There really is no other word to describe this. Mass hysteria makes it sound like it affects everyone. Mass stupidity isn't really true; these parents aren't dumb. Mass robotic cult-followers is a better term, but too clunky. And so mass nincompoopery seems correct.
Gaines County, Texas is full of vaccine skeptics. As predicted, a measles outbreak is spread throughout the county, killing one child. It has spread to neighboring New Mexico, where it just killed another child. It is spreading now throughout west Texas. There is an effective vaccine against measles, but people think it hurts their child, so they will not let their kids be vaccinated.
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| These are numbers from last week (Feb 28) |
The map above shows the number of cases last week. As of yesterday, there were over 30 cases in New Mexico and over 200 in Texas.
Increasingly, however, doctors also have to counter misleading information. One mother, a doctor said, told her she was giving her two children high doses of vitamin A to ward off measles, based on an article posted by Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nearly a decade before he became President Donald Trump's top health official.
Vitamin A is helpful in countries where malnourishment is rampant and children don't have enough vitamin A. That is not true in Texas, but parents have done "their own research". And so the outbreak keeps growing, and children keep going to the hospital (over 10% of the children infected are in the hospital now, and the numbers are growing.
Mass nincompoopery is the only description that holds.
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