Here’s a gripping CNN piece about a Eli Jacks, a toddler in Arizona, and his leukemia-stricken sister Maggie. They have been exposed to measles, thanks to a family of vaccination-refusers who went to Disneyland, picked up the disease, went to a clinic, gave it to a nurse, who exposed 195 other children — including the toddler, who is too young to have had measles vaccine yet. His sister did get the vaccine, but chemotherapy has all but destroyed her immune system.

In the story, CNN interviews a cardiologist who comes off as a sociopath:

But Dr. Jack Wolfson said it’s the Jacks family who should keep themselves at home, not him.

Wolfson, an Arizona cardiologist, refuses to vaccinate his two young sons. He said the family that didn’t vaccinate and endangered the Jacks children did nothing wrong.

“It’s not my responsibility to inject my child with chemicals in order for [a child like Maggie] to be supposedly healthy,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s very likely that her leukemia is from vaccinations in the first place.”

“I’m not going to sacrifice the well-being of my child. My child is pure,” he added. “It’s not my responsibility to be protecting their child.”

CNN asked Wolfson if he could live with himself if his unvaccinated child got another child gravely ill.

“I could live with myself easily,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child.”

He blamed the Jacks family for taking Maggie to the clinic for care.

“If a child is so vulnerable like that, they shouldn’t be going out into society,” he said.

The mind reels at the callousness of this man.

Here’s Megan McArdle on the anti-vaxxers:

I’m not saying that we should force parents to vaccinate their kids at gunpoint. On the other hand, we might treat vaccines the way we treat drunken driving or car insurance. You have the perfect right to drive your uninsured automobile — on your own property. I doubt the cops are going to come after you for a DUI on your own back 40, either. But when you enter into public space, you have an obligation to protect others from the possible consequences of your actions: You can’t drive recklessly, you can’t drive without liability insurance, and you cannot drink a fifth of scotch and then get behind the wheel of a car.

So say to parents: You have a perfect right not to vaccinate your children, and we will not force you. But unless you have a vaccination certificate, a letter from a doctor explaining that your child falls into a small number of well-recognized medical exemptions, or a testament from your minister that vaccinating violates the tenets of a church of which you are an active member, failing to vaccinate your child also means failing to qualify for any public benefits for those children. No tax deduction. No public school, college or municipal activities. No team sports that practice on public land. No federally subsidized student loans. No airplane rides for anyone under 18 unless the TSA gets an up-to-date vaccination certificate. If you will not help society protect itself, then society will deny its help to you, and it will do its best to keep your child out of crowded spaces where they might infect someone.

Is this coercive? Of course. So is putting some stranger — often an infant, by the way — at risk of disease and death. Some level of coercion is necessary to protect public health. It is coercive to force you to pay for an expensive sewer hookup rather than dump your waste into the nearest cistern or river. It is also unfortunately necessary to keep cities from becoming death traps. We should try to minimize the coercion as much as possible, which I think this does: If you want to home-school and keep to yourselves, you are free to risk the lives of your own children. But you’re much less free to put others at risk.