The Guardian view of crank arguments: such talk costs lives

In this year’s gallery of human pestilence, the World Health Organization highlights familiar characters: influenza, an infectious disease with pandemic potential; the deadly and contagious Ebola; a HIV epidemic that claims nearly a million lives every year.

Yet among the major threats were anti-vaxxers, who refuse to vaccinate even when vaccines are available, and air pollution, which kills 7 million people prematurely every year. These are man-made public health dangers, in the sense that they are products of the choices that we have made, often irrationally. In the case of anti-vaxxers, we see crank arguments driving out sober ones, the appalling upshot of which is a resurgence of measles in countries that were on the verge of eradicating it. A lack of trust in doctors, encouraged by our era’s anti-government politics, has not helped. Society needs to drain support from the counter-intelligentsia and stem the flow of cash into its front organisations. With air pollution, vested interests make dubious arguments to forestall radical action on tackling dirty air despite early deaths. This week the UK government claimed it would set demanding targets to clean up our atmosphere, but there’s little detail on how these will be enforced.

We need new forms of political and economic development. The current yardstick, gross domestic product, is deficient. Maintaining a record prison population adds to GDP in the US. Prostitution boosts the UK’s GDP. In the pursuit of sustainable prosperity, governments should encourage and participate in activities that make a positive contribution to genuine progress, and discourage those that do not.