Bill Nye has had it with dingbats and antivaxxers

Bill Nye

I’ve always known the Science Guy as a passionate yet mild-mannered promoter of reason and critical thinking, but it seems his patience is wearing thin with the rise of unscientific attitudes in the United States. He explains where the country’s anti-intellectual bent is likely to take it:

[I]t’s hard not to be critical of people who want to be ignorant, but I don’t think it can last. I don’t think the celebration of “dingbatitude” can stick with us because we’ll get out-competed by the non-dingbats. People will want to look to non-dingbats to innovate and keep the United States competitive.

It’s simple logic: Smart, healthy people will outperform and outlive dumb, sick people. This goes for individuals as well as entire nations. It’s only too bad the US is currently ruled by a party of cranks, morons and shills, all voted into power by an electorate that increasingly distrusts education. Already the country’s reputation is slipping around the world, and that trend isn’t likely to reverse itself within the next four years.

But Nye saves the brunt of his frustration for the special, dangerous kind of stupid that is antivaccination lunacy:

And for all the anti-vaxxers out there [in the theater audience], you have to get vaccinated. I don’t care about you. If you go ahead and get sick and die, knock yourself out. The reason I insist you get vaccinated is to protect me from you. Me! You get sick, the virus, the bacteria, mutates inside of you. You are the petri dish of death for the rest of us. Vaccines were discovered in the 17-freaking-hundreds, people. It’s not some new freaking thing! So we push back against that.

The thing with vaccines is that whilst they protect you (obviously), the larger goal is to protect your community at large through herd immunity. The more people are vaccinated, the easier contagious diseases are contained, which also ensures that more vulnerable people who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons (such as AIDS sufferers, chemotherapy patients, and those with actual allergies to vaccines) remain protected by the wall of immunized people around them.

This is why when it comes to vaccines, the community’s right to not get sick trumps the individual’s right to reject modern medicine. People, especially children, die every year from vaccine-preventable illnesses, either because their parents refused to vaccinate them or because they couldn’t get vaccinated and there wasn’t enough herd immunity around them to keep them safe.

That strikes me as a far greater injustice than forcing people to vaccinate their kids and penalizing those who don’t.