If you’ve looked at the news for five minutes this year, you’ve probably heard one word come up over and over: outbreak. Measles, tuberculosis and all sorts of flus are hitting the nation in small, but severe epidemics.

Besides the usual mutations and evolutions of these vile viruses, unvaccinated people have been a major factor in these outbreaks’ severity. 

Because of vaccines, many awful, often fatal diseases like measles, smallpox and polio were totally or nearly eradicated in the U.S., but because of the wave of anti-vaxx sentiments in the last couple of decades, they’re back.

People are against vaccinations for many reasons — usually idiotic ones. For some, it could be some hippy-dippy pride about keeping the body “all-natural,” but let’s face it, we’re all full of microplastics and chemicals anyway, so a potentially life-saving shot won’t desecrate your “temple” of a body.

For others, it could be the heavily debunked beliefs that vaccines are a cover-up for the government injecting microchips into Americans, or that they cause autism or even cancers.

That last reason was suggested by newly appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said the polio vaccine “killed many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did” and caused an outbreak of swine flu in Guam due to him spreading false information about the infection’s vaccine.

If you don’t want to vaccinate yourself, that’s fine — it’s a free country after all. The real problems start when children aren’t immunized.

Kids aren’t the most hygienic humans and will put out all kinds of pathogens through drool, snot or vomit. The key to not having epidemics starting in daycares every day is herd immunity, which the Cleveland Clinic defines as “enough people being immune to a disease that the infection can’t spread from one person to another.”

Herd immunity is usually achieved through the majority of children being vaccinated, somewhere between 70 and 95% depending on the infection, according to Yale Medicine. But as more and more parents go the no-vaccines route, the chances of an infection spreading go way up. 

This is best seen in Texas and New Mexico, where the measles outbreaks have affected many unvaccinated children, with one dying from the disease but just two vaccinated people being infected, as reported by ABC News.

So if the benefits of vaccines are so blatant, why do some people still insist on refusing the shot?

Misinformation, mainly online, heavily contributes to the spread of anti-vaccination ideas, leading to devastating consequences in the real world.

If people weren’t posting crackpot theories about the “harms” of vaccines, then maybe more Texans would be inoculated against measles, and parents wouldn’t have to bury their children.

And if people, mainly parents, weren’t blindly believing said theories, perhaps people in Kansas wouldn’t be suffering long, agonizing deaths at the hands of tuberculosis.

The ability to differentiate fact from fiction when it comes to the safety of vaccines is not some superpower; it’s just common sense.

This mainly seems to be a problem with older people, who are more likely to engage with and believe misinformation, according to a study by the National Institute of Health.

Bad actors online take advantage of older people’s susceptibility to push conspiracies and fill their heads with lies about vaccines, dooming them to get themselves or their loved ones sick with a preventable illness.

While identifying and rejecting misinformation is the responsibility of the consumer, some fact-checking from social media platforms would help suppress malicious lies about medicine.

The fact is, unless you have some rare autoimmune disorder, the worst thing that will happen to you after getting a vaccine is a mild fever and a headache. No autism, no microchips and no cancer.

If you look at the websites of the CDC, NIH or World Health Organization, you’ll find dozens of articles with mountains of data saying the same.

Now compare the practically nonexistent risks of vaccination to the consequences of not getting a shot. You could catch any number of preventable diseases, suffer as your body tries and fails to fight it off and die, or if you’re lucky, be left with scars or paralysis.

To me, it seems like a pretty easy choice.