I've recently been drawn to the television dramedy Castle and have been making my way through prior seasons. Yesterday, I watched an interesting episode from season 5.
In this episode, entitled "Swan Song", Beckett and Castle investigate the murder of a man whose blood shows the absence of antibodies against polio and tetanus. Later on in the episode it is revealed that he had not been vaccinated because he belonged to a religious cult which forbade vaccinations.
The plot of this episode prompted me to think of how paradoxical it is to be part of a large community of individuals who are not vaccinated. Their isolation from society, rather than protecting them, strikes me as akin to bleeding in a tank full of great white sharks. In such a conglomeration of chum, all it takes is one individual exposed to, say, measles to set off an outbreak that could have deadly consequences.
If I were in an unvaccinated cult I would get vaccinated because, in the land of the unvaccinated, the immune is king.