I do not fall within the anti-vaccine crowd.
But that doesn't put me in the pro-vaccine crowd (though, for the most part, I am).
I have a problem with both sides of this argument: there's no way for me to know which one is true. We live in a world with such a large volume of knowledge—and highly specialized knowledge at that—that personally fact-checking all of the "experts" that have their fingers in our lives is near impossible. No, it is impossible. I think this is one of the most dangerous features of the world in which we live.
Conjoined with this fact is our tremendously poisonous tendency of believing that it is valid to hold opinions on subjects for which the possessor has no qualifications, or worse, not believing that there even are qualifications that ought be met. Don't believe me? Think of any presidential election and of all of the experts in the "home audience" that hold such strong opinions about their candidate and "how much better they'd be" for the complex, modern economy.
I am no immunologist and have no first-hand knowledge in that arena—and, odds are, neither do you—so any belief I hold must then be based on authority. But whose authority? My completely un-informed belief is that the anti-vaccine camp is wrong; I don't trust that they know what they say they know. By the same logic, however, I don't know that the pro-vaccine camp knows what they say they know. We have turned information into a commodity and there's simply too much to gain by cutting it from whole cloth to be able to freely trust it. The snake oil salesmen at least had to fill their bottles with something. Now you just get yourself a free blog and start typing.
"Information Age", indeed.