Over at Mother Jones Tasneem Raja and Chris Mooney have a rather alarming article up, How Many People Aren’t Vaccinating Their Kids in Your State? This is no joke. I’ve talked earlier about the fact that during my wife’s pregnancy we were confronted by rather strong anti-vaccination sentiments within the community. Because of our generally scientific bent it had no effect on us, but we saw how persuaded, or persuadable, many of our friends and acquaintances were. Without a scientific background people often rely on authorities, and those authorities can lead them astray.
One issue that has come up on occasion is the political orientation of the anti-vaccination movement. Many have assumed that it has a Left-liberal bias. I’m actually moderately skeptical of a strong political association (e.g., Michele Bachmann). But the map above suggested to me that we should test the proposition that there’s at least a state level correlation between exemptions and vote for Obama in 2012. The data was easy to get.
The raw Obama vote % and vaccination exemptions correlated at 0.08 (p-value 0.59). Pretty much nothing. But, I thought it might be more interesting to look at Obama vote for whites. Here the correlation was 0.25 (p-value 0.09). This is still a modest correlation, but it does suggest a political tinge. But rather than a standard Left-Right axis, I think we’re seeing a “crunchy counter-culture” sentiment. Here’s a scatterplot with state labels for what it’s worth….
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