In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. The antivax movement has led to outbreaks of measles, which are costly. There are already more cases of measles than in all of 2018.
CDC reports:
Lena Sun at WP:
In Austin, Del Bigtree, chief executive of an anti-vaccination group called ICAN, wore a yellow star during a rally last Thursday to identify with parents who decline to vaccinate their children. A spokesman for Bigtree said he took the action “to let the Jewish community of Rockland County know he stands with them.”
After photos of Bigtree were posted on Twitter, the official account of the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum in Poland tweeted in response: “Instrumentalizing the fate of Jews who were persecuted by hateful anti-Semitic ideology and murdered in extermination camps like #Auschwitz with poisonous gas in order to argue against vaccination that saves human lives is a symptom of intellectual and moral degeneration.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement: “Groups advancing a political or social agenda should be able to assert their ideas without trivializing the memory of the six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.”
