Our View: When superstition beats science, kids wind up paying the price

Score another round for two of man’s oldest companions, ignorance and superstition.

That is the takeaway now that we’ve learned the United States will likely join countries such as Iran, North Korea and Haiti this January on the World Health Organization’s sad roll call of nations that just can’t seem to eliminate measles.

In other words, we’re about to blow one of the easiest questions on what President Donald Trump — in his own infamous terminology — would no doubt call the “Shithole Country Test.”
And unsurprisingly, South Carolina is one of the students that can’t or won’t get it right.

Which brings us to the measles outbreak that’s currently spreading like, well, measles across Spartanburg County. And to the confederacy of cranks who foisted this opt-in epidemic on the rest of us. How? By turning childhood vaccination into just one more tragic and tiresome flashpoint in America’s never-ending culture wars.

Of course, they’ll tell you that we’re the problem. See, they’ve done their homework. And after carefully weighing the evidence — a hundred years of gold-standard scientific research versus the latest findings of the TikTok Medical Association — they’ve arrived at the only possible conclusion.

The Earth really is flat.

Inevitably, this steaming pile of pseudoscientific nonsense has done real damage, pushing the state’s childhood vaccination rate down from 95.5% in 2020 to 93.5% in 2025 — a full point-and-a-half below the 95% needed herd immunity level to prevent outbreaks.

What’s worse, it’s left even the most conscientious parents confused about how best to keep their kids safe, as Lowcountry pediatrician and Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Annie Andrews told the City Paper this week.

“I have a lot of sympathy for parents who are trying to figure out who to listen to for accurate information,” said Andrews, a pediatrician, “And I worry about the long-term impact this will have on the health of South Carolina’s children as vaccination rates continue to go down.”

And adding to parents’ uncertainty, she noted, is the strange migration that vaccine denialism has made from left to right, culminating in Trump’s appointment of conspiracist-in-chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services.

“The anti-vaccine movement started in high socioeconomic far-left spaces on the West Coast,” Andrews said. “But now, the disinformation isn’t just coming from those groups on Facebook and Instagram. It’s coming from the federal government.”

Still, thanks to good people all across the state, some local efforts are making a real dent in the dysfunction.

Case in point: The Charleston County School District’s 2022 decision to become a federally authorized childhood vaccine provider, which has resulted in thousands of Lowcountry children getting the shots they need with their parents’ approval.

That’s an initiative worth celebrating. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of person-to-person program that experts say can ease real-world parental concerns — and sometimes even break through the internet-induced certitudes of the dangerously misinformed.

And that’s critical, because Mark Twain — a man who knew a thing or two about steaming piles of nonsense, pseudoscientific or otherwise — had it exactly right.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble,” he once observed. “It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”