Vaccine Lottery Tickets Are Sad, but Also Perfect

Every American state has laws requiring vaccination. If you want your children to attend kindergarten, you must vaccinate them against rubella. Most parents comply because they don’t want anyone going deaf from congenital rubella. And if that isn’t convincing enough, then there is the ominous threat of having to homeschool.

But these laws have , and more people are going through them. In the past decade, the number of people seeking “philosophical exemptions”—meaning they don’t need to comply with the law, because, effectively, they disagree with it—has . At least partly as a result, are now verging on common in places where the disease was once totally eradicated. At the same of vaccines, as people conflate concerns about vaccination with objections to being made to do … anything at all.