Vaccines are necessary and we shouldn't take the anti-vaccine movement lightly. But -- the argument here, and the accompanying chart, make me very uncomfortabl

Vaccines are necessary and we shouldn't take the anti-vaccine movement lightly. But -- the argument here, and the accompanying chart, make me very uncomfortable. The author makes the explicit claim that the chart proves vaccine deniers have caused a massive explosion of measles cases. The author then offers one opinion poll's number, for a single year. That's all we have, in this argument, to conclude causation. It's just not enough. The trend is not at all clear from the graph -- with every line the same color, there is no movement, no trend here. Without a matching history of even that one opinion poll, we can't even make a statistically inappropriate assumption that there's a correlation between vaccine opinion and measles cases. This is a poorly formed argument about a serious topic. These sorts of misfires are dangerous in that they can add fuel to the non-science-based side of a debate that threatens lives... Edit: The author misquoted the actual numbers in the 2014 study he linked through to -- 53% of respondents were Extremely or Very Confident that vaccines for children were effective. Another 30% were Somewhat confident. In all, 83% of respondents were confident enough that they would/would probably have a vaccine administered. The WonkBlog has been producing some hit-or-miss content recently. There was another "Literally every goat in the US" graph they put out that, while humorous, suggested rounding up to the nearest 500 goats was "literally" every goat...