Grifters, cynics, and true believers: The family tree of vaccine opponents

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Stanley Plotkin, 93, was instrumental in developing a number of vaccines over the course of his career. He recently said that he’s “beginning to regret having lived so long—because we’re going downhill.” How could we possibly have gotten here?

Maybe we’ve always been here. It turns out that the anti-vaccine arguments currently flooding the Internet have been around for as long as vaccines have. In his new book A Pox on Fools, Thomas Levenson breaks them down into three categories, as made clear in the book’s subtitle: “The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines.” The accusations these people levy against vaccines can just as

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