Vaccines and other collective action problems
It’s pretty clear that vaccination views don’t break down on partisan lines. Elizabeth Stoker Breunig is no doubt right that good old American individualism motivates many people’s refusal to take major risks to other people as seriously as minor risks to themselves. But not all of them. (It’s hard to generalize about anti-vaxxers.) And individualism itself of course exists across much of the political spectrum.
Nor is support for specifically mandatory vaccines found mostly just among us liberals, with our comparative comfort with statism. And some of the best things I’ve read on this have been by right-leaning commentators.
One is Ross Douthat, who among other things raises this important fact: vaccine refusal isn’t actually on the rise. It’s geographical clusters of unvaccinated people, not the overall number, that are causing a problem. The issue is not so much fierce individualist types—herd immunity can absorb a few lone wolves, after all—but places where anti-vax sentiment has worn the herd down.
