@cstross If I may be allowed a small rant.
What shits me is that this nonsense doesn't stay in the US. These folk fund anti-vax messaging across the world.
So, a sole health worker in remote Australia has to combat targeted anti-vax propoganda funded by US organisations, and increasingly by the US government. Some US organisations simply pay elders to betray their communities' best interests. The local clinic nurse doesn't always succeed in winning against the powerful, and in some remote communities old diseases have come back.
These communicable diseases make unusable the sole medical clinic for hundreds of kilometres.