Google News 09/24: Deceased kids drive anti-vax activism

The power of subjective truth

The story of Minnesota woman Catelin Clobes is tragic on two accounts. After falling asleep alongside her 6 month old daughter Evee, she woke up to find the child dead — killed, a medical report would later find, by postural asphyxiation.

This is a horrible ordeal in and of itself. But it’s compounded by the fact that Catelin, being dissatisfied with the official cause of her daughter’s death, is now convinced that a round of shots administered 36 hours beforehand are to blame.

As a result, Catelin has inducted her daughter’s tragic death into the increasingly popular myth of vaccine injury: the idea that vaccination can cause harm to children. Her position is encapsulated by the anti-vax motto that ‘healthy babies don’t just die’. The problem, of course, is that they do — conditions like SIDS and suffocation are tragic but well-documented—but despite all the evidence the anti-vax movement continues to thrive.

This tension between objective fact and individual experience, I think, is coming to play a role in more and more news stories, and can be encapsulated by the notion of subjective truth.

Many interpretations of the anti-vax movement emphasize that it rejects science. We hear about the original…