Doctor Mike

So I pulled down the California Department of Public Health data, as one does when you're...

Data science, you know, computer science person, right?

I was working at a startup.

I was in San Francisco for tech.

That was my field, that was my job.

And I pulled down actually 10 years of public health data because you could actually see by kindergarten, right?

You could see the vaccination rates.

And when I had pulled down that first year, there were some schools that were at like 35% MMR rates.

And I thought, this is insane.

And so I looked.

I wanted to pull down the tenure.

And so I did that.

And I decided I was going to make a data visualization.

And I was going to show.

I was going to animate it, actually, so you could see over time those numbers changing.

And I decided I was going to pull down the census data.

Because you can actually cross-list some of this stuff with zip codes, with socioeconomic data, with a whole bunch of different ways that you can...

make this into a visualization and and i wrote a blog post i had a tumblr at the time right throwback um so i i wrote a tumblr post and um and i and i called it something like you know california's vaccination policy like really hurts its kids uh because i thought this was insane

Because in New York, you had to have like a religious exemption where it was like signed by a religious figure, sort of saying that you had a sincerely held belief.

Whereas in California, we had these things called personal belief exemptions where you could just write like, I'm not vaccinating and like, that's it, that's my choice and I'm not doing it.