Jul 4, 2015 3 min read

Conservatives frequently rail about Hollywood being in the pocket of liberal Democrats, but there’s not much of a chance comedian Jim Carrey is going to be breaking bread with California Gov. Jerry Brown any time soon.

After Brown signed a strict bill Tuesday requiring all public school children in California to be vaccinated by July 1, 2016, Carrey took to Twitter to denounce Brown as a “corporate fascist who must be stopped” and further stated the Centers for Disease Control, which has repeatedly vouched for the safety and efficacy of vaccines, is “corrupt.”

Following this outburst, we think Carrey ought to spend less time pontificating about vaccines and more time pondering the next “Dumb and Dumber” sequel.

And in that one, he won’t even need to act.

Carrey, unfortunately, is one of many benighted souls who have spread the canard that vaccines are dangerous and can spark autism and other childhood afflictions.

Using long-debunked scholarship, misinformation dredged from the Internet and anecdotes of dubious veracity, they’ve planted doubts in the minds of some parents, leading them to leave their children unprotected and endanger the health of other children who might have a legitimate reason not to be vaccinated because of medical issues.

Despite vaccines having been shown time and time again to be safe and effective, this reluctance by some parents to have their children vaccinated has led to outbreaks of measles and whooping cough in some pockets of the country. These afflictions can be fatal and were thought to have been largely vanquished until the anti-vaccination throng started pounding its drums.

According to The Los Angeles Times, immunization rates in some California schools are at 50 percent or lower. And last fall, the newspaper reported, close to 13,600 kindergartners in California were exempted from being vaccinated because of their parents’ personal beliefs.

By way of comparison, only a little over 4,000 kindergaten students had such personal-belief exemptions on file in 1998.

Brown and his fellow lawmakers are correct to stop this epidemic of ignorance in its tracks.

The bill signed by Brown would mandate children attending public schools in California be vaccinated, with allergies and immune-system deficiencies being the only legitimate excuses to sidestep this obligation. California now joins West Virginia and Mississippi as being one of the strictest states when it comes to vaccinating children.

Other states, including Pennsylvania, need to follow its example.

“The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases,” Brown explained. “While it’s true that no medical intervention is without risk, the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community.”

There are plenty of things to be concerned about when it comes to raising children. But worrying that they are going to catch easily preventable diseases because misguided parents declined to have their own children vaccinated shouldn’t be one of them.