Pathogen Privilege

Amanda Uhry, who runs a consultancy called Manhattan Private School Advisors, which, as its name suggests, helps parents through the private-school application process, said she recently turned down a half-dozen clients when she discovered that they were opposed to vaccination. For a long while she had never inquired about the issue, but a few years ago, a child she was working with missed his kindergarten interview because of whooping cough, which left her stunned. “I thought, Whooping cough? Who gets whooping cough anymore?” she said.

While the Times strains to paint the wealthy parents New York City as marginally more reasonable than the wealthy parents of Los Angeles when it comes to anti-vaccination fervor, it’s clear that their pampered, all-organic, macrobiotic-fed, micro-managed children — who are able to skirt the city’s otherwise rigorous vaccination requirements, thanks to their malevolently ignorant parents’ preening — are going to reintroduce us all to antiquated diseases which had otherwise been wiped out of the public sphere. Call it pathogen privilege.