Our Voting Public: Uninsured revolt against the Anti-Christ behind the climate hoax edition

An April survey from Kaiser Family Foundation found that four in ten Americans (42%) are unaware that "Obamacare" is actually the law of the land. 12% thought the health reform measure had been repealed by Congress, 7% thought it had been overturned by the Supreme Court (which actually upheld the law in June of 2012), and 23% didn't know enough to say whether the law was in force or not. Overall, 49% of Americans didn't know enough to say whether the law will impact their own families--but, depressingly, the percentage of people lacking that knowledge was highest in the two groups the law is likely to benefit most: the uninsured (of whom 58% said they didn't know how the law would affect them) and the poor (56%).

Another poll--from PublicMind at Farleigh Dickinson University--shows that 29% of all Americans (18% of Democrats, 27% of Independents, and a whopping 44% of Republicans) believe that an armed revolution might be necessary in the next few years, in order to protect our liberties. An armed revolution. In the next few years. Another 5% of Americans aren't sure about that. Well, that's good, I guess; one doesn't want to decide these things too precipitously.

And in other polling news from what appears to be this planet, Public Policy Polling (a well-respected polling firm known for asking the occasional oddball or controversial question) has found (among many other amusing and/or scary things) that 58% of Republicans think global warming is a hoax, while 77% of Democrats disagree; and that 20% of Americans think vaccines cause autism, while 34% aren't sure.

And 20% of Republicans believe that President Obama is the Anti-Christ. Well, I guess we know why they think armed revolution might be necessary. Hope your health insurance covers gunshot wounds.  

Vaccine Trouble

An October study in Pediatrics shows that 13% of parents follow a non-standard vaccination schedule for their children, by refusing particular vaccines, delaying certain vaccines, or (in about 2% of all cases) refusing all vaccines. More disturbing is the fact that many parents who are currently using the recommended schedule are at risk of departing from it in the future: 22% of them disagreed that the expert-recommended schedule they were following was the best one to use, and 28% of them thought delaying vaccination would be safer for their children. This is the legacy, I think, of Andrew Wakefield's fraud and the misguided activism of RFK Jr., Jenny McCarthy, and others. Meanwhile, a paper presented at last week's meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America showed that younger doctors have less faith in vaccines than older doctors. In a WebMD interview, one of the authors stated that while there was generally strong support among all doctors for vaccination, every increase of five years in year of graduation was associated with a 20% reduced likelihood that the doctor believed that vaccines were very safe, and with a 20% increased likelihood of agreement with the statement that "children get more immunizations than are good for them." Why would younger doctors have less faith in vaccines? This, too, may be partly a legacy of the recent controversies surrounding HPV vaccination, the alleged vaccine/autism link, and so on. But there may also be something else at work: younger doctors have no experience of the devastating effects of childhood diseases. Indeed, many young physicians are more apt to have seen an adverse reaction to a vaccine than a case of polio or whooping cough or rubella. Vaccines, in other words, may partly be victims of their own success.