At the beginning of this decade, there were clear lines in science denial. If you denied evolution or global warming, you were more likely to vote Republican, and if you denied medical, agricultural, or energy science, you were more likely to vote Democrat.

The evidence was clear; if you took a compass and drew a circle around a Whole Foods store, you were going to find anti-vaccine beliefs, organic food, and insistence that solar power would keep the lights running. And Whole Foods stores were only in wealthy areas, 80 percent of whom had voted for President Obama.

The right wing has been playing catch-up on anti-vax beliefs, according to an article in The New Yorker, but they will find the climate much more difficult than the left did. At the turn of this decade, anti-vaccine sentiment on the coasts was so high that in California some schools had under 30 percent of kids vaccinated. Meanwhile, states like Mississippi and Alabama, more right wing and religious than California and Oregon, had almost no vaccine exemptions for any reason except medical. They created a phalanx around each other to show support. If none of your friends had kids vaccinated, you felt okay; 'let poor Republicans provide the herd immunity and risk getting autism.'

But things got better. Thanks to Dr. Richard Pan, California passed a law to keep wealthy coastal elites from spreading preventable infectious diseases and there are too few right-wing people to matter. And vaccine denial on the right was just a few fringe religious kooks, it was not a whole cadre of Hollywood celebrities and a New York Times columnist like Eric Lipton defending Moms Across America when he is not promoting the organic industry as an alternative to science.



When President Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008, he floated anti-vaccine crackpot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as head of EPA. When President Trump met with RFK, Jr. after his 2016 victory and I wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he should avoid such lunatics, the President's team immediately assured the science community that there was not going to be a vaccine commission out to undermine their safety regardless of what Kennedy suggested.  

The New Yorker may worry that the right will catch up to the left in vaccine denial, but it may be that they are pretty far out of the mainstream, geographically and politically. Or it could just be wishful thinking on their part, since the anti-vaccine agenda has long been a black mark on a political party that claims to be more evidence-based than its opposition.