Anti-vaccination beliefs don't follow the usual political polarization (2017)
theconversation.com

... When health officials learned that the 2015 measles outbreak was caused by clusters of unvaccinated children, Americans once more wanted to understand why some parents do not vaccinate their children. In our highly polarized culture, media commentators and even academics began to connect opposition to vaccination to either the left or right of politics.

So a question arises: Who is more likely to be opposed to vaccination, liberals or conservatives? As a sociologist who studies infectious disease, I took a look at this. The answer seems to depend on what question you ask.

Because the outbreak started in the wealthy, liberal enclave of Marin County, California, and because some of the best-known "anti-vaxxers" are Hollywood actors, some right-leaning media outlets connected opposition to vaccination to liberals and related it to other "anti-science" beliefs like fear of GMOs, use of alternative medicine, and even astrology. Other writers have opposed such a caricature and have argued that opposition to vaccination is actually either bipartisan or a specifically conservative problem. Academic research on the topic is also conflicted.

While historians have shown that there is a long history of opposition to vaccination in America, the contemporary anti-vaccination movement got its major boost in 1998 when Andrew Wakefield published faulty research in The Lancet that falsely claimed that the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine was related to autism.
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