disease which was considered eradicated just 15 years ago, made a nasty comeback last month.
The outbreak began when a few dozen people, most of whom had not been vaccinated against measles, were exposed to it at Disneyland in California. Since then, the virus has infected 102 people in 14 states. Responsibility for the outbreak lies on the hack doctors and celebrities of the anti-vaccination movement, who urge parents not to immunize their children using pseudoscience to fuel paranoia.
It was into this mess that Christie made his clumsy foray earlier this week. While maintaining he and his wife are personally in favor of vaccination, he said parents should have “some measure of choice” in the matter.
We’re facing the worst outbreak of measles — a disease that is entirely preventable — in decades, all because a few thousand people felt too entitled, or too trusting of junk science, to bother inoculating their kids against it.
Of the many, many facts anti-vaxxers fail to understand or realize, a rather serious one is that the choice of electing not to vaccinate themselves and their children affects everybody else, too.
As every shred of credible evidence has already demonstrated, there is a positive correlation between the number of people vaccinated against a virus and the scarcity of that virus’ impact on people.
Beyond that obvious fact, high immunization rates help to protect those who are too young or old, or whose immune systems are too weak to be vaccinated. It’s a concept called “herd immunity,” and it protects the vulnerable among us who can’t be inoculated themselves. Anti-vaccination advocates and their adherents, then, place their misinformed and conceited notions of health care above the safety and lives of everybody else.
We’re not suggesting that Christie — or anyone else, for that matter — forcibly vaccinate American citizens by any means. What we are suggesting, though, is for prominent political leaders like Christie to be more responsible with their rhetoric. His statement, though probably made in good faith, will serve to legitimize a sham strain of medical theory whose only result is making us all more prone to disease and suffering.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 2/3/2015 under the headline “Vaccination goes beyond personal choice"]
