A recent and growing measles outbreak forced President Obama to tell every parent in America what science has been telling them since the dawn of time.

“There is every reason to get vaccinated—there aren’t reasons to not,” Obama said in an interview with NBC News that aired this past weekend.

“I just want people to know the facts and science and the information,” Obama continued.

“And the fact that a major success of our civilization is our ability to prevent disease that in the past have devastated folks.  And measles is preventable.”

In recent years, a wave of anti-vaccination sentiment has swept the nation, championed by such respected members of the scientific and child-rearing communities such as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey (sarcasm).

It started out as a mildly embarrassing moment for our country.

But now, with the most recent measles outbreak at Disneyland infecting at least 100 people across 14 states, it’s grown into a level of ignorance that could have the most costly currency of all—people’s lives.

The anti-vaccination movement ostensibly started with a 1998 paper written by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and published in the Lancet, a well-respected medical journal published in the U.K.

At least, it was well-respected until Wakefield’s research was thoroughly discredited and the study retracted.

The Disneyland measles outbreak is a perfect storm of a doomsday scenario; a highly contagious disease was propagated throughout a vacation destination that draws people from all over the world.

But even on a smaller scale, the anti-vaccination movement proves a very real threat to the entire nation.

Anyone who has ever set foot on a daycare or elementary school campus knows that:

A. Children are a walking, talking, snotty-nosed vessels of sickness and

B. Schools and daycare services are breeding grounds for even more sickness.

So it’s more than a little sad that parents of young children today have to worry about their kids becoming infected with a disease that was literally eliminated from the United States 15 years ago.

Speaking of breeding grounds, irresponsible adults have only furthered the anti-vaccination movement with false information in social media, and some fall for the whole deal hook, line and sinker.

So to the anti-vacciners out there, research your stance more carefully before you endanger your children’s lives, as well as the lives of others.

Your decisions are literally killing us.