How today's political polarization has fueled the measles outbreak

"Seizing our newborn infants,

Blighting their lives with pain;

Filling their veins with poison,

Tainting each tender brain"

So go the lyrics of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Hymn, circulated not by the modern-day anti-vaccine band the Refusers but by the Anti-Vaccination Society of America. The group's members campaigned against the life-saving smallpox vaccine in the late 1800s, a turbulent time when a nation grappling with the aftermath of slavery responded with "black codes" and Jim Crow laws that pushed a divided society even further apart.

Sound familiar?

Vaccine resistance in America has frequently coincided with periods of great angst and resentment toward a government that seems bent on micromanaging citizens' lives. As the country faces the largest outbreak of measles since the disease was deemed eliminated in 2000, epidemiologists and medical ethicists say they are not surprised to see an us-versus-them mentality fueling the rise of vaccine opponents