Fake news on vaccines

Childhood deaths have been falling worldwide since 1990. In their foundation’s annual letter last week, Bill and Melinda Gates estimated that science had saved 122 million children in the last quarter-century.

That’s a population larger than three Californias. What saved them? Vaccines, mostly.

The percentage of children receiving basic immunization is now at a historic high, internationally speaking. It’s “incredible progress,” the Gates Foundation report said, a triumph of foreign aid, charitable giving and bootstrap determination on the part of developing nations. By any measure, it’s something to celebrate.

So why on earth, amid that good news, would other famous Americans want to undermine childhood immunization? In Washington, D.C., Robert Kennedy Jr. and Robert De Niro spoke on a panel stoking conspiracy theories about the safety of vaccines.

Their stance was based on widely discredited research that purports to link vaccines and autism. There is no such link, and claims to the contrary are not only fake science, but irresponsible and pernicious.

Though vaccines have eradicated many lethal childhood diseases, those diseases can come roaring back if we don’t maintain an immunization rate of about 90 percent or higher. And anti-vaxxers — both the hardcore kind and the easily led worriers who simply delay or resist vaccinations — have managed in some communities to lower herd immunity to dangerous levels. That’s how the Disneyland measles outbreak happened, and why vaccine laws were tightened in California.